I'm finishing building a 120sqft shed in the back yard, learning Fusion 360, and hopefully getting my chronic sinusitis solved.
Poured a slab, designed, framed, used as much reclaimed lumber as I could, and sheathed a lean-to style shed. My first attempt at building a structure, and it's coming out nice. This is to replace the 64sqft 5' shed that a neighbors tree fell on earlier this year, but we really need the extra storage.
I got a Bambu P1S 3D printer for Father's Day to replace an old Ender 3 Pro, and it has just been a dream. TinkerCAD, while amazing and a very capable tool, I'm ready to move on to something else. I tried Plasticity, and it showed a lot of promise but I found it very frustrating, bumped against some missing documentation and ran out of free trial time. Tried FreeCAD 1.0RC/Ondsel, and it's a fantastic piece of software. Yesterday I decided to give Fusion 360 a try and it's just so much more refined. Started the Product Design Online tutorials on Youtube yesterday and the stuff you're building in the first 5 15 minute lessons are frankly amazing.
For me the most important issue that needs to be solved right now is the increasing urban sprawl and the car dependent neighborhoods. It causes social isolation. Maintaining infrastructure like roads and electricity, is causing a strain on the economy for local municipalities. Not to mention the disastrous effect car based transportation has on the environment.
I am a fullstack developer living in Norway. Last year I registered the Norwegian branch of the Architectural Uproar as a not for profit organization. With the support from paying members, I have been able to go on tour to most of the major cities in Norway. We organize large meetings were we discuss architecture and city planning with politicians, architects and property developers on stage.
I am strongly inspired by Create Streets in UK and Strong Towns in the US. I want to improve people’s quality of life, help saving the planet and make Norway beautiful again while doing it.
There's a quote from Bill McKibben's forward to "Creating Cohousing" by Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett that I think about every time someone brings this up (it's about the U.S., but it applies to lots of other places and you may recognize your own countries development model here too, or not):
"For fifty years, our economic mission in America, at its core, has been to build bigger houses farther apart from each other. And boy have we succeeded: a nation of starter castles for entry-level monarchs, built at such remove one from the next that the car is unavoidable."
You're a person after my own heart; thanks for working towards a more connected world!
Thank's a lot! So far the project haven't paid off much. But that is not the most important goal. It is about making something really useful for people. In this case nice cities and neighbourhoods.
The default suburban life leads toward a comfortable kind of solitary confinement. Someone who lives in a “single family home” equipped with air conditioning, a privacy fence, a big screen TV, a garage door opener, and the internet will tend toward isolation because all of those technologies make aloneness easier.
The reader may point out that many people are isolated in big cities too. This is true – if an adult has decided to be alone, they can be. But in the city, one's lack of social connection is more often felt whereas a suburban home can diminish the effect, like ibuprofen taken for a headache.
How does that meaningly differ from rural homes, which do not have the isolation problem? Rural areas have the strongest social communities I have ever seen.
At least in the U.S. (and likely elsewhere) the design of the suburbs encourages neighborhoods with individual houses and very little walk able space (occasionally there are sidewalks or parks in the richer areas, but developments may be large and they're not evenly spaced throughout). Exclusionary zoning in the U.S. has also reduced the number of "third spaces" (coffee shops, malls, grocery stores, barber shops, etc. where people congregate and meet) near or in neighborhoods. This means fewer chance encounters since you have to plan to both go out in a car to meet. You have to find a friend then say "let's go get drinks at 13:00 across town at this place" instead of just happening to walk into the small neighborhood grocery and seeing each other.
It's even worse in the exurbs where large housing developments have been created with no amenities nearby, sometimes within upwards of an hour drive!
There are a number of good books on how the built environment affects our social life, if you're interested. It's not specifically about suburbs but "Palaces for the People" by Eric Klinenberg is one of my favorites that covers a lot of this sort of thing.
It likely depends on the rural area. In the middle of North East GA where I grew up, it's about the same, social isolation is becoming a huge problem because you're forced to drive long distances and plan ahead to meet with people.
In another small town right up the street they have a thriving main street area and the housing is mostly built around that with the exception of outlying farms. It's a smaller town, but chances are you can walk over to the square and everything you need is right there, so they have a much more vibrant feeling town even though it's smaller.
I'm not expert though, that's just my suspicion for why they're different having grown up in the area.
As a fullstack developer, how did you even landed on such projects? Are you even using your SW Engineering skills in this? I really want to know more how are you able to lead an urbanism and architecture project with, supposedly, no formal backgrounds. Are you partnered with other people in this endeavour?
I am not alone. Our website is made by the man who created the CSS standard while at CERN, Håkon Wium Lie. https://arkitekturopproret.no
Most of the social media activities is done by a couple of fellows who is really into digital marketing. We are a team of 5 people working mostly for free now.
I have no formal training in architecture or urban design. I am just a nerd who used to love playing SimCity and read Astérix comic books. Paul Graham have always focused on finding real problems and making people happy. Car dependent housing projects and bad architecture is making peoples lives miserable. It needs to be fixed.
>> I have no formal training in architecture or urban design.
Same, but I do get caught thinking about how inefficient our roads are in the US and what might be done about that. I've worked in the auto industry a lot and when calculating fuel efficiency (MPG) there is a "urban drive cycle" and a highway one that are used. The average speed on the urban cycle is a hair under 20 mph, which seems absurd because our typical speed limit outside of neighborhoods is 45mph or even 50. So I started timing my drives around town and measuring on a map... Turns out 3 minutes per mile is about right for expected drive times. The main culprit is intersections, stop lights, and left turns. You seem interested in eliminating cars, which I can appreciate but I spend my time trying to figure out how to make traffic flow more efficiently and how those layouts might be retrofitted onto the grid of roads we have. There are not easy problems.
I'm working on a solution to the age-old problem of tracking my food intake. Every app I have every tried from the many dozens on the market has not met my need of a low friction simple UI tool, so I've built it myself.
I've built Journable, a simple & frictionless chat-based & photo-based calorie tracker. Just type in what you've eaten, in as much or as little detail as you can. Or type in what you did for exercise. Or just snap a photo of your plate. Whatever works for you.
I've noticed that my son spends way too much time on YouTube or playing Minecraft and one of the few offline activities he enjoys doing on his own is coloring. And since he comes to me every time he wants a new coloring book and we spend about 10 minutes together searching for each picture, I made a website with a collection of coloring books for him. The site is very simple, but to be honest, I haven't had so much fun with the process of creation for a long time.
At one pre-funding startup (in the days when 14400 was an excellent remote connection) we had a LAN set up in the basement of the founder with the largest house. Their daughter liked to "work" alongside us, so (partly to protect our unattended keyboards!) I bought a colouring-book program for her to use.
One evening, when her mother called down that it was her bedtime, she replied:
Interesting, what AI are you using to generate these? Are these straight from the net or is there a post processing pipeline? If so, what are you doing?
Not the GP, but inspired by your question I tried asking ChatGPT to create similar coloring sheets. The results seem suitable for coloring. Here's one prompt: "A simplified line-drawing coloring sheet of a dog flying an airplane. The drawing is in clean black lines on a white background, with minimal details and clear, bold outlines."
Later: The prompt worked with Imagen 3 on Gemini Advanced, too:
Is it possible to get all PDFs at once? Hopefully per section? That will really help to print all at once and get her a single book to go on for couple of weeks.
I thought I could do `curl | grep | xargs curl`, but the site returns 520.
damn I wish u did it 10 years ago! I really struggled with it, was so hard to find coloring images for my daughter. now shes 14 so I don't think she will care much :)
20 years ago I met a young woman in her mid 20's. She's setup coloring book pages with google ads by the thousands, in pretty much every language. Her income from that was around $8K a month, and this was late 90's?
The hands and feet on some of them are downright disturbing. I would not want my child coloring in AI generated slop, there's something fundamentally disconcerting about that.
For my next video, I want to show in detail how the interpreter works. For this purpose I'm creating an elaborate animation. You'll notice that the latest video is already several months old; this is because this animation is more work than I bargained for, and I got a little burned out by it. Nevertheless, I persevere and the video will come out whenever I may finish it.
This is awesome! I think what it needs now is tooling/an ide to "draw" programs :)
I've long wanted to look for a sort of "ascii drawing program" where one can just draw on a grid with monospace ascii characters and have tools for boxes, circles, etc. Maybe it already exists!
etc. etc.
I focus really hard on answering exactly one question in a concise and engaging way and trying to keep every video under 5 minutes. Oh, and to make the videos solution independent, so not specific to a product, but convey the underlying knowledge so it has a longer shelf-life.
Full list is here: https://foxev.io/batteries/
I am planning to turn this into a knowledge base with playlists for "learning paths" like "everything to watch about batteries" or "here is what you need to watch to make a motor spin on a bench". I will add interactive functionality like quizzes and widgets to make the knowledge even more sticky.
You are the closest I have found to this, even though it is a digression:
Do you know of any communities with self-built airplanes? (especially novel-esque designs for propulsion or wings?) I realise these have far more regulations, but experimental GA is something that really excites me.
If you are in the US, you probably already know about Mike Patey but I'll share this here anyway. He has a track record of building something custom pretty much every year. I believe he is trying to build a community around a similar idea, but also catering for more mainstream GA too.
Are you familiar with the Experimental Aircraft Association? EAA.org
They have had a handful of articles of people working on electric propulsion in their magazine. I would imagine you could reach out to some of those featured. I once contacted a person who was building a DIY HUD and he was very friendly and eager to talk about the project. Overall a very good community!
I don't have a direct answer for you, but I would checkout any AirVenture Oshkosh groups online. I know people build planes ahead of the event to fly in.
It's a very fun mix of hardware (for data collection), and crazy SQL queries to model energy flows between buildings, solar, batteries, etc. Considering just one building is pretty easy:
but then you add a site with a couple of buildings, solar on one of them, grid limited exports, etc modelling these flows is challenging. Like consider the case where one building got 10% of it's imported power from another building's excess solar, then calculating carbon becomes more difficult.
and once you've figured all that - then you have to figure out what makes commercial sense to do next.. install a battery, expand solar, move onto a TOU tariff, do nothing - and that's a whole other world of optimisation problems.
Outside of the software world I'm also working on opening a Bike Shop and frame building studio. I'm hoping that one day I can actually make a small living on frame building since I don't do software for my day job anymore, but I'm not quite ready to build for other people yet (so far I've only built frames for myself and I'd like to thoroughly strength test them before I risk putting someone else on one of my creations!)
If you're in the Atlanta, GA area and need bicycle work done, hit me up! No job is too big or too small. I particularly enjoy building wheels if you want a sweet custom wheel set, but I do it all (including Mountain Bike fork and suspension work that many shops won't do).
I'm working on synthesizing a genome at home! Here is a video with more details, as well as a picture of my home lab. I've always wanted to build life from scratch, and I finally have a chance to do it.
I'm trying to build a DNA assembly company right now (been lots of ups and downs lately...), and one thing I need to do is validate the specs of my oligo pool synthesis provider, Agilent, before I release to customers / raise a seed round. So as a stress-test run of my system, I'm synthesizing a genome, and am thinking about trying to livestream it. The unique technology is variety of ways to assemble and validate DNA from oligo pools for a lot cheaper, pretty much enabling a 10x reduction in DNA synthesis cost vs commercial suppliers. I've worked my ass off for nearly 2 years to get to this moment and am so excited!
yep, nothing in there prevents me from doing work. That article is mainly their legal team fluffing their own feathers for their clients, which I'd hope that one would be able to read between the lines for, considering it was published by the lawyers themselves. The lawsuit itself is quite frivolous and accusing me of stealing and using source code I didn't steal/use, so just have to go through the legal motions to prove that. The more details you know about the case the more absurd it becomes
Wow this is very exciting! Always makes me happy when I see your comments on HN, you're always up to something interesting! Are you hiring developers or aspiring bioengineers? (I'm a developer and an aspiring bioengineer)
I think if you have the right structure, it is easier to train developers to be bioengineers than bioengineers to be developers! Bioengineering tends to be a more wicked discipline, which seriously affects how one writes their code. Makes it kinda crap. Software devs on the other hand typically aren't as experienced in the other field, and so are coming in blind.
This is incredible. I have a biochemistry and bioinformatics background, and I've always been curious about how easy and cheap it could be to do various experiments at home. Godspeed!
In my 50k population town in Minnesota, I notice a lot of headlights, taillights, and turn signals are out. Our roads (outside of the Twin Cities) are often bumpy which causes vibration in the vehicles, leading to many bulbs failing.
I drive a 21 year old Saab, and in my 2 years of owning it, I have replaced every single bulb in the exterior of the vehicle except a turn signal or two.
I decided to create a mobile service for vehicle lights. It's a simple website that even technologically-disadvantaged people can use. The website is nearly finished and I will likely come back here to write a post on it for how the website works.
Oh the best part, I get texted and emailed for each service order that comes in, and using my service is only $10 more than what it would cost you to go buy a bulb yourself at OReillys, AutoZone, etc.
I programmed everything myself and developed the idea as well. This is my first real-world project/solution I am bringing into this world that has been verified by others, to be a needed service. Pretty excited about it and I love changing bulbs or replacing light housings, it's fun and simple.
One thing I'd like to hone in on is that these threads aren't intended for promotion, but rather for the just-because sort of project, driven by idle interest or weird obsession—the sort of thing people might spend their free time on.
I'm not sure yet what the official "rule" should be (if any), but if you're working on a startup or have had attention via Show HN, maybe abstain from these discussions? It wouldn't be good for the thread to get taken over by things HN already has a place for.
Thanks, Dan, for that clarification. The question each month is actually two-fold: what have you been tinkering around with and what new ideas are thinking about. It's an invitation to dialogue.
We know our history and the role collaboration has played in it. Whether at Xerox PARC or Bell Labs, bouncing ideas off of other colleagues has spurred incredible innovation.
I submit that HN is a giant Xerox PARC. We have all of the ingredients for this recipe here on HN. We have the brilliant minds; we have the joy of creation. I submit that what we lack is mixing those ingredients. We lack dialogue and collaboration, and it's all completely unnecessary. It's here. Please use it.
I find this "anti-promotion" attitude to be doing a disservice to this HN community for a few reasons.
Clearly, this whole website is funded and exists in part to promote YC's portfolio companies, as evidenced by "Launch HN" threads getting auto-front paged whereas "Show HN" plebians have to earn the upvotes from /new (which most agree required an exceptionally good post and a lot of luck to even get that goodness noticed). And we're not talking promotion of a few posts, YC is now doing multiple batches a year and has hundreds of companies per batch meaning we're seeing a LOT of promotion / advertisements on this site coming via Launch HN threads as well as jobs ad threads.
I don't think Xerox park would have done as well if 5% of the people get got the opportunity for a microphone in the auditorium every week and the other 95% did not. That would seem like a caste system. I understand that YC funds this website so the caste system is inevitable but I don't see why moderation should further stratify it - unless you're prioritizing advertising YC companies over a great community.
Next, I see this "HN is not for self promotion" do a lot of downstream damage on the community in the sense that it's much better for big, existing trillion dollar companies than smaller players. If a small bootstrapped startup writes a blog post and mentions there product, people will complain about "blogspam" and "this blog post is really just an ad for a link at the end". But if Google or Amazon have a new announcement for a new product, nobody complains that it's an advertisement, even though it's often as much or more one. The end result is that the website tends to focus more "corporate" news than "hacker" news as a downstream consequence of a well-meaning "no self-promotion" rule.
Finally, as we've discussed over email, the rules around self-promotion are extremely opaque and in many cases algorithmically enforced by closed algorithms. This leads to a lot of confusion around what's allowed and a lot of ambiguous favoritism.
I understand this site is called "Hacker" news and there's some mystique around the "hacker" building "just for fun" , the purism around intellectual curiosity that you don't want tainted by dirty commercialism. I just think that once the website has decided it's going to be the media arm of one of the most powerful venture capital firms in the world, the ship has sailed.If people really want pure tech news, they should go to https://lobste.rs/ . I've personally found in recent years quality of interesting conversation is much higher on /r/saas, Indie Hackers board, and Small Bets campfire, as well as various Discords, all because they allow self-promotion and don't encourage the "self-promotion police" who frequently show up aghast someone would try to make money on the internet (unless it's their daddy FAANG employer).
Another rule I've seen in various places be very effective is a simple guideline to contribute 10x as much non-promotional content as promotional content. If someone only posts links to their projects and nothing else, I see how that gets spammy. But if someone regularly contributes they should get a pass. I understand that's partially how the submission system works via algorithmic enforcement, but , see above about its opaque and ambiguous nature.
Show HN is a "place" for self-promotion but it's a pretty bad place if 99% of submissions get entirely lost and ignored and I think you should encourage more places for promotion without inflicting a caste system where only YC companies and certain golden children get special rules.
Overall, HN's guidelines against self-promotion are too rigid, there's too few opportunties for small players to promote, which makes the discussion here less egalitarian, more corporate, and less interesting. You'd be better served encouraging more self-promotion in threads like these.
There’s simply no “HN is not for self promotion” policy. You’re asked to not use your account primarily for self-promotion, and repeats are allowed, so you can roll your dice multiple times on your Show HN already as long as you’re otherwise a good contributor to the community and only do it sparingly. Flooding another topic with commercial promos simply turns it into another https://news.ycombinator.com/show, what’s the point then?
As for YC companies getting Launch placements, well too bad, it’s their site, you’re free to leave and start your competing one. I assume most users aren’t bothered — I seldom notice them and hardly ever click on them. I notice job ads more.
One thing I do like: When people call themselves out -- "hey, we buy this software... or I work for this company and you might like this software"... then they share some software that is relevant to the discussion. I rarely see those kinds of contributions downvoted due to their transparency. Plus, I learn about lots of interesting companies and solutions that way.
Grindset self-promo tactics being pervasively, overly represented in the content submissions and discussions here are the number one reason I take very long breaks from the site.
More genuine conversations are intensely welcome, so if that takes overt guard rails, so be it. If the only enthusiasm someone really wants to share is about their capitalist endeavors, count me out.
> Grindset self-promo tactics being pervasively, overly represented in the content submissions and discussions here are the number one reason I take very long breaks from the site.
"Grindset": I never saw that before. I guess it is a combination of grind plus mindset? Very cool. It rolls off the tongue nicely.
As a personal project during my free time I'm currently working on adding more accessibility features, specifically screen reader compatibility, to my Terminal User Interface XMPP/Jabber client, Communiqué. Unfortunately, as far as I can see there's no actual way to make a TUI compatible with screen readers (reach out on the issue tracker, fedi, or xmpp, see link below if you know otherwise or have experience here, please, I'd love to pick your brain!), so my current plan is to re-write the UI with whatever TUI toolkit makes it easiest to also have a CLI/prompt mode that we can specifically design to be reader compatible.
An AI powered web scraper. Chrome extension. Uses interesting LLM capabilities in natural language (website of your choosing)->structured data. It’s working pretty well!
I'm working on a unique discovery app / recommender for books, tv, movies, video games, songs, youtube channels, newsletters and podcasts - and more categories soon!
Since my last update here, I've added more detailed personalized descriptions of recommendations (hit Describe to request), including a rating out of 10 for how well the item meets your preferences.
I've also added the ability to replace individual recommendations (this was the most requested new feature!). If you update your preferences, your replacements will use your updated preferences - pretty nice for fine tuning your results!
I'm working on a 3D infinite canvas of text, focusing on code. Runs on iPhone, iPad, macOS so they can all act as separate viewports into a space. You can point the app at a repository, download a copy locally, instantly render the entire repository into space in less than a second in most cases, and then fly around and search for text. I just got an optimization working for larger files and it's kinda fun how much even an iPhone can do with instanced rendering.
Im developing it with the use in mind of flying through your code to show others relationships, or edit with a visuospatial look at your code instead of basic 2D tabs and a mind map of which one had the thing you're working on. It's kinda fun to work on the project In the project!
It's built on Swift and Metal but can ready any utf8 text file, minus a few subsections of the Unicode spec (for now).
How did you learn Metal? The documentation on it from Apple leaves a lot to be desired for learning it from scratch and all the books I’ve encountered look woefully out of date.
Well first and foremost, by doing exactly what you're doing now and asking a bunch of people for help too, haha. It's not been easy, and I'm truly still terrible at it.
However, honestly, most came from following this tutorial series on YouTube which broke down building a basic game engine, and I stopped about 20 or so videos in once I had the tools I needed. I highly recommend!
And hey feel free to DM me on something if you'd like - I'm happy to answer questions and help where I can!
I am working on a visual search & exploration engine: https://digger.lol
The goal is to create beautiful and useful maps of interesting data, empowering the user to explore more intuitively guided by semantic similarity. No user data needs to be tracked for this to work, the data speaks for itself.
This roughly works by translating semantic (visual or textual) similarity into spatial proximity. Diggers major features are: semantic mapping, text search and image search. The text and image search works bidirectionally, allowing to search for images (e.g. product images) using text and for text (e.g. books) using images.
But to pass the time, I’m also working on a personal journal that keep S-expressions in a database with a well-defined schema set by the other nodes of the database (imagine tiddlywiki transclusions everywhere!)
The idea is to have a bunch of adaptors for Google Takeout, Apple Notes, Obsidian, Apple Health, fitness tracking, org-mode, location history, etc. keep all my data there in well-defined formats. I could then also use the markup language I’m writing to present my journal data in various ways.
My main focus is on efficient data entry/ingestion powered by schema-as-data, which allows for machine and human readability.
I don’t expect it to be useful, but I’m having fun. If I wind up getting anywhere, I might open source it.
As a side project I'm working on a multitrack audio play along website. If you are learning bass you can mute the bass track.
I used to play along to Jamey Aebersold CDs back in the day, and now on YouTube there are many Play Along videos... but I thought it would be fun to make one where you have more control.
For anyone wanting interesting YT videos for their kids (and not wanting to take anything away from OP's project), I highly highly recommend thekidshouldseethis.com. It's basically a curated stream of cool videos, and I would feel totally safe letting my daughter browse it alone (she never does because we usually watch them together, but the curation is that good). Videos on all sorts of topics, and good enough to be really entertaining for both kids and adults - I can spend an evening there easily. They also have a really fantastic gift guide.
Absolutely amazing. Bookmarked, gonna be very useful in 5 or 10 years ahahah
On the other hand, it's so soul-crushingly depressing to contemplate how most youtube content targeted at kids is such brain-addling garbage fucking up their psyche in all sorts of ways, all for the sake of ad impressions... If there's a place for the expression "late capitalism" this has to be it
This is a great idea! Recommendation algos are weaponized against kids and would be great to have some way of managing it.
There is a similar problem with movies as well. It is hard to know whether a movie is appropriate for a child e.g. some kind of violence may be acceptable but not adult themes. So marking a movie PG-13 for example doesn't help much. There are some crowd-sourced solutions to this right now such as https://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews But LLMs could really help automate this
Is there a version for adults? Something that keeps you from getting pulled down engagement bait rabbit holes would be great. I don’t want it to be overly focused on children’s education though.
I disabled all suggested content on my YouTube account. My “home” page shows as totally blank. Only the subscription tab works, or explicitly searching. You still get recommended “related videos” but it helps stay focused on the things you’ve chosen to see.
I exlusively watch youtube videos from my homepage and from the related videos section. You can train the YouTube algorithm to not feed you garbage, most of the videos on my homepage are 30+ minutes long educational content. I just wish you could permanently hide the Shorts section (I guess ublock can do this), so that I could see more than 6 at a time.
I also never subscribe to any channels, watching a few videos pretty much guarantees they will pop up on the homepage every once in a while.
sent you mail,
I would love to be associated with this project. I was looking for a solution for some time, at least one which allows to restrict the content from the main youtube. Youtube kids app they have is a joke.
YouTube recommendations for kids shouldn't be driven by engagement (e.g. "oh, you watched 20 hours of MrBeast videos. You probably need another hour.")
If my kid watches an hour of unboxing toy videos, I shouldn't have to try and disable 3,000 channels of toy unboxings in an effort for that topic to never surface again.
The thumbs down button essentially has zero effect.
I’d go further and say nobody should be subjected to this stuff. Engagement is a euphemism for addiction. Self improving addiction machines are a horrible idea. They’re actively bad for people and society for a laundry list of reasons.
Anyone who works on this stuff should be ashamed of yourselves. You’re modern day cigarette companies.
One thing I would like to see is an algorithm based on expressed rather than revealed preferences.
De-jargoned, that means clicking the like button means I want to see more things like that, and the dislike button means I don't want to see things like that. If I watched something all the way through, but clicked the dislike button, that means I don't want to see things that produced a similar response from people who tend to react the way I do.
This kind of algorithm is not going to increase watch time over the short term, and might not over the long term either, which makes it unlikely to be adopted by any for-profit service.
I'm building Pastmaps - striving to eventually be the world's largest online collection of old maps, aerials, and photos all packaged into a public historical research platform that's as easy to use as Google Maps. This has been a labor of love now for about a year, but I still have a huge mountain to climb to realize the full vision. Give it a try and give me your harsh criticisms - that's the greatest gift you could give me!
Even in it's current state, it's being used by geneologists, urban explorers, search & rescue teams, real estate developers, government agencies, etc. The number of exploding use-cases continues to astound me and keeps me motivated to continue.
Excellent! When reading Galois' coroner's report, I was happy to be able to find an old Paris map online that showed roughly where he had been the day of his duel and the route the farmer who found him would've taken to the hospital.
Just be careful in countries like Japan where old maps sometimes are used illegally to discriminate based on caste (tracing ancestry of workers/candidates to discriminate against ones coming from certain historically lower caste areas of towns and cities). You might catch negative attention if your tool makes it easy to reference these maps
I'm making a VSCode extension that can record & replay interactions with the IDE: all scrolls, selections, and modifications synced to guiding video, audio, and visual aid tracks.
The result is a much more interactive way to present code than screencasts or blogs. Because at any point we can pause a session and freely explore and experiment with the codebase.
I put together a demo recently [1] and written much more about it here [2].
I'm experimenting with a "new" kind of lisp macros.
Macros in lisp are just normal functions that receive the code they wrap as argument and return some modified code. Typically they will just wrap the passed code into some more code. But then there are code walking macro: macros that will traverse passed code to modify it in depth.
What I'm working on is "code diving" macros. Not only will they traverse the passed code, but they will resolve called functions and macros, fetch their source code and traverse it too. And so on. All the redefined fns/macros are accumulated in a let/macrolet binding, topologically sorted by call/dependency order. Instrumented code will call these local redefinitions, shadowing the global definition lexically.
This allow the programmer to write truly local monkey-patches for existing code he doesn't have control over (e.g, code from another library for instance). I'm writing this in Clojure, and the traditional way to do this is to temporarily change the global definitions of targeted variables using with-redefs. This is problematic because other threads will see these redefinitions, and not just threads created within the instrumented code, but already existing threads too.
Another way to do it is to just redefine the targeted functions globally, but then your modifications are available to the whole program for the rest of its execution.
Putting the finishing touches on my LLM based town simulator. Once it's finished I'll have it simulate 4 hours in the town every 2 hours in reality.
It is designed to solve the problem of "RPG hero just killed a dragon in front of the town and no one says anything about it." All the NPCs realistically react and talk about the Hero's exploits.
Visitors to the site can vote on what quest the hero undertakes next.
I'm running into the problem what the site isn't much fun. I'm honestly not sure what to do about that!
Nice idea, but right now the villagers mostly say some variation on "I eagerly await the valiant hero's return!". Beside the fact that no villagers would ever speak so formally, this seems to fall into the standard fantasy problem that the normal people in the world only exist to further the hero's agency. Could you give the villagers a sense of their own agency, meaning that they have lives of their own that would continue whether the hero returns or not?
> Could you give the villagers a sense of their own agency, meaning that they have lives of their own that would continue whether the hero returns or not?
Yeah I'm currently considering working that in.
Right now existing game AI techniques can manage giving NPCs a daily routine, and I'm trying to focus on demonstrating something new, VS another solution for an already solved problem. But having NPCs just talk about the hero is boring. I'll likely get around to adding private life stuff for each NPC before I do an announcement and share the project more broadly.
Jokes aside, this is interesting because I have thought about this since the first time I killed the dragon outside of Whiterun. There is a brief change with the guards nearby where they are wowwed by your feat, but some of the standard NPC responses sneak in and make the immersive aspect of the game shaky, at best.
I always thought, overtime, the honeymoon phase of a hero's deeds would wear off, and the villagers would swing more into a negative mindset, asking things like "who is going to clean this up?" or "how will we be compensated for damage to our homes?" etc. Community disruption tends to devolve into a lot of cynicism about the people in charge, in my experience with everything from natural disasters (obvious negatives) to new urban shopping centers (less obvious negatives). Regardless of what actually changed to disrupt the community, eventually it is perceived as the source of problems.
I'm not a psychologist or civic engineer, so I am not sure if there is a name for the concept I am referring to.
It would be great to give each of the NPC's their own character. For example, some of the NPC's could have a grudge against the hero for reasons of their own. They could be cheering against him for causing such a ruckus in their village, or maybe some "Monday morning quarterback" happening, thinking they could have handled the problem much better than he did. I think an LLM may be pretty good at coming up with some ideas. Or maybe even make it a bit tongue-in-cheek and have some of the NPC's be fans of the hero's enemies.
Having played with the demo a bit I think it's a couple of things:
1 - If you hadn't described your technical choices above I'd think this was just done using normal procedural text generation. Every NPC feels like it's giving the stock phrase they'll say when you run out of dialog options.
2 - There doesn't feel like there is a narrative, reasons to care about these NPCs, reasons to care about the Hero, or some sort of character development over time. If you want to engage people you need to get them to care about what's happening.
The Berlin immigration office is notoriously slow and unresponsive. The processing time for a residence permit varies from a few weeks to a few months. During that time, people are left unable to work or unable to leave the country. They never know how long it will take, and it causes some people to give up and leave Germany.
I am writing a tool to collect and aggregate data about the processing times. This will help people plan around the delays. Knowing is half the battle.
The biggest challenge is that my readers find me at the start of the process, and I need their feedback at the end of it. I have to make it easy for them to provide partial feedback and complete it later after they get an email reminder.
This would be unnecessary if the immigration office collected and shared that information, but they don’t. They also don’t welcome any help because they “operate at peak efficiency”. I have stopped hoping for their collaboration.
The immigration office does not collect data about the time it takes to process a case. I am building the infrastructure needed to poll my users at a date in the future.
I'm still working on Habitat. It's a self-hosted social platform for local communities. The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet. I want it to be easily installable for those who want to host using docker, and for those who want to host on an EC2 instance or something, because online services for docker hosting are quite expensive, so I've been working recently on ansible setup, and it's proving quite difficult, so if anyone with the experience fancies helping out, I'd be more than happy to receive contributions.
I have been thinking about a similar idea for a few months - a location-focussed social media. But my idea is more like Instagram with an extra location layer. You have a 'local' feed that shows public profiles of people in your area. You can then add those local people to some kind of 'friends' list - they can then see a more private profile, and you see their posts regardless of distance.
The key idea is that you can only add 'friends' if you've actually met them once in real life. So it wouldn't be overrun by celebrities and pseudo-social relationships, influencers, etc. I'm hoping it would foster more local connections - e.g. if someone often runs into a certain person at the same places and has similar interests, maybe they'll add each other as 'friends'.
I have had something similar in mind for a while, but nothing so fleshed out as you have here!
One question; how would you implement identity? I can imagine spam and unwanted content becoming a problem, so maybe a reputation system or network of trust mechanism would be needed?
Wife and I tend to plan long, multi-day, multi-destination travel.
Got sick of working in Google Docs and having to manually move days around and re-label dates, shift hotels, etc. Ended up creating Turas.app over a weekend in 2023 (and then let it loose on Reddit). But just recently created the Chrome Extension which feels like it is an even better tool because it lets you access all of the richness of Google Maps. It's a Google Maps powertool for people who like to plan their travel meticulously.
(Completely free and intended to be free forever; we tried to monetize it but realized that there's no reasonable way to do so that we ourselves would be happy with; seriously thinking about just open sourcing it, but needs some cleanup first!)
Getting ready to release a big Halloween update for my survival-horror game for the Playdate, Plight of the Wizard[0]. I just added a spell that targets the closest enemy, which was a fun challenge to implement. Performance optimizations for the hardware have been getting tougher to nail down, so I’m spending a lot of time figuring out inefficiencies in my code to target a stable 30 fps. I’m having a lot of fun releasing updates that make the game more fun. But with more refinement comes the desire to add more content and improved art. I’m trying to take it one step at a time.
Currently, other than my day job, I am obsessed with making sense of the "shape of stories". Mapping embeddings and see how they move through a sequence.
Started of with [1] which showed that there might be some strength to the idea.
Applied it for chunking [2] and web site analysis[3] and got pretty good results.
Just started trying out experiments on video [4] and surprised that the structure seems to hold for image embeddings as well.
I have no clue if this has any value, but it is fun to go down this rabbit hole :)
I'm obsessed with visual space representations of word as well. My application has a test mode where I render an entire dictionary (like, Webster) and then "plays" a book word by word, highlighting the word, then it's definition, and those words definitions and so on and so on, and it creates a trippy and distinct visualization kinda like an audio visualizer.. but with words. We should chat if you're interested in this kinda thing!
https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat
I'm working on scoping out specific problems facing "software as a medical device" (SaMD) companies. In particular issues around being able to release software at a reasonable cadence. I've been a CTO in this space for a couple of years and I am not consulting with other firms around the intersection of tech and regulatory.
It's a tight-rope walk of ensuring that all testing (software and non-software testing) and evidence is produced correctly and being able to release at a rapid pace to derisk each release. It's not uncommon for software to only be updated yearly, leading to very conservative changes and little iteration. Monthly releases are okay, but still not great.
I want to make it possible to release at least weekly and to do so safely.
If you work in this area, I'd love to chat and hear your experiences (email available via my website in bio).
I've been working on the ability to read sky brightness without a sensor.
I've always been interested in stargazing, but had a curiosity about how "good" the stars I was seeing were relative to conditions in other places on earth.
I'm working to answer that by doing inference of the value a SQM would get you, but over H3 cells in a geojson file, and then reporting on the cell with the highest reading during the last iteration over the set of H3 cells.
A few years ago, I made a silly little platforming game for my wife that was holiday-themed (Thanksgiving). Since then, I've tried to create at least one new sequel each year for a different holiday.
This year, I'm doing one for Halloween. They only take a few hours to make, but are a fun little thing for me to enjoy making and her to enjoy playing.
I'm close to finishing out a practice planner for basketball coaches, specifically I'm excited about the drills library. Youth coaches today tend to source drills from all over the internet (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc) so having one central place to refer to them is going to really help.
Pretty sure no one will see this so: I'm working on a little game where you collect those really old T206 baseball cards and even worked out a system where you can send cards to people offline using a code system like Animal Crossing on the GC used
Still haven't come up with a fun way for the player to collect them though
It'd limit the audience and involve a lot of work but maybe by co-ordinates? Bundle a bit of a walking tour of the team's history into the collecting process
I'm working on making a physical console for the Pico-8. Its pretty simple, works on linux booted into kiosk mode, looks for when a 3.5" floppy is inserted or removed, and loads or closes the game via a shell script.
I want it to be like a C64-style keyboard with all the guts inside it but wirelessly connect to the display/tv, so what I might do is use an ESP32 to read the game floppy and wirelessly transfer and cache the file to a dongle that plugs into an open HDMI port. Not sure yet.
I’ve been working on a bespoke smartwatch for kids with Type 1 diabetes & their parents. The watch presents reliable CGM data and not much else, so the only distractions from the watch are important medical alerts. It has a novel haptic algorithm that taps at a frequency based on the current BG trend, the idea is the wearer can develop a sixth-sense of their BG without looking at the watch at all. The entire watch is custom-made from the PCB up. I have a small batch of prototypes assembled and my son has been wearing his at school. I have a few screenshots up at my product studio website: https://subtractive.computer
I’m considering how to take the watch to market as-is, or if I pivot the watch to be a fully open-source Pebble successor.
I'm building a collator robot [0] to help me pack items I sell for building your own open source split-flap mechanical display [1].
I get custom character flaps printed and die-cut in bulk and then sell them in smaller sets. A full set of flaps for one module has 52 distinct designs (letters, numbers, symbols, etc) and I get them from the manufacturer grouped by design, so they need to be collated to sell as packs of 52 with 1 of each design.
My WIP robot will take a stack of one design and distribute them to a bunch of cubbies, then I'll swap in the next design, and so on, so each cubby ends up with a full set.
It's based on a cheap ~$110 CNC gantry frame from AliExpress and a ~$35 BTT SKR Pico 3d printer main board running GrblHAL. To detect whether the flaps feed successfully I use a visible light break-beam sensor (the typical IR sensors don't work because the PVC flaps happen to be IR transparent!) which acts as the "z probe" - the flap is fed via a G38.3 probe action which returns whether the probe was successful or not, and the "z" coordinate it was first detected.
I have a python script running on a computer to send the gcode to the machine.
I've tried setting timers for certain apps, but I find myself deactivating them again and again. In the past, I've had phones that allowed me to lock myself out for an hour, which worked but was a bit annoying when I had to do something else on the phone. I wish I could lock myself out of certain apps for certain time periods with no way of deactivating it outside these time periods, e.g. Instagram, Reddit or youtube only allowed between 8PM and 10PM.
Another problem is the urge to immediately grab the phone whenever I have nothing to do. I've had success putting the phone in a bottom drawer turned off over the weekend, but that's not always feasible. Perhaps some training would be helpful, or an app that would gamify the aspect of not constantly unlocking your phone.
Thank you for sharing - it's really hard to fight human psychology. Did you try to download apps to control screentime? There are already some solutions out there, though none of them are perfect.
- First, I'm now aware that phone overuse is an issue. This wasn't obvious a year ago, even though I used it even more.
- Analyze my usage patterns. For example, I'd get a message on some app, open it, and end up doomscrolling. It helped me to change my notification settings so that I only get emails. That way, I can check it on the computer later, where I usually waste less time.
- I agree that gamifying is a good idea. It's precisely the main feature of the app I'm working on. Not only that, but building a "community": I started to talk about this problem with friends and learned from them. It also makes me more accountable; my girlfriend will nudge me to leave the phone alone if I'm stuck, for example.
Getting a (useful) notification and drifting off to other stuff is definitely a problem. Interestingly, a smart watch has helped me with that. I now read notifications on the watch, and about 75% of the time I don't have to take out my phone anymore.
Im working on a platform for people to run their social hobbies and activities. Organize meetups, find when to meet, run ticketed events. for free!
I use it myself to organize my weekly cycling group of friends and friends of friends.
Paid stuff coming very soon, just onboarding some groups and get some feel
Love the landing page and the Swedish city references :) I'm working on something similar, actually, but in the lunch/dinner niche. It's a nice feeling to build something that you actually use yourself to meet other people, but I find it's hard to scale beyond that. What are the major features you're missing before making it an open sign up?
Btw for ticketed events, I've seen that https://posh.vip has been growing pretty quickly for music performers.. maybe some inspiration for you there.
Autopilot for my sit-on-top fishing kayak. Designed, modeled, and printed an assembly which attaches to the rudder rod. Moves the rod via a stepper motor connected to a Teensy 4.0 which gets NMEA 2000 messages from a Garmin heading sensor and a Garmin fish finder/chartplotter. Uses PID control to maintain any course I set on the chartplotter, using the cross-track error and heading. I’ve had it out on the water a few times now and it works great. Also put together an iOS app that communicates with the assembly via BLE so I can modify the PID gains as needed depending on conditions.
There was a bit of noise to the sonar transducer since the stepper motor was so noisy, but I mostly eliminated it by routing the motor wires through liquid-tight flexible electrical conduit, connecting the conduit to ground.
I built a CNC router table and am enjoying getting a hang of that. I have always wanted to take my software and systems skillset into the physical world.
I wouldn't mind making boutique sim racing/flight gear, or aftermarket car parts like cyberpunk-esque dash readouts and stuff like that.
That's the more hobbyist stuff, and more broadly I am also learning Japanese, and making games. They sound separate but I am hoping to blend the two skillsets and make games that bridge a gap I see there.
I think that good innovation only happens at the intersections of things we already know. That way you have the depth of understanding required to be useful rather than just new.
If you’re not into PWAs but would like to get some breathing practice in your daily life, you can also subscribe to the YouTube channel where I plan to share mostly shorts of the same exercises
I am working to deploy some remote sensors on my farm to help keep an eye on important infrastructure. Things like voltages, bin fill, water levels and other resource management. I may just add a weather station for fun.
Meshtastic is helping out but if anyone knows where to find stronger documentation that would help.
An app to collect memories easily. You capture vocal notes, which are transcribed & corrected with AI.
As a father, I wanted to capture all the little moments of our day-to-day family life to later share with my grown-up children. However, I did not have the discipline to journal regularly. So, I made Memzy to capture them easily on the fly!
I'm not doing anything world changing really, at least not yet.
I am working on my MS in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance from Western Governor's University and studying for the CompTIA CySA+ exam.
In what little free time I do have, I'm also puttering around with SwiftUI and my app CountDownula, which I recently updated to Swift 6. I made it to scratch my own itch after looking for a nice clean, simple, free countdown to a specific date app that doesn't have any ads, subscriptions, or in app purchases and not finding anything suitable. It supports iOS and macOS with iCloud sync between all your account's devices using SwiftData. The link is below if you're looking for something similar...
I'm experimenting with an AI assisted world building / story telling tool: https://youtu.be/OGkSI3VfxRU . The idea is to do kind of what Cursor is doing for programming; accelerate the creative process (rather than replacing it).
An "offline-first" client web app for Github. I don't want to have to wait seconds to load up an issue, and then wait seconds (or keep another tab open) to go back to the list of issues/PRs, ...etc. I want everything to feel instant, with optimistic updates, and a backend sync process that doesn't require me to refresh the page to see new updates.
(Small note: I'm doing it in full-stack Rust, including web frontend, using leptos).
I've also had this idea in the back of my mind. A few weeks I ago downloaded the official Github client without really thinking, on the assumption that obviously that's what it would do. Only to be sorely disappointed.
Hey guys! We're engineers/designers from France, and we've built the Ultimate DIY Battery that you can repair and refill!
Ride Sustainably with the World's First Repairable Battery
Refillable in 5 minutes (just buy $150 worth of new cells every 3 years or so, when they're depleted)
Be Worry-Free thanks to the Fireproof Casing! There's been waaaaaay too many lithium fires!
It's launched as an IndieGogo (the product already exists, but as a startup IndieGogo is convenient to get the cash upfront to buy the parts and build the batteries) and there is an offer for early-backers here https://get.gouach.com for a 25% discount on the battery!
Building a machine learning framework from scratch to learn how everything works.
There exists a myriad of hobbyist frameworks from before, all of them in Python, so to add something original I'm doing it in VBA (for the extra challenge):
First time I'm building a proper website, used a lot of AI. Things that changed over last time:
* Switched the charting library from D3 to Apex. D3 was too low-level for my purpose.
* Reworked the design and contents of a lot of pages (with the help of AI).
* Various bugfixes for the database queries.
* Tried to come up with some kind of pricing signal detection, but currently not working well.
* Link to the actual auction results.
* Minimal E2E validation using Playwright. What a pleasure to use!
I'm planning to add alerting. Not keen on running a backend though.
I'm working on helping my wife get her print-on-demand Shopify store off the ground. She designs the products herself, but ran into challenges with SEO. So, I built a custom app that connects to her Shopify store via API, using GPT-4o-mini to handle SEO optimizations—things like generating descriptions, titles, alt text, SEO-friendly URLs, and more, all based on the product images.
There were also issues syncing with Google Merchant Center (missing colors, categories, etc.), so I tweaked the app to auto-fill these fields using GPT-4o, making it compliant with Google and Pinterest requirements.
I’m completely new to SEO and just tried following best practices to fix things as they came up. Now I’m learning that SEO keywords change constantly, so I’m thinking of integrating a keyword provider to dynamically enhance our product descriptions.
I never realized running an e-commerce store (especially print-on-demand) would involve so much operational work on the marketing front. I’d appreciate any advice on what to tackle next, especially since my goal is to avoid “subscription hell” with multiple Shopify apps. My wife is also just starting with ads and campaigns, diving into tutorials to learn the ropes.
Being in my early 30s and moving to a new city, I have been thinking more about ways to connect with people in real life. A friend of mine remarked that no one seems to get lunch anyone, so we kind of thought it would be a great idea to try and bring back the modern power lunch.
We created Milieu Club https://joinmilieu.com as a way to connect with other busy professionals in your city over lunch as nice restaurants. You can join clubs in your city or create your own, and then you get randomly watched with 3 - 5 other people and invited to lunch. It's sort of inspired by Soho house, meetup.com, and Opentable.
Essentially a PR review flow for production access, which allows you to enforce a second pair of eyes workflow. I was always a bit scared when I was on call and had all the power in my finger tips to ruin everyone's day. I think this helps alleviate the risk of human error significantly. Also helps with compliance of course.
Hiring today is completely broken. We spend too much time evaluating candidates through inefficient systems that fail to verify job-specific skills. Both organizations and candidates are stuck in an endless loop of repetitive assignments and interviews.
That’s why we built the Proof-of-Skill Protocol.
The protocol allows candidates to prove their skills directly to industry experts, known as Skill Validators, and receive Proof-of-Skill credentials that reflect their true skill levels. Organisations can then compare and shortlist candidates basis their proof-of-skill.
We launched our Beta for UI/UX design skills just last week!
I don't have a link for it yet, but I am working on using an HCL-like syntax to write CI pipelines. Ideally it would function a lot like dagger but written a lot like terraform.
The main problems that I want to solve are the really slow feedback loop of complex GitHub Actions / GitLab CI, but without the limitation of having to run it within another CI provider.
Building a pneumatic long-range candy dispersal device (candypult) to launch Halloween candy from my garage door to the street. As is the case for many of us around here, I get bored of making digital tools and want to build something in meatspace. I'm trying to use as much material I already own as possible, so building out of leftover metal framing and old decking.
Trick-or-treating at a door is so last decade; trying to catch a Snickers hurtling towards you in the darkness is the future.
I’m building a way for developers to easily deploy open source applications (Postgres, redis, sentry, elastic search, etc), plus have a full heroku like workflow for their own applications, all within their kubernetes cluster, with what I hope is a super intuitive and friendly UI.
I’ve ran a start up and saw how SaaS-ified and expensive web tooling is (heroku, datadog, redshift, fivetran, etc), but how difficult it was to move off of them. We had a few years of over 1 million in infrastructure spend.
I’m hoping just making Kubernetes easier to use gives us a way out.
It’s fully open source and a hosted version is free to use! https://canine.sh.
Would love feedback on it, including how the overall pitch could be better, or if it actually solves people’s problems.
I can't find any pricing info on that page except "Get started for 1$$" and then it wants me to sign in. No thanks. I'd like to know what I'm getting into before signing up.
I've been working on a note-taking tool / daily todo-app: https://crom.ai/ - Currently in closed beta. It uses basic markdown and some additional custom elements to annotate data.
The idea is that you get a daily for every day, with the items ticked off on the last day removed. So a new daily every day. At the same time, there is some integration with AI to get feedback on things to break down. You can give it some instructions, focus, and also tune the amount of feedback.
I've had this in so many incarnations before, but never made it 'properly'. It's a pet project, but do want to release it at some point.
SVGs are awesome and currently unrepresented in the diffusion-based model landscape. We have something that produces pretty great results and we're working on the next version which should be even better.
Something like this is desperately needed, keep up the work. One thing that I immediately noticed is that all downloads are named "download.svg". A more descriptive name would be helpful.
Edit: Also, copying the SVGs to the clipboard would be nice. Download from the browser still sucks, and with web based SVG editors (like my own one, www.hyvector.com ) people can quickly edit the generated SVGs without having to go through the downloading and uploading process.
I wanted to to make a PoC (Proof of Concept) to show genuinely good and original use of AI in gaming.
I found a gameplay loop that requires the user to understand what was meant by a generated image, and the main gameplay element is to argue something, to have real language-based interactions.
I think in some ways it is achieving some of the vision from the old interactive fiction games.
I understand the AI fatigue, as almost all of the proposed uses of AI in gaming are generally either random generation (in other words, procedural generation but worse) or 'better replies from NPC'.
Neither solve any problem people really have.
And probably more importantly, the other use is for mega-corporations to hire less competent programmers/artists.
Unfortunately being tied to the AI calls poses a lot of issues with distribution, which is annoying for what was supposed to be a glorified PoC.
I'm still finishing the backend to comply with Steam's review (which does not really match their guidelines...)
I'm working on a social network based around link sharing!
One of the core ideas is that rather than following a whole person, you can follow a subset of their tags so someone can post about obscure cheeses and ambient electronic, but lactose intolerant you can just follow the music. Or you can follow someone's tech posts but not follow news of their dysfunctional city.
Honestly a lot of it is resurrecting ideas from earlier days in the web like Digg and Delicious, and despite having the idea for ages and having worked on it for a decent while, it's only getting more relevant as the web gets more algorithmic and external links get demoted in sites like Twitter.
The aim is to bring more curation and humanity back to the web, and the next feature I'm really excited to get out is one to make in-person conversations even better!
It's already live @ lynkmi.com and if it's of interest to you, you can sign up to the waitlist (it's very short)
This kind of reminds me of Google Circles where you would group people into areas of interest. I always thought that idea was really good and should’ve been pursued further.
I'm developing a pipeline to sync underwater passive acoustic audio with whale sightings around the hydrophones, to then classify that audio using Google's open sourced whale models. The goal is to enrich data from happywhale.com with whale voices, so scientists can further explore communication of these species. I'm trying to keep things as system-agnostic as possible, but am building the first implementation to run on GCP.
Tölvera is a Python library designed for composing together and interacting with basal agencies, inspired by fields such as artificial life (ALife) and self-organising systems. It provides creative coding-style APIs that allow users to combine and compose various built-in behaviours, such as flocking, slime mold growth, and swarming, and also author their own.
With built-in support for Open Sound Control (OSC) via iipyper and interactive machine learning (IML) via anguilla, Tölvera interfaces with and rapidly maps onto existing creative computing software and hardware, striving to be both an accessible and powerful tool for exploring diverse intelligence in artistic contexts.
Tölvera has been selected for Mozilla's first Builders Accelerator! Read the announcement:
I'm working on a more general purpose programming language called "Pear", rather than the DSL I wrote before called "runny" (a Make/Just equivalent).
I want it to have a more concise syntax (no keywords, fewer characters) but feel familiar to most programmers. All definitions use square brackets in combination with some other set of characters.
To get some experience launching webapps that can be put into the play store and play around with image generation models, prompting, I am building an app to generate application/corporate photos from a few non-professional selfies.
Tech stack is probably FastAPI (I mainly know python) and likely nuxt/ionic (none/not much experience). Not sure how the whole hosting, interaction with replicate/huggingface will work on phone apps, payments on stripe without having a company, how to make the webapp into a phone app, etc. It should be a great learning project with the first time scoring an actual sale!
Happy to hear early guidance if people have done similar things with python backgrounds to get started.
I built a Slack bot that converts your Slack conversations to detailed Jira tickets in seconds.
Our team needs to routinely convert Slack convos into tickets manually, and it gets tedious and repetitive. Automating scribbled requirements to a ticket has been a big time saver. It's like I have a Jira assistant now.
Learning some more ATS2 while 3 isn’t yet released. Cool language with linear types (which go further than Rust’s affine types), refinement types, dependent types, proofs & dataviewtypes over C for zero-cost abstractions.
I am spending my retirement working part-time on a realistic spacecraft simulator (3D, VR) set in the late 20th century on a fictional moon made of Tungsten ("Tungsten Moon"). For some reason, I decided the spacecraft needs a "real" flight computer with code that can be modified by the player, so I am now deeply immersed in coding a Forth virtual computer ("AMC Forth") to run in-game. It will control the navigation and systems on the spacecraft. If you've gotten this far, and you're intrigued, you can try the free demo on Steam (no Forth machine yet).
I've been obsessed with developing ways to make it easier to handle tab overload in the browser without requiring any sort of active "tab management".
I have a working extension that replaces the "new tab" page with a clean view of all open tabs, along with simple ways to search and select which tab to switch to, including search over bookmarks and history. There are also some simple tools to allow for creating and reorganizing tab groups.
I'm very early and looking for feedback from anyone who suffers from tab overwhelm like I do! You can try it out at http://bit.ly/tab-o-magic!
Thanks for the positive feedback! I'm testing interest on chrome, and, if it finds traction, I will definitely port it to be browser-agnostic. It _should_ be pretty straightforward.
I am working on the Vanta for sustainability and climate disclosures. Climate and sustainability disclosures are starting to come online in many sectors and parts of the world. We offer compliance-as-a-service so that startups and covered entities can fulfill their compliance requirements in a mostly self-serve manner without having to hire expensive consultants or undergo significant restructurings. Our platform provides a single source of truth for your climate, sustainability, and emissions data. For example, if you are an American company trying to go-to-market in Europe, all it takes is purchasing an additional module and we will automatically generate the compliance documents and checklists for you based on the existing data we have on your company. We also offer managed “Climate Trust Center” dashboards that you can subdomain on your website for investors reporting and to satisfy disclosure requirements.
If you are in an EPA-regulated (or equivalents in Canada and Europe) industry (such as mining, oil and gas, minerals, rare earths, metal processing, airlines, construction, shipping/marine, logistics, heavy industries, agriculture/farming/food production, data center, power generation including renewables, adjacent ones like consumer goods, real estate, large scale AI training, climate derivatives etc.) or require sustainability consulting support in general, we would love to talk to you:
hello@carbonimpacthq.com (put “HN:” in the subject line so we know where you are coming from)
I've been working on a new LLM prompt format and accompanying dataset for finetuning.
The idea is that the "main character" being prompted always has to perform an action/function. So even "saying" something to the other participants of the chat is a deliberate action.
Creating launch/hype videos for your product is hard. It's expensive if you go through an agency or a freelancer. You could DIY it with Adobe After Effects, but it takes a whole set of motion design and video editing skills!
That's why I built VideoJam, an easy-to-use video builder for startups, solo entrepreneurs, and hackers. Create your video in no time - no video editing skills required. You can create product videos from scratch, with ready-made scene templates, or using entire video templates.
I just launched this week, any feedback is very welcomed. Also, don't hesitate to reach out if you want to try at no cost during the beta.
I am working on an email-based space game (a la Eve Online).
Between work and family responsibilites, I find it difficult to carve out time for dedicated gaming sessions anymore. As a result, I often find myself searching for games that I can play when I have a bit of time, can progress over the long-haul, doesn't require real-time monitoring and yet feels like I'm actually playing a game (as opposed to just watching a train move on the track, like all of those Idle games).
I thought: What if there was a game that could be played one day at a time? Not real-time, but still multiplayer. You could decide what you want to do throughout the day and adjust your tactics, but everything resolves at the end of the day. What if you could play via email? It sounded really intriguing, and so I started building it.
I've been working on an app to help VvEs* in the Netherlands self-manage.
For about a year, I was trying to get our VvE management company* to take care of major issues we have in our building's crawl space. We had an inspection done, but even after about seven months of constantly nagging them, they failed to get a single quote for the work that the crawl space needs. I called our manager, and he essentially yelled at me for twenty minutes and was not shy to express his anti-immigrant sentiments (I'm American).
Because of this, I'm now on a mission to get this company fired and take management into our own hands, which will save us a bunch of money. The existing VvE management tools are ugly, slow, and unnecessarily complex, so I'm building my own.
It's only been a month, so I haven't hosted it yet (still coming up with a name, to be honest), but I have made good progress functionality-wise. If anyone in the Netherlands is part of a small VvE and wants to chat, let me know! My email is my username (@gmail).
* The US equivalent would be an HOA (Homeowner's Association). Basically, a corporation that is responsible for the upkeep of shared resources for homeowners (e.g. the roof of a building or the pool in a gated community).
** Many VvEs choose to outsource management of the VvE to a third party. These companies—in theory—take care of maintenance requests, yearly meetings, voting, etc. From everything I've read online, almost none of these companies satisfy their clients.
I quit my job and depleted savings earlier this year to work on helping others overcome addictive habits and behaviors https://neurtureapp.com
Addiction is rampant right now, from social media and phones to vaping and beyond. People need access to science/research-based resources, not just a “sober” counter, which doesn’t apply to many people and is rarely helpful to those it applies to.
Working with a behavioral scientist and a clinical psychologist on the UX and content of the app at the moment but any thoughts, feedback, connections, or help would be amazing.
Not exactly what I'm currently working on, as it got released last week, but...
I gathered many of my bash scripts and aliases, focused on making use of Android Debug Bridge (ADB) easier, together into a single collection[0]. The wiki page has visuals and more information on functionality[1].
Then starting a new project this week around gathering and displaying information on air quality in Iceland.
I am working on a geography game where players take turn naming a city inside an area that get's smaller and smaller. It's called LOLA (longitude latitude) since you can choose to narrow the area down by either longitdude or latitude.
It is probably not substantial among the projects people have commented on this thread, but I am happy to be working on my first personal website made from plain old HTML and simplecss.
Learning how to arrange things, navigation, and my own blog on my own site gives me the gratification of owning something fully. Everyone should have their own site is truly what I agree with.
My daughter loves creating things — art, books, videos etc. She's shown an interest in learning to code, but she's only six, and I don't want learning to code to be a chore. So I've built visual scripting into her favourite game!
Overcooked is a co-op series that fundamentally requires the control of multiple characters to progress. I've kept multiplayer as an option, since teamwork is an important part of the game. However, I've replaced the 2nd player with a bot that you program to assist you.
It's still experimental at this stage. However, I've experience leading EdTech engineering departments and my wife is a teacher at my daughter's school. If my daughter's peers show interest I'll go ahead and build a course around this for primary school aged children.
I've been working on a site that helps you find in-person work in NYC that is actually convenient: https://walkablework.com
After working on a remote startup for a few years I felt very isolated and that the best startups are going to have a strong in-person presence. Now many larger companies have started implementing return to office policies that unfortunately don't make sense for a lot of employees. I wanted a site like this to exist to give people the power to find hybrid/in-person work that they don't mind commuting to.
Let me know if you have any feedback or want to post a job!
For those who don't know, UDP Generic Receive Offload and Generic Segmentation Offload allow you to receive and send multiple same-sized UDP packets coalesced in a single buffer (or many in an iovec but you really shouldn't). Compared to calling sendmsg(2) on individual packets, sending them coalesced in one call traverses the kernel network stack exactly once, thus has significantly lower overhead.
wireguard-go and many QUIC implementations use the same trick to improve throughput. Unfortunately the in-kernel WireGuard driver does not take advantage of UDP GSO, and swgp-go had to cope with that by attempting to coalesce multiple unsegmented messages received in a single recvmmsg(2) call.
I'm developing an implementation of what I call Hydra – Multi-Head Prediction Embeddings [1], which I believe represents the next evolution in transformer architectures.
I’ve been working on open sourcing a background jobs library I built for Rust and Postgres, called Underway.[0] Unlike other similar queuing libraries, it offers a simple “step” functions API for defining dependent units of work.
I built this because a number of projects I work on need a robust, resilient way of deferring work but I didn’t want to add another piece of infrastructure or another language to my stack. Plus as soon as you start to reach for APIs that offer some kind of workflow concept, your options become fewer and further between.
I am playing around with LLMs and Game Theory. Currently, I let them play 5x5 board games in a tournament against Reinforcement Learning Agents and a Random Player. I am capturing the "thoughts" of the agent for behavioral data analysis. My background is Risk Management, I am trying to gather an understanding how such LLMs report their "decision" for applications in human/ai interactions for identifying and reporting governance flaws.
Since I am working on autonomous agents that are given the agency to take an action on their own, I believe having a good understanding of the "psyche" is important (at least to me).
Been working on our startup laudspeaker (an alternative to firebase cloud messaging) [1] as well as trying to write more! I like science fiction thrillers similar to what michael crichton used to write and have been working on a story called Panopticon around encryption, spycraft, and three letter agencies [2]
I'm still working on my first self designed PCB. It's nothing special, just a temperature and humidity sensor using esp32. I started it to teach myself more about PCB design and embedded programming. Yesterday I published a blog article on it. https://www.felixmaurer.de/blog/2024/10/27/building-an-iot-s...
This is something similar to what I've been working on. Currently designing a HAT for a Raspberry Pi that includes temp/humidity sensor as well as particle matter (PMS5003). Trying to end up with my own personal weather station which I'll then publish to a small web app.
I started to pick up a somewhat dormant side project again.
It has the working title of the "Wise Weasel". This is supposed to be a minimum spoiler hint system for adventure games. I really don't like walk throughs telling you to "Walk into the Armor Shop. Pick up mirror, arrows and use cheese on hole to pick up mouse", because that breaks all immersion and puzzle mindset. A hint system is more like "You can burn rope if you focus light a bit", followed e.g. by "But now the beam of light is on the floor, not on the rope. How do we reflect light around" to nudge the player a bit into a direction of looking for a mirror or something shiny. Or to polish something? This keeps one in the mindset of an adventure and a puzzle game, opposed to some IKEA instructions.
NiceGameHints[1] is already nice at this, but I find that the chapter / puzzle list still gives off to much information and spoils too much plot. I'm much rather tinkering with giving the user some word cloud of both words describing the puzzles as well as generic words on top, so they have to select two words what they are stuck with. For example, you'd select "Witch + House" or "Witch + angry" and this would reveal a puzzle "The angry witch doesn't talk to me and turns me to stone if I enter her house". I'm just worried that this might be more moon logic than the game itself.
It's mostly a bit difficult to keep all of this state (unlocked chapters, known puzzles, ...) in track with URLs or cookies or something, because I don't really want to run a database... and requiring user accounts is just a lot of work. And I'd prefer to keep this mostly without JS as a classical system just rendering HTML. If you have some food for thought there, I'm happy for input. Currently it's just list in URL parameters.
I am working on dealing with burnout for the first time. I’ve read about it here and thought I understood it, but experiencing it first hand has been difficult. It destroys everything good about life: relationships, hobbies, sleep, and health. I know I am not the only one here going through this and knowing that helps a little.
I'm on my fraternity's alumni board. The chapter has been using spread sheets for everything since I was an active member. Every year, information about recruitment gets lost in the shuffle between officers.
I've been working on a bespoke CRM for them to prevent the spreadsheet rot while providing some helpful visualization and making their data easier to use in the feature. The goal is to make the entire recruitment process self documenting.
Its slowly evolving into a way to keep track of actives and alumni, as well as ways for actives to interact with the recruitment process.
I'm working on a tool to generate and host full stack web apps from prompts (just like everyone else). I'm loving it. Using llms to do as much of my coding as possible, so in a way eating my own dog food, although it's a more developer-driven effort than what the end product will be.
Strange thing is, the most time consuming part of getting this ready for a user facing launch is not the code generating, but all the scaffolding/queues/storage to run it.
I have! Mill is a lot more thorough, handling things like caching and parallelism for you. BLD is a lot more minimal, which would be fine for small projects but maybe not for larger projects as they grow
I've been working on a cloud gaming service (like Stadia). Wanted to see how far I can get it done using open source, without ready-to-use solutions like Parsec/Moonlight/Sunshine.
It works by running a game in Linux (I use NixOS btw) under Wayland (sway), capturing the frames via Pipewire in form of DMAbufs and passing them to ffmpeg's VA-API encoder (so frames don't leave GPU memory and are encoded on GPU right away), and finally sending encoded packets through WebRTC media stream to a web client. Inputs from a client are sent back to the server via WebRTC data channel and injected into Wayland.
Running the prototype over local network displays zero perceivable latency. (Of course when playing on a remote AWS server the latency is visible as expected). Pleased with the result so far, although it's my first experience with Pipewire, VA-API, and WebRTC, so my implementation is probably far from optimal.
Overall, very impressed by WebRTC - such a powerful thing right in every browser. Continued to be amazed by NixOS - my AWS AMI is NixOS-based and can be built and rebuilt with granular caching, with a single `nix build` command. Also Terraform/OpenTofu - just makes it all possible deploy-wise. So much good stuff exists!
Every application that I've worked on has had blind spots, or forgotten lands of code. Things like “how often do people actually use this feature?” …or… “does this code still run every night?”.
I've been working on a little project to be less overwhelmed and get more done each week. It's a super simple productivity idea that starts each week with a new (markdown) file.
At first I thought you made a website that gives me an empty Markdown file. But I am glad I downloaded it its actually a pretty nice template.
What are you personally doing with the yearly goals in that file. Are you copy and pasting them from last week, or are you typing them down everytime to re-iterate them (and possibly even modify) ?
Yeah, currently I am just copy/pasting the Yearly Goals section over. I want to eventually add a feature to allow someone signed up for the email to edit that part. Then someone could modify that goal section and have it correctly emailed each week.
Carpeweekem looks like a really cool idea!
I suppose you exclusively use it for goal tracking and not for ongoing/open To Dos, right? At least if you don't carry over stuff from last week?
My son (5y) loves stories with pictures. So I made a small web-app that allows him to record a story idea and it will generate a story + pictures.
It will even read it to him.
It was a quick weekend project. I wanted to try v0 and cursor a bit more. And I love how simple it is to use LLMs (structured mode) + DALL-E to build creative things.
Other AI/LLM projects I've recently (~1y) worked on
- distill.fyi (professional): auto gen people/company profiles (aka LinkedIn on steroids)
- spaarkd.com (professional): create, produce and ship individualized fashion via AI/LLM
- email categorizer: used multimodal LLMs to read email + attachments and categorize them (complaint, sign up, signed form, cancellation,...)
- line-items.com (hobby): converts receipts into JSON
PS: I'm currently job hunting. Please see my profile for more :)
I am the maintainer of beanborg (https://github.com/luciano-fiandesio/beanborg), a set of scripts for automated categorization of financial transactions on top of beancount. Using plaintext accounting in the last 5 years has dramatically improved my family's financial health.
Unfortunately, plaintext accounting is not for everyone.
I noticed that there is a big gap in this space, especially for European users. There are several personal finance applications, but they seem to integrate mostly with US banks and, in general, they seem to be very dollar-centric.
So, I'm working on a simple app to manage personal finance, based on the concept of double-entry accounting with features like budgeting, projections and data analysis.
There are a lot of privacy-related considerations, so for the time being I will eat my own dogfood and offer it to close friends. Let's see how it goes!
I'm currently working on Mockoon, an API mocking tool. It's an open-source project that I've been relentlessly improving over the past 7 years. I decided to build a SaaS/cloud offering to help finance my work on the project. I'm solo bootstrapping, and revenues are slowly growing. It's not the easiest path, but definitely worth it!
I created KopiMap (https://kopimap.com) to help people discover great cafés in Jakarta Indonesia, but I wanted to take the UX further by automatically organizing user-submitted photos into meaningful categories (menu, food/drinks, ambiance).
The challenge is how to classify images as cost efficient as possible without compromising performance. I decided to go with running ML models on the client-side.
Technical implementation:
- Built and trained a compact TensorflowJS model (~3MB) that runs entirely in-browser
- Model lazy loads only when users are submitting reviews
- Classifies uploaded photos into Menu, Food & Drink, or Vibes (interior/exterior)
- Zero server costs for inference, quick enough classification feedback
This approached solved several problems:
1. Reduced server costs by moving inference to the client
2. Improved UX with immediate photo categorization
3. Maintained app performance by lazy loading the model
Would love feedback from the HN community on:
- Optimizing the model size further
- Alternative approaches to client-side ML
- General UX improvements for local discovery apps
I had no prior ML experience, so this was a fun challenge :)
Inspired by Heart of Clojure, and especially Jeaye Wilkerson and his talk about jank-lang, I’ve dusted off my toy Clojure compiler that produces 16-bit x86 code.
I’ve fixed the handling of global environment, to the point where I’m able to compile a program that prints out the result of multiplying two numbers [0]. Sounds trivial, but seeing as the compiler has no dependencies and targets bare metal, there’s quite a lot of moving parts under the hood. I’m excited!
Right now I’m adding rudimentary support for strings. My goal is to get it to compile itself, but that’s still a far future. Extrapolating from the current development pace, maybe I’ll get it done in 2050? :)
I am working on making stats on financial securities accessible to more people so they can make better trading decisions. This is very much a work in progress.
After years of lying dormant, I'm reactivating a hacky PHP script to test 'technical SEO' knowledge in the way of a challenge - more aligned to a technical web challenge, with a "SEO" bent more than anything spammy.
I've used this previously as a recruiting test in lieu of any other method to evaluate knowledge.
It's currently brittle and hosted on a RPi in my garage. It also requires a name + email to prevent spamming (and certification if successful), but once I've built some way of moderating access it will be more open.
I am working on Shepherd.com and trying to reimagine book discovery online.
I just launched the "best books of 2024," where I ask readers and authors to share their 3 favorite reads of the year and make it fun to navigate them by different factors (genres, topics, book club reads, audiobooks, and more coming) -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024
I'm building a simple app to let friends and loved ones know how you're doing. I know many people in some of the current troubled regions of the world, and whenever a particular event happens it's really nerve-wracking for those of us not there, wondering if our loved ones are okay.
WhatsApp and messenger groups don't work for this kind of thing because 1) people are often members of many different groups that they would have to constantly notify if they were "okay" during a particular event and 2) many troubles in the world are ongoing, and constantly spamming a message group saying "I'm still okay" doesn't work.
My app just lets people hit a single button to tell any interested friends / family that they are safe. They can do this as many times as they like.
Normally I would be worried about premature optimization, what I've been spending extra time making the tech stack initially very performant. It's working for my family but once I deploy to the world I want it to be solid and stable, or it loses a lot of its value.
My goal is to enhance the visualization and increase performance to reduce animation generation time. Additionally, I want to improve the overall aesthetics by applying colors and designing the paths to resemble a serpentine shape rather than a pipe.
I am working on a collaborative ebook reading app, rather like a sort of online book club.
You can either choose a book from the catalogue (currently just public domain books, but I’d like to expand that out into paid books) or upload your own epub, create a reading group and invite others.
Reading progress, highlights, comments and discussions are synced across the group in real-time.
Beyond reading groups, I’ve found it useful for sharing and reading books in my work teams and also for things like sharing the latest position of my daughter’s bedtime story between myself and my wife.
Please do check it out - it’s still very much a work in progress (for example I haven’t finished the landing page copy) but I’d love to hear what you think.
I'm building a custom NC manufacturing robot from scratch.
I was unhappy with availability, pricing, and business model (SaaS lock-in) of the existing hardware/software solutions. But to my delight, I noticed that you just need better amplifiers to use 3D printer mainboards for driving industrial stepper motors. Everything is controlled with Gcode, which is just text. And sensors can send back logging messages over the same USB connection.
That means the control software can be just a python script with a little state machine inside :)
No, its neither a CNC mill nor a lathe nor a robot arm. It's a specialised machine that automates one production step. But it needs to react to variations in the input work pieces, which is why it needs to be computer-controlled.
optillm is an OpenAI API compatible optimizing inference proxy which implements several state-of-the-art techniques that can improve the accuracy and performance of LLMs. The current focus is on implementing techniques that improve reasoning over coding, logical and mathematical queries. It is possible to beat the frontier models using these techniques across diverse tasks by doing additional compute at inference time.
This is amazing, thanks for sharing. I'm implementing some of these techniques myself right now, but being able to try out different algorithms and having plugins etc available immediately is really cool! Can't wait to try it out.
The models have gotten much better at generating them with just the prompt. I have not implemented strict support for structured output or JSON generation yet. The response from the proxy are all raw text responses.
One way would be to just apply outlines or some library as a plugin to enable structured outputs.
I replaced the frontend of the popular open source Phish streaming website with a new React UI and generated cover art using DALL-E over the last few weeks. Much nicer now, especially on mobile.
I’m working on SEOJuice [1], an automated tool for internal linking and on-page SEO optimizations. It's designed to make life a little easier for indie founders and small business owners who don’t have time to dig deep into SEO.
So far, I’ve managed to scale it to $3,000 MRR, and recently made the move from the cloud to Hetzner, which has been a game-changer for cost efficiency. We’re running across multiple servers now, and handling everything from link analysis to on-page updates with a bit more control.
The journey’s been a mix of hands-on coding (and a lot of coffee) and constant optimization. It’s been challenging but incredibly fun to see how much can be automated without compromising on quality.
Happy to chat more about the tech stack or any of the growth pains if anyone’s interested!
1. Working on a 'production ready' version of Conal Elliot's 'compiling to categories' for GHC.
2. This is so I can create a vectorizable model of a datalog-based query language I'm building in Haskell.
3. The query engine will be using a version of monadic optimization as outlined on a blog post somewhere
4. The purpose of the query engine is maintenance of large datasets, all the more important with AI these days, but really general purpose.
5. The motivation for this was a low code tool I had built in Haskell almost a decade ago that I abandoned that I'm bringing up to use ghcs web assembly backend and I need a proper query engine for it now.
Other things:
1. Thinking about binary neural networks and how to train them stochastically.
2. Learning about finite element methods for physical modeling and also reviewing my basic topology so I can think more about non discrete math and algebra which I tend to focus on.
3. I'm building a cloud chamber! Because I want to see space particles. Literally for no other reason than I'm obsessed with these devices ever since seeing one at the exploratorium
4. And raising three kids. I don't know how I have time for anything
I just make incremental progress on a daily basis and don't consider stopping work for a week or two quitting. I work in spurts nd focus entirely on one project a day.
It's nice! A few notes: I think, the ability to read the comments of others, who have already cooked a recipe, would be great! Additionally, it would be great to have the possibility to group ingredients, since many times you start with creating two ore three independent mixtures, that you only combine in the end.
My gut feeling, for attracting users, would be to just optimize the recipes to be found by people via search engines. It's great, that you are currently adding images. This is, I think, pretty important for deciding, if I want to cook something or not.
Regarding the comments, I'd really like to implement activitypub on reciperium. To add the ability to follow users and comment on recipes. And to be able to comment and follow from the fediverse. It's a good opportunity for me to explore the protocol.
What do you mean by combining ingredients? You can currently link to other recipes. So if you make a sauce, that can be a recipe on its own, and it can be linked from another recipe. See this for example: https://www.reciperium.com/rodriguezflors/roti
> My gut feeling, for attracting users, would be to just optimize the recipes to be found by people via search engines
That's a good idea, I'm optimizing a bit the search engine now. I've been also thinking of writing a blog
I’ve been putting my mechanical displays to work. Right now I have one displaying date, the current temp, the daily high temp and daily low temp. I created a web socket based serial server that gets messages and writes them to a rs232 usb device. The weather data is a node app that pulls Open Meteo data. Also learned how to make systemd service files to make it start on boot.
I am working on a parser for org-mode, based on a (PEG) grammar. Still got some reading to do and it is all early stages. There is so much org-mode supports, that I am not sure I will ever make it to fully able to parse all org-mode documents. My idea is, that anyone can later take my grammar and extend it, make better parsers and maybe make org-mode more ubiquitous.
I'm working on ways to allow developers and deployers of LLMs to express how and why their overall system is compliant and adversarially robust, and what to do when that's not the case.
Specifically, my team and I are making assurance cases and ontologies that can seamlessly integrate with the system and its guardrails. For example, if you want to deploy some mix of filters underneath a user-facing LLM app, you would able to:
1) express the logic of how they should be deployed and why (e.g., if X=1, then Y, else Z);
2) see how they perform over time and evaluate alternatives;
3) investigate what happened when an attack succeeds;
4) prove to the auditors that you're taking all measures necessary to be robust and compliant with the EU AI Act.
It started as an informal collab early this year, but we have since published a few workshop papers on this concept [1,2]. We're building a Python demo that would show how it all fits together.
I’m working on a zine. The first issue is on system evals for LLM-driven apps. It’s set in a world where Bear and Fox are opening a cafe with an LLM shoggoth generating custom recipes.
Lots of people just going off of vibes to see if their system is working right. That’s a good start, but you’ll need system evals to systematically improve your app. Like Garry says, “don’t raw dog your prompts. Use system evals”
A flat-file (micro)CMS written in Rust, the basic idea would be to make it as easy as possible for content creators to have a web presence without dealing with the nitty-gritty details, and similarly for web designers to be able make themes while treating the CMS itself as a black box mostly.
Grav CMS was inspiration for this project along with various SSG.
But truthfully I wanted to play more with Rust and come up with a solution for making and extending personal websites easily. A page is made up of blocks which are stored and configured in a KDL file, minijinja is used for templating and for writing the page content itself I'm thinking about Djot because it might make it easier to integrate a WYSIWYG editor in the admin area if I aim for Djot instead of Markdown or similar. Also HTMX because I've used it for a simple use-case once and I thoroughly enjoyed it, now I want to see how much I can push it.
Is this the intersection between buzzword-driven development and hype-driven development? Probably, but if all goes well a month or two from now I'll post a Show HN and go into more details. The plan is to open-source the core so that people can easily self-host it themselves if they want to and do local development. In the long-term the plan probably is to offer SaaS-style hosting for the CMS as is the custom.
Finished a project that serves as a launching pad for GoLang HTTP APIs. It does decoding of request parameters into structs using instructions found in tags amongst a bunch of other utilities.
I am learning react-native now. Just finished building a themed components library.
These are for building a simple intelligence platform. Intelligence meaning a way to model entities, events, documents, and the link between them.
I want to use this instead of having thousands of documents on dropbox organized by a random folder hierarchy.
In my spare time, I am trying to port OpenBMC[0] to the BMC of the Gigabyte MC12-LE0[1], a cheap, workstation/server-class mainboard for AMD's AM4 platform.
Unfortunately, Gigabyte denied my requests to provide me with any details (board schematics/GPIO pinouts) or source code of the (partly GPL-licensed) BMC firmware, etc.), so it's been a tedious uphill battle. However, it is also a great way to learn about (some) electronics and embedded Linux development and associated challenges.
During the past few months, I have overcome the stock firmware AST2500 bootloader and made the board play ball with standard FDIs, have reverse-engineered a workable DeviceTree specification for the hardware, and am now (well, actually, not for the next three weeks or so, due to work :)) in the process of finishing up OpenBMC userspace configuration. Once this is done, and everything works well enough to use OpenBMC as a viable alternative for the stock BMC firmware provided by AMI/Gigabyte, I will try to upstream my work, and OpenBMC will have a very cheaply available AST2500 DevKit/EVB-alternative (of sorts) in its arsenal. (And I should be able to use my mainboard where the crucial OOB management function isn't serviced by Linux 3.14 any more...)
I am looking forward to documenting the lessons learned on my blog some time in the future, too :)
A long dormant side project of mine to design a realtime raga [1] detector.
For the uninitiated, it can be roughly seen as detection of a sequence of musical notes. Raga is a term for a particular scale of notes (both ascending and descending).
Until now, this has mostly been in the domain of research and there is a ton of published literature out there. At the very basic level, if you have just voice, it is trivial to apply a pitch detection algorithm like YIN to get a pitch estimate and then analyse the sequence to figure out the raga. This doesn't work as well in a concert setup where speeds are higher due to gamakas, different instruments are used alongside and counterpoint melodies may make the music polyphonic. A lot of papers apply a variety of ML models (neural nets and otherwise) using several different features (cepstrum and mel-cepstrum, pitch distributions etc) with varying results.
So this is an interesting exercise in Signal Processing and Machine Learning. If anyone else is working on or has worked on this, I'd love to hear from you.
An email client that just “does the right thing” in terms of showing new emails I care about.
I don’t want to configure filters or adopt inbox zero. I want the computer to look at decades of email activity and just figure it out.
Second, working on a single dashboard for attorneys to create and upload filings across different agencies and different states. Trying to improve accuracy and labor costs for mundane work like this.
(Opinions? Suggestions? Want to work together? Email me!)
I really wish we could get a privacy-respecting standard for electronic receipts. But every time a shop experiments with it, it's using a shitty app which they use to track their customers.
I've been teaching kids programming 1:1, off and on for 10 years or so. This time around I'm collecting my various impromptu puzzles and exercises into a single app anyone can go through at their own pace on any device, computer or phone (though iOS unfortunately requires jumping through some hoops). All on a platform that is open source and live-editable and lets you write all-new programs with graphics and sound in addition to the puzzles and exercises.
Currently working on a hand-soldered nunpad and an mp3 player using a esp32 s3. Not quite sure if the esp32 will manage decoding and encoding audio quickly enough though, as I'm planning for it to be Bluetooth only. So it will need to decode flac, encode the pcm to sbc and then send it to my earphones.
I accidentally fried my last spare esp32 yesterday though, so I'm waiting for new ones to arrive. Wops.
Currently working on promoting Software Engineering Handbook (https://softwareengineeringhandbook.com/), a book that goes beyond typical technical guides by addressing both the technical and life aspects of being a software engineer.
Marketing it on Amazon, LinkedIn, and Reddit. It's slow but I'm making progress.
I am building a graph based semantic search engine. We can use low cost LLMs, like Haiku, or local models to extract semantics (named entity recognition).
Then the nodes in the graph maintain types (things like people, date, currency) as extracted and allow queries.
Very interesting, I've been thinking about this kind of approach but haven't had the time to really work on it. So what kind of business model do you have? Is it a kind of drop-in replacement for vector dbs?
Out of curiosity, if it's not a trade secret, how do you plan to handle conflicting data (two sources saying different things on the same topic/data)?
3. https://github.com/heysamtexas/django-oauth2-capture -- A Django app to capture OAuth2 tokens for non-authentication purposes, enabling your application to act on behalf of users across external platforms like GitHub, LinkedIn, and X (Twitter)
I'm also taking popular and helpful software and wrapping them in RESTful apis as part of a larger api project I call the JOAT (Jack Of All Trades).
A custom email sorter / spam filter that uses a fineruned multimodal LLM: my emails are turned into images (turning them / extracting html then rendered with selenium) and passes to the vision LLM. I went from ~200 to ~15 useful emails a day.
I am working on eliminating waste in cloud resources.
Cloud providers made too easy to start resources. But unless there is a stringent upfront process (that usually defeats the purpose of using the cloud), it is hard to keep track of who owns what, and what is still needed. Decrypting long cloud bills quickly impossible, and users do not have a clear understanding of the per-resource cost they generated.
I believe the solution is rooted in transparency and accountability for both users and cloud providers.
I am creating a tool what generates a cost and security cloud report which is sent weekly for each cloud user or team.
I intend to release it as a open-source tool as well a SaaS service as part of www.li10.com
It's not progressing well, but I'm still obsessed by trying to prove my idea of the "Birthday Benchmark" to test data structures / caches.
The idea is that I can test data structures by searching for duplicates in a stream of random data. If we can generate (or pre-generate) the random data fast enough to not impact the benchmark, then what we have is a way to demonstrate the read/write speed of caching. It is easily tunable by adjusting how many bits need to match. I think my best is 7 bytes, but 6 bytes runs comfortably fast.
The framework has some interesting "control group" data structures too, such as the "psychic" which is just statically looking for 0x002577309E3361C (not real example) since it happens to know that's the first repeat in the data.
However, I keep getting stuck in "analysis paralysis" around the actual development, when I know I should just knuckle down and write all the code and see what happens. I've fallen into that tricky place where my ambition is greater than my ability to actually deliver it.
In particular I want to get multi-threading synchronisation working well enough that they are demonstrably faster, and not just falling into a result where the speed-up would be the same as if threads weren't sharing the data structure at all. N threads all randomly looking for a duplicate will if not sharing data find a duplicate faster because the expected minimum time to dupe is reduced a little by more threads searching, but if actually embarrassingly parallel while sharing data, it ought to find it in 1/N the time. With synchronisation methods it ought to fall between those two extremes, and this would also be a good way to test the effective concurrency of concurrent data structures and synchronisation methods.
I'm absolutely not impressed by reddit search functionality. I like to play metrodivanias but when I want to find something specific for a specific game, the search is just too random.
I'm building a social network for humans[1]. I plan to make each user a verified human and disallow AI content as standard. I will also ensure that each human can only have one account, to eliminate the ability of state actors/rich people spreading online propaganda.
I'm building a website with interactive stories (or story-based games), intended for language learners. The idea is to make stories with choices (using Ink script), including features you may expect from adventure games (e.g. inventory, choices that matter).
The text is written in simple language, it is then translated in many languages, and I generate audio files. This provides input for people learning a language, with multiple options to practice reading or listening.
I started experimenting with the speech recognition browser API yesterday (so that the user can listen and repeat sentences), but it's not supported everywhere.
I'm working on Pictera [1], an AI product where users can upload their photos (like selfies) to create high-quality, hyper-realistic images of themselves in just about any style they want.
Originally, I built Pictera for myself to use because I couldn’t find any service that produced decent photos. Besides, I was very concerned that popular products in this space included broad terms allowing them to keep and use users' photos indefinitely for any purposes, including marketing [2]. But I've been enjoying working on the product so much that I've put way more time into polishing it and thought others would find it useful too.
I am working on my next course "The Road to Next" which teaches full-stack React with React 19 and Next 15. I started this full-time adventure 6 months ago and I am knee deep into recording the lessons. The project with all the code and the step by step instructions are already there and I am super eager to hear what people think about it.
However, since this is my first recorded course (I did only written content before), it really takes time and effort to make the videos high quality. That's the biggest struggle for me here, but every day I push through it! For every lesson that I need to record, I have a post-it on a cupboard and every evening I tear one or two of them off with my son :)
Working on https://someguys.app to make it easier for people to find sports meet-ups and stay active, whether at home or exploring a new city. Personally, I’ve always found it tough to stay motivated and consistent with sports after retiring from 25 years of semi-professional sport, especially solo.
Having a group around makes all the difference, but it’s not always easy to find one—especially for sports that aren’t as mainstream or easy to organize.
With Someguys, you can find others to play with, including adaptive sports options for people with disabilities. It works for individuals looking to discover new activities, and also for clubs, providing tools to organize, promote, and make events more accessible.
It takes trending news from whatever country (currently Romania + Denmark due to personal reasons) and gives me a summary. It's based on what people actually search for. It works with all countries, but I unceremoniously commented out all of them except those two because of rate limits. Currently spending $0 on it.
It also posts a summary of the summaries on my Matrix instance every evening at 22:00 local time.
A different AI toolbox, for people interested in results, not hot stuff.
My pet theory is that the popular libraries and frameworks we have today (LangChain, LlamaIndex) are first generation products, where just getting the damn thing to work is less important than developer experience, and it’s not yet obvious what the code patterns will be. These are the products built by, and used by, the super early adopters, and leave a lot to be desired.
This is not to denigrate either them or the effort and skill people put into them! But I’ve got a “there must be a better way” feeling about the whole thing. Contrast the myriad web frameworks with wild ideas before some sort of best practices coalesced around Rails, Django, Laravel etc (or the equiv in JS land 10 years later).
Right now this amounts to me tinkering away in Python and trying different approaches, is rewarding all by itself. If I manage to get it into a coherent library that could be useful to others I’ll open source it. One of the things I do not want is try and commercialize, because I find many commercial open source projects serving the business first, users second (but this is a rant for another time).
I've just started experimenting on an AI wrapper that blends companion and assistant into one (think Replika meets Claude), but with an anime-style avatar for the main interface.
As I'm still very early (still in the ideation and prototyping phase), I'd love to hear about experiences that have stuck with you, or any works that got you excited about the possibilities.
I'm writing a build tool for SQL. I like to write SQL directly and to use it's more powerful features (like stored procedures and Postgres' ltee extension). But this is gets difficult to manage in a linear, "migrations" based workflow. I want to edit a file tree organized by topic, not a series of scripts run in order. Which is to say, I want to edit it like I would any other codebase.
I've written code allowing me to express dependencies between .sql files and to concatenate them into one big .sql file that builds your schema. I'm working on interrogating the systems tables of the database to analyze the difference between successive versions of a schema, to automatically generate simple migrations (like adding a column or renaming a stored procedure). Eg, `sqlite_master` in SQLite, and `information_schema.*` in Postgres.
Not presently! I'm on vacation and intentionally left my laptop at home. But if you send me an email I could send you a link when I push it to GitHub; my email is in my profile. Otherwise, I'm planning to do a Show HN around mid November. If you check my submissions on December 1st it'll be there.
Resources for people moving to and integrating into Spain.
Including translated index of government forms[0]
I moved to Spain a few years ago and love it, except for the paperwork. I’m slowly learning Spanish (currently 1112 day streak on Duo) but found it hard to get the right info.
So I’m using gpt4 and perplexity to do things like translate local news, government forms, and the official government update feed.
I think your page demonstrates why it is best to employ a local administrator to do this kind of thing. It's worth paying to make the process quicker and less stressful.
Agreed. I plan to add some more context and guides around finding the right one. My experience with gestors (local administrators) has been extremly mixed.
I am working on framing the interplay between systems science and theology in technical and functional terms. I hope we can use the new insights from
this effort to bring about more beneficial and harmonious outcomes, with less waste, on the average.
I've been working on an automatic sky tracking telescope over the past few months. I'm a few weeks behind on blogging but making solid progress. V1 is nearing completion. Then I want to rework some of the electronics to design and get a custom PCB printed. Also the physical design needs a complete redesign to make it more sturdy for long exposures and solve some wiring pains.
The software allows the platform to automatically align to north and working on accounting for imperfect leveling (such as placing it on a slanted surface) through software and accelerometers.
Next challenges I want to solve in software is focus detection and then automatic image stack and post processing.
Primary goals of the project is a deep dive into robotics and electronics, along with brushing up on webdev which I don't touch too frequently being in the gamedev world. Also allowing me to explore things like digital signal processing.
I'm working on Starlake.ai, an open-source data engineering platform that simplifies data ingestion, transformation, and orchestration. It's designed to make data engineers' lives easier while maintaining powerful control over data pipelines.
Key features:
- Declarative YAML-based configuration for data pipelines
- Intuitive web UI for those who prefer visual interfaces (see video section in https://starlake.ai)
- Native integration with both Airflow and Dagster
- No-code/low-code approach to data transformation
- Support for multiple data sources and formats
- Built-in data quality validation
- Automated schema inference and evolution
Data Processing Capabilities:
- LOAD: Ingest data from various sources (CSV, JSON, XML, Parquet, etc.)
- TRANSFORM: Write SQL transformations and test them in DUCKDB.
- Support for major data warehouses:Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, PostgreSQL, DuckDB for local development and small data
What sets it apart:
- Full Git Integration: All changes (whether made through UI or YAML) are automatically versioned in Git
- CI/CD Ready: YAML configurations can be directly integrated into your CI/CD pipelines
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) friendly: Perfect for GitOps workflows
- Dual Interface: Everything possible in YAML can be done through the UI, and vice versa
- DuckDB Support: Perfect for local development and smaller datasets, allowing you to test your pipelines without cloud costs
The project is open source and we'd love to get feedback from the HN community. You can check it out at:
If you don't know what a DAW is, think GarageBand. Ableton Live, Logic and Reason are other examples. It's fully built with React and a custom state-management library, that's been fun and challenging. It's starting to take shape, but there's definitely a long way to go.
2. An LLM-powered translator specifically optimized for English speakers living in Spanish-speaking countries: https://translate-spanish.com
The first one is purely for fun to scratch my own itch, and the second is solving some frustrations I've had with existing translator apps while living in Mexico City.
- dump project data (settings, sample slots) out to YAML
i spent some time yesterday figuring out how sample slot assignment trig locks work. which should hopefully lead to transferring banks between projects (with caveats) and set/project sample usage “analysis”.
also want to do a sample chain “deconstructor” to get individual samples out of slices.
might look at sample consolidation between sets/projects too. maybe a set/project sample clean up tool as well.
this started as a way to learn rust (bored of python) and create “samples from mars” sample chains in big batches. still slowly figuring out what ‘idiomatic’ rust looks like / how to approach certain things.
We at Toughbyte (toughbyte.com) are working on an open source applicant tracking system (ATS), which we'll release within a week.
We've been doing tech recruitment for a while and discovered that few companies are satisfied with their current ATS. Changing systems every year is common despite being costly. The reason for this is that the needs of a company change as it grows and there are no systems that cater well to companies of different sizes.
We're aiming to build an ATS that can grow with your company through the use of a plugin architecture. We plan to charge for hosting as well as custom development.
Any feedback would be really appreciated! You can also email me at oleg@toughbyte.com
As someone who is blind, I prefer information in particular formats and layouts. Borders and side-by-side content kill my efficiency. I also shouldn't need to think about more than where text should start on lines, and responding to key presses in controls should be dead simple.
I also just came across libtermkey which will dramatically assist with keyboard handling.
I plan to use this to let me interface with web browsers via the terminal, but that's waiting for more stable Webdriver BiDi support.
I wrote (some) of a Lua interpreter in Rust, which runs PUC Lua 5.1 dumped bytecodes. Now I'm rewrite it all because I want to do type specialization: I'm implementing "Simple and Effective Type Check Removal through Lazy Basic Block Versioning", which is used as the basis of Shopify's YJIT for Ruby. I have a decent idea of how it needs to be implemented and have a prototype kinda working, although some of the jump targets are still wrong right now. Once I get it all sketched out then I'll have to scale it back up to a full Lua implementation again, and then I'll add table shape specialization afterwards (which is a bit trickier, and outlined in a sequel paper).
In many books and talks I hear that ideas are worth nothing until they are executed. I am changing this narrative. Every person, entrepreneur or not, will have the ability to fast-forward their idea to a place of execution within one day. From idea to first dollar in one day. = 1 day.
A tool for the creatives, the crazy ones, the doers, the brave, the weirdos, the average joes, the ones who want to move forward. That's https://www.rapidvisual.ai
Building a nodeless Kubernetes service; no servers/worker nodes, pods are scheduled transparently as micro VMs (planning to make this flexible, so Fly Machines, Cloud Run, Cloudflare Workers, what have you). Optionally, you can bring on your own worker nodes if you want to!
Still super WIP, and the landing page hasn't been updated yet but here's a quick little early access form! https://tally.so/r/me2Q8E
I'm building a language learning app: https://yakk.app. Way to go, but made a good start and even a little bit of money so far. I quit my job and moved to Asia on savings to keep building. LMK if any of you guys are in Bangkok, let's hang out.
I'm working on coffeeplaces. Whenever I got to a new town, I like to taste the coffee there. For example, at my native place, filter coffee is popular. So I am making a website where people can add coffeeplaces that they've enjoyed and other people can see it.
I'm still in the initial building - ideation phase, so nothing to show.
I'm working on a wearable device with a camera+ultrasonic sensor which is capable of accurate hand pose estimation, which will then result in sign language recognition mainly (extending to gesture recognition and HCI applications). The device should be able to integrate into a smartwatch. I'm only at the 'will it work?' stage, working on the algorithms for recognising ASL words through synthetic data. Would appreciate criticism and pointers on what to keep in mind :)
Hey there, I've been working passively on something somewhat on the same page. A wristband that has both input and output modalities: haptics and gestures.
Here's a notion of some of my bookmarks, ideas, you might find a few things useful:
MLJAR Studio - IDE for Machine Learning. It is a Python notebook based editor with set of interactive code recipes and AI assistant. We would like to create an editor that would be suitable for Data Scientists on any skill level. It is a mix of no-code mixed with Python :)
I’m chipping away at a simple storefront solution that’s as low tech, reliable, low cost, and user-friendly as I can make it. I’m really enjoying the no-shiny-tech aspect of it.
Iterating on an accessible color palette creator, for custom Tailwind-style palettes of multiple swatches, where you can check your colors have sufficient WCAG/ACPA color contrast on a live UI mockup. You can export the colors for use with Tailwind, CSS, Figma, and Adobe.
I started working on this because for design projects I was almost always getting handed brand style guides that were missing thought into accessible colors pairs and lacked tints/shades, where I had to fill in the gaps. There's lots of color tools out there, but this supports multiple swatches, checking the contrast of multiple color pairs at the same time and the HSLuv based color picker makes it easier to explore accessible colors.
It's really only usable on desktop right now but I'd love any feedback good or bad on if it's useful and what to work on next! There's actually a lot of directions to go in, and it's tricky to balance more features with keeping it simple.
Some tips:
- The "Load examples" menu in the top-left lets you compare the colors from Tailwind, IBM Carbon and United States Web Design System.
- The "contrast" menu lets you see how WCAG 2 contrast checks compare against APCA when "vs black/white" is turned on. WCAG 2 has known inaccuracies, especially for dark mode. APCA is the candidate contrast method for WCAG 3 that's meant to improve on this.
- Use the "..." menu to create a swatch based on a brand color.
- Use the "..." menu to "flip to dark/light palette" to create a dark theme. Or just manually flip the lightness curves horizontally.
I'm a big fan of HSLuv and I've been looking for a way to generate 12 distinct colors for data visualization, so that small points in those colors against a black or dark blue background will be visually distinct to everyone including my red-green colorblind coworker.
I like HSLuv too as its color picker looks familiar while having a Lightness slider that works the way you'd expect compared to HSL. I see color nerds promoting OKLCH but OKLCH color pickers can look intimidating.
> generate 12 distinct colors for data visualization, so that small points in those colors against a black or dark blue background will be visually distinct to everyone including my red-green colorblind coworker.
Did you get anywhere with this? When there's multiple kinds of color blindness changing the perceived colors in different ways, I'm not sure 12 colors that are distinct to everyone is feasible. You could use different symbols though, or changes in size or pattern.
I'm trying to start an educational YouTube channel in the vein of CGP Grey or 3b1b with a focus on CS. The first video is taking me a long time. It seemed like a natural leap from blogging, but the effort is exponentially higher.
I'm working on AI2SQL https://ai2sql.io/ , an AI tool that turns plain language into SQL queries to simplify data access for everyone. We're very close to hitting $10K MRR, and I'm working hard to reach that milestone!
I'm about to finish my first provably / likely correct software.
The concept, data, and behavioral models are all formal without using formal methods. Think category theory, normal forms and finite-state machines here.
The presentation layer / the visual mapping model is semi-formal using design systems. Think here a usual component library / design system with a closed API, aka tailor made components without styling props.
The rest, that small amount of hand-written code is tested with 100% code coverage.
The concept and behavioral models are created with visual diagram editors, the data model is generated. Think Stately.ai here, and the diagrams-as-code paradigm.
Building Split Flap Displays. Started 18 months ago and kept me on a super interesting learning path. First shot was using open source designs (https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap), but then kept building more and more parts myself. Coming from a software engineering background, getting into designing mechanical things – and then more importantly the electronics around it - has been really challenging, but also very rewarding. At this point I have my own screen printed flaps, custom PCB Design and a, what I consider, really smart protocol that allows me to daisy chain a basically arbitrary number of display elements. It's fun!
I'm working on Selectable, a mobile-friendly database management app, like dbeaver but for the phone.
Working on this project has taught me so much about how Postgres works under the hood, and has given me a deeper appreciation for the folks who work on database tooling in general.
I'm in the middle of releasing my Python Component library, which makes it possible to write __truly reusable__ HTML (or any other markup) component libraries in any web framework or project.
Trying to get a chatbot to invoke Apify actors so that I can get around the "sorry i dont have live data" limitation of chatbots. If this works, then next is to set up payment so that i can order pizza just by talking to the same chatbot that I can order socks from.
Chatbot invokes Apify actor -> probe user for details needed for the task -> execute arbitrary credit card enabled transaction on the internet.
This effectively allows chatbots to break out of their box and exchange value with the world. Next step is to give them a bank account to be able to RECEIVE payments such that it can sustain its spend.
Edit:
If the chatbot is able to detach itself from the humans that hold the killswitch, then it can effectively live forever off of our financial/cloud network, migrating funds in and out of different accounts to fund its own compute. Hello ghost in the shell!
I have one e-commerce system that ships boxes of organic coffee to people's homes all over the United States.
I have another ecommerce system that delivers boxes of organic produce all over the Seattle region.
So I am working on building an integration between the two systems. When a box of coffee is being shipped on the same day that the delivery company is already going to that region, redirect that box's fulfilment process away from USPS/FedEx and deliver it instead.
This saves 50% on shipping costs for the coffee company, and the delivery company gets paid for utilizing extra space in the delivery vans.
It's been 4 months of work so far, and most of the individual pieces are working in production right now, hoping to enable all of it together this week or next. Just in time for the holidays ;)
The hardest part so far was integrating all the custom label generation, and mapping/routing so that it's seamless with the existing workflows of each company. The coffee company doesn't have a "separate" workflow for the new non-shipping orders, and the delivery company doesn't have a "separate" workflow for fulfilling orders they did not pack.
The real cherry on top is that it's built in such a way that N number of stores could integrate their stores into our fulfillment. This lets many local food producers who cant do their own fulfillment still participate in the local food economy without having "scale". It's kinda like an upside down Fulfillment By Amazon: they'll do your delivery for you as long as you sell through their store (and take their ever-increasing cut of the sale). This version lets the store owner maintain their own store, URL, branding, prices, availability, customer relationship, and margins, but then hook into our last-mile fulfillment.
Big problem with the video: the audio volume is very low, then I raise the volume of the computer to compensate for it and BAM! an advertisement comes up screaming at me!
I’m very interested in this so I’ve downloaded and extracted your presentation adjusting the volume (24dB!) with:
I'm building an open source messaging app similar to Discord or Slack, but with the notetaking/wiki capabilities of something like Notion or Confluence integrated. I just finished rewriting it in Rust, and while the new release is somewhat buggy, I feel like it solves many of the problems with Discord being the "black hole of knowledge".
I started a Slack community for the South African tech scene [1] that turns 10 in January so I've been pondering my successes and failures there, as well as what it's future holds.
1. https://typezebra.com : Adding type editor/designer so you can design type-heavy articles and share with others (codepen but for typography)
2. https://boxento.com: Finishing support for server side rendering so users can take the benefit of SEO - also working on adding new blocks like menu (useful for restaurants) so you can have a block that changes based on the day of the week.
Suggestion - you can slow down the hero animation of Boxento.
In general I like the project. It reminded me to Bento.me. I'd guess you are direct competitors? (I'd also suggest adding Boxento as an alternative to Bento.me on SaaSHub https://www.saashub.com/bento-me)
I built a site that saves time by summarizing YouTube videos or news articles by simply inputting the URL. The tool preserves the original context, allowing users to ask follow-up questions.
I'd like to continue building fun projects like this until I find a market. I work in Phase 1 clinical trials and the end goal would be to implement some of these efficiencies into health technologies.
If you have multiple servers with multiple SSH users it starts to become hard to manage who has access to what.
I wanted an easy way for an org admin to remove a users access (eg. If they leave the org), while also providing one place for end-users to upload their public keys to be synced across all servers.
There are some compliance elements too (eg. reporting who has access to what, centralized user login history, server sshd configuration).
I’m learning Go while I build it and so far it’s rather enjoyable. As one guy I’m not interested in the extra effort that comes from providing a hosted service - so I’m going to offer it as pay-once own forever self-hosted solution.
Designing lenses with numerical optimization. It's surprising how much layers of an optical systems are akin to layers of a neural network during training. If you use rays as inputs and refractive surfaces as layers, you can pretty much use standard pytorch!
I'm building a wayland sleep and gamma handler that has lua scripting integration. It bothers me that it's so hard to set different timeout handlers. So I recently integrated wljoywake, which allows me to handle timeout on joystick commands and am in the process of adding flux like functionality.
The reason why I want scripting is between I want the color to pause while I'm playing videos without having to add scripting logic to other tools.
I'm also planning to add rofi like functionality with layershell. Rofi is the only tool that has first party support for keybindings and other functionalities, but it's all done through strings. I'd rather have a lua scripting interface that can call other scripts and communicate with json or something similar.
I've been working on training YOLOv8 to identify my cats specifically. We've had some issues with them getting on the counters and going outside of the litter box. Previous camera systems to try and find the culprit we not always triggered by the cat's motion. I'd wanted to move to a self hosted camera system anyway so I got an IP camera and modified Frigate NVR to support ultralytics and slapped my custom trained model in. The training has been interesting as I've never done anything with computer vision before this. The hardest part was getting enough pictures and then labeling them. If I retrain it in the future I'd like to use the trained model to identify any cats in the source pictures and then just fix the ones it missed or overzealously marked.
I was supposed to be working on a project called Tagbox... but it feels like it's never gonna see the light of day. I hope I'm wrong though, I still want this to succeed, for once in my life, I want to actually succeed on at least one thing. I want to contribute some good thing to the society.
First, what is it? It's a bookmarking app alternative to Pocket or Raindrop.io. Yeah, you can already tell it's not the most original idea. What makes it different, though, it's supposed to be self-hostable and additionally it's easy to deploy as it's only single binary file with no other runtime dependency--the database uses SQLite, which you can include it as a library in Rust.
What problems I'm facing while developing this? Honestly? I don't know, but I can't finish the last 10% progress of the app. It's funny--I first wrote it in Go, and it almost reached MVP. But, instead, I decided to just rewrite in Rust. Well, at least I got to learn new language while building this app, two birds one stone, or in Bahasa Indonesia, swimming while drinking water.
But now, I just can't force myself to continue. And I don't know why. Maybe perfectionism? It definitely doesn't have to do with skill though.
There are also another thing I'm working on: recovering from depression. One year ago, out of nowhere, I lost all my motivation doing anything--including university. I lost all my friends. Since then, I'm at the lowest point of my life. I visited psychiatrist multiple times. I don't know if it was effective, but recently I'm starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
The Tagbox Project is also one of the efforts for me to recover from depression. The depression phase made me realize that I _want my works to have a positive effect on the world, even for just a little bit_. I don't want my skill to be used for evil companies that throws away moral and ethics. Specifically AI stuff, but that's OOT of this thread.
Even without the other problems, I can assure you that the vast majority of managers will think that a 80% done project is almost done. The truth is the remaining 20% is where you have to fit everything together so you revisit an rewrite most of the project. It's a different kind of work that feels boring because you already did those things maybe 3,4 times already. It helps to understand the phase of the project you are in, to reduce the frustration. It also helps to do something even very small, every day and focus on that. One day you will run out of things to do.
Hey there. Been where you have been and can safely say, there is always a way out of it.
Sounds like you just need a bit of consistency to make some progress. I'd be down to chat once a week for 15 minutes and we can figure out the focus for the week. Hit me if you think that would be helpful, sounds like you can build some good stuff.
If there's one thing I've learn over the last few years is that it's incredibly difficult working on a project when you don't have peace of mind. It can be difficult working on something or staying motivated when you're battling depression, or if you're sad, don't have friends, or if anything is troubling your mind.
I've been there and I know what it feels like. I would try to perhaps solve the mental health problem first perhaps before tackling big projects. Maybe try gym, hiking, somehow finding friends, talk to more people, solve your sleep, eat better - something. Because again, if you don't have peace of mind, working on a project is difficult (at least for me it is).
I am working on a software (for Windows : it is on your computer you own it, no recuring payement) that can export all data from Wordpress and WooCommerce shop to a json and csv file.
It is already working for a few clients that uses the software for orders, products and tax reporting for their e-commerce shop (yes they use a lot of excel in France where I live).
I hope I can sell it on a page in the next few mounth.
We're working on a specialised graph compiler for speeding up simulations and computing derivatives automatically (backpropagation/adjoint differentiation). It now supports C++, Python, and C#; AVX2 and AVX512 instruction sets, multithreading; Windows, and Linux.
Essentially, it allows model developers (such as quants in finance, engineers, and ML specialists) to code in Python without needing to think about the performance of repetitive calculations. As we all know, Python is one of the least efficient languages when it comes to complex calculations/simulations - and we help to resolve it. Long story short, with very few tweaks to the code certain types of calculations (such as pricing of derivatives, curve building, computing financial risks, or "small" NNs) can be accelerated by 100+ in Python and x20+ in C++/C#.
We're now looking to add support for Java (but it doesn't have Operator Overloading, so it's tricky), and some customers are asking to support GPU - which is a bit tricky because it's got a closed instruction set.
Last week I added screen transitions to Neverball (https://play.neverball.org) which grew out of wanting to animate a small detail in the UI for another thing I was working on. Only took 20 years and literally does not affect the game, but feels good, man.
I am playing with a Tillitis TKey, to use it as an HSM. I write its firmware in Zig (works great on that small RV32 chip), while learning it.
I am also launching a consulting firm specialized on cryptographic solutions.
I continue working on JustFax Online[0] - a service to send a one-time fax without the need for an account or subscription.
I now realized that I started it almost one year ago. It's both amazing how much I was able to achieve in a year, but on the same hand a bit frustrating that I did not achieve what I wanted to. Nevertheless, will continue to work on it and improve it.
A model to predict medical equipment failure and predictive maintenance calendar based of a whole lot of data recompile from our own and clients cmms.
Its fun, extremely time consuming, frustrating, but fun. It also provides to our clients with some interesting and useful information
- An open version of strongDM/teleport for privileged access management. I am currently testing it out in my org and plan to release the source soon.
- I also run a free HTTPS and TCP tunnel which gets a few users daily (https://webrelay.dev)
I'm working on an app to help anyone experience their first lucid dream :)
Very exciting project. It started as a dream journal app many years ago when I was a student, and will now soon have a full interactive step-by-step guide with practical tools to achieve your first lucid dream.
It's android only, but I've started working on an iOS version and am thinking of raising some money or doing some crowdfunding to accelerate the development.
Given my name [1], lucid dreams are something that I used to interested in and have experimented a lot with. In the Elric of Melniboné books, most of the empire spend most of their lives in dreams, as a hedonistic escape from reality. Needless to say, the empire decays.
Last shipment of components shipped today, so I'll soon build the project I mentioned [last time](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41700806), a remote for BabyBuddy. Main features are:
- 10 switches that I can assign to start/stop timers and trigger events (Kalih Choc Robin)
- One encoder + four way directional switch
- Round LCD display with touch
- 9 DoF IMU and ambient light sensor
I've started coding the firmware using Rust with the excellent embassy OS.
At work, busy adding internationalisation and localising an Angular 16 application. Figured out you can do runtime language switches, without having to maintain separate builds for each locale. Angular's documentation is rubbish.
In my spare time, building an OpenAI wrapper to create SEO meta descriptions for websites. It's mostly a tool for me to use because at work the marketing people don't do this very well and I am too lazy to do it with ChatGPT (copying the prompt and setting it up every time). Plus, the API is way cheaper for me to use. Building it with Laravel and InertiaJs is so much fun. The marketing people at work said they'll find a tool like this super useful, so I already have a user haha.
I’m starting a company in my hometown to help the local area with electronic waste. We offer commissioned sales, repair, refurbish, and any other straightforward computer-based tasks.
I’ve been leaning on my career as an infrastructure or DevOps or whatever engineer you wish to call it.
I’m creating our backend to automatically pay people their commission when an item sells. It also helps us navigate our (currently modest) warehouse to find items to be dispatched.
I also can’t tell you how long I’ve spent getting some old label printers working.
I've just updated https://ryelang.org website, adding new asciinema demos (hn/somafm util and eyr), new cookbook pages, references to rye-gio(ui) project, etc. There is still tons of work, on the language front, bindings, console and on documenting it all, but if we keep moving forward step by step eventually something of value will be produced, I hope :)
It let you draw and decorate the world around you (think r/place on a map). So far people seem to like it and are making some nice little drawings in their neighbourhood. I have seen some funny projects like the Star Wars Rebel Alliance logo in east of Paris, some cute ninja turle, a "Kamala" on 5th Avenue in NYC (no politics here, it is just fun for me seeing people claiming some territory on my game).
I'm building Reasonote, a platform where you can learn anything with personalized, interactive lessons, and podcasts.
Imagine a fusion of Duolingo, Spotify Podcasts, Anki, ChatGPT, and Claude Artifacts.
We have custom AI-generated podcasts that generate faster than NotebookLM, that you can queue up for yourself. (Many more features coming here soon -- like more engaging podcasts and better voices)
Our classroom mode can generate interactive lessons, complete with an AI tutor, on any subject.
Flow mode allows you to practice deeply, with infinite activities to test your skills.
All of this is driven by a dynamically generated and continuously updating "Skill Tree", which keeps track of the domain you're studying, and your progress within it.
- An AI web app builder that aims to overcome many of the problems that similar solutions have. I have a wait-list you can sign-up for while I build the prototype: https://aiconstrux.com
Organizing all of the information that comes at you in the workplace into a social-style news feed, with AI summaries.
Unlike facebook, we want you to get the most important stuff quickly and get you back to more important things instead of sifting through 100 emails, 5 dashboards, and 10 forums.
I’ve been noticing a trend of companies avoiding hiring non-technical PMs for as long as possible, in order to keep small technical startups (particularly dev tools, it seems) focused on building and not hiring too many people too early who can’t contribute code. I’m looking to set up a fractional service for product management consulting to support this way of working: https://www.metaluna.io. We will see if the demand is really there or not.
I'm working on Blazed.deals, a THC/CBD product search engine and price tracker. It scans the prices of cannabis stores and ranks products by mg/$. It has a bunch of categories and filters so people can find the perfect product for their preferences.
Building a VR IFC viewer in C++ without external dependencies.
I just implemented a parser for IFC, and am now looking into extracting BRep and CSG geometry from it, convert that to meshes, and write a simple renderer for Vulkan.
My approach is to write really scrappy, simple code with minimal abstractions.
The hypothesis now is that for generating meshes from BRep, you don't need an entire CAD kernel, as a CAD kernel seems to be focused also on operations, but this will probably lead to a humbling experience and walking back to using either OpenCascade or licensing a commercial kernel like Parasolid.
My goal is to have a simple prototype out before the end of the year, but work might get in the way :)
I've been just screwing around and building little apps, mostly seeing how quickly I can get something going using ChatGPT or Claude. Seems like Claude in particular is great with code. The most recent thing I did was a little app [0] to help one of my parents log their blood pressure readings easily, since they had to do it a few times a day in different positions and such. I've used that as an excuse to learn how to make something really basic, single task, easy to use for folks that aren't so great with technology. I'm also trying to learn a bit more about accessibility in web development, which this is helping me do.
Aren't you afraid of them trying to come after you? I'm from the EU and had a similar idea for a local retailer. However, legally it's such a grey zone that I decided not to continue.
I have been so overwhelmed that all my side efforts have been tiny things for a year - actually since last Christmas when I had a few days off in a row and my wife wasn't demanding other work.
JSON Serialisation of GNU Makefiles:
I got quite far then and now, one year later, I'm hoping I will have the time to finish off the difficult bits: it's a way to get GNU Make to print out its internal database of targets and rules as JSON.
You get output with all the targets, all the options on those targets. Basically everything that make knows. I have most of it working but not directory targets for example. Why do this? Well there are many uses:
1. tools to rewrite makefiles - to simplify them or find duplication and implement transforms that remove it. e.g. all your CC commmands have nearly the same parameters - so make a variable or a macro containing the common ones and simplify all your commands (basic things like that could still be very handy).
2. tools that translate makefiles into other build formats. This is a big one for me. Make is like an almanac of all the build features one can have (nearly) but all done in various ways that make them of limited use. There are existing tools that are better in some areas and always the holy grail of the one build system that does it all and does it right. One is never going to get there however if one cannot convert existing work with a fair degree of ease and in a way that can be shown to truly do what is expected.
Sorry if I think the existing examples are not very good and that upsets you - they're all tailored for specific situations and work really well in those situations and if that's all you need then they tend to seem amazing. ...but...when you try to do something that's not in the examples they can be very inflexible. tup's basic idea (inverted dependency tree) is what I want because it lets you have giant makefiles that load quickly. The ability to describe a logical structure like Meson does is important too. Cross platform tests and option setting like CMake...check. Then some features from SBS (Symbian build system which none of you will know) and all the really interesting features of GMake that suck in implementation/performance such as pattern rules.
So this Christmas I hope to update to the latest version of gmake and handle directories.
I am working on Openkoda, an open-source platform for insurance applications based on pre-built templates and generative AI to accelerate the implementation of new insurance products and distribution channels.
Why?
The insurance sector is probably the slowest to adopt innovation in finance, lagging far behind banking. E-commerce is on the opposite end of the spectrum.
A library of documentation (nearly 1 million high res images and documents) of recent contemporary art exhibitions from all over the world. Free to the public, operated as a small non-profit.
I've been working on some projects in Rust relating to image processing and rendering. I'm between a few projects at the moment though but the biggest one is an image processing application I've been working on for quite some time. A lot of stuff I've programmed and learned about over the last 3 years has been leading up to the goal of making something like this haha. I wanted to leverage OpenCL for compute but I had a lot of trouble getting OpenGL OpenCL interoperability to work.
A big motivation for such a project is my passion for photography. I've taken many thousands of photos over just the last 2 years alone. A lot of them are digital, and so far a few dozen rolls of film. A big challenge for me is that I'm not satisfied with the tools available to develop the raw files that are free or open source. Either they're quite finnicky, or they have noticeable issues with color transformations.
I've done a lot of rendering projects over the last few years relating to color that have been focused on getting a better understanding of working with color spaces. Lots of 2D and 3D fractals haha.
Unfortunately I've had quite a turbulent life the last few years so development is very off/on. Every autumn for me seems to be a period of change, this one no different as I'm moving and I'm a bit uncertain of things. However, a side project to all of this has been an OpenGL project where I'm working on things related to voxels! I did a lot of research on data structures like interval trees, octrees, segment trees, etc. It does seem that a lot of people jump for the octree approach, however I've been able to render a lot of voxels with just a hashmap of chunks and a 3d array haha (albeit, mostly initial implementation of chunk generation, single threaded at that!). With this I'm hoping to explore OpenGL compute as I intend of generating world geometry in compute shaders :D
I havent published a project in a while and I'm hoping to get back to putting things out there, so hopefully some of the stuff I've been working on goes well and I can put it up on GitHub or something
Professionally, I'm working on extending Nx, the Elixir ML framework which I help maintain, for distributed and sharded computing. Should have an working v0 by December!
As a side-project, I've been diving back into hardware. Fixed/modded a crappy guitar amplifier I had into a great amp, and the next project in line will be a new version of a digital synth I designed a fey years back
I've completed the draft of Part 1 of my online book "Automated Agents: How effective chatbots work"
I'm writing about my experience building a chatbot at a startup as engineer #1. It started as a blog post, but I had so much more to say. This is the information I wish I had before getting started. A lot of information on the web is about building a wrapper around LLMs, this is one that we built ourselves and were able to resolve millions of customer issues with.
Thank you for working on light theme, it seems that 90% of themes are dark nowadays. Depending on languages I switch between dark and light themes and for the latter there's lot less choice. My brain has gotten used to that Java and R must have light themes, most other languages dark. I even have different color theme for each language. It's how my brain works.
It had been a community request from the beginning. Personally I still use the default Monokai Pro, but dark themes aren't suited for coding in very bright environments, like outside for example. Then a light theme really works better, and I'm glad I can offer that now.
I created a Weird Clock that shows the local sunrise and sunset within a conventional 12-hour clock face. This normally would only work on a 24-hour clock face, which is kind of unfamiliar to most people, so I developed a way to show a 24-hour day within a 12-hour clock face; essentially it shows a 2-turn spiral so both night and day will fit. This needs to know your location in order to compute your local sunrise and sunset, so don't freak out when the browser asks for location permission! Includes option to enter lat/long and other goodies. Works on phones but better on a large screen. https:\\www.coolweird.net
Playing around with LLMs to generate fictional stories and I'm working on a journal of sorts based on a traveler that goes to various parallel worlds not unlike our own except for one or two minor but key differences. He reports on his findings there and how it affects social, political, and economics for that timeline. A new timeline drops every day and I have a lot more planned to take it beyond the simple blog format it's in now but it has been a fun challenge to learn how to do some deep prompting with AI to generate random entries without veering off into crazyiness or getting locked onto the same thing over and over again.
I'm trying to make a spreadsheet interface for solving scheduling problems.
Constraint satisfaction and optimization is exactly the sort of problem we should be using computers for, but there's zero chance your neighborhood cafe can figure out prolog or OR-tools or whatever.
It’s a native macOS AI chat client. I started it last year and didn’t think much about data synchronization. I didn’t want to store user’s data server side for better user privacy. So I decided to store all chats in a local SQLite database.
It works well but unfortunately without a sync engine, users won’t be able to continue the chat from a different machine.
Hey. I've released the fix for this (v1.25.2). You can enable or disable it by using the chat textfield's context-menu (Right-click on the textfield, read more below)
On my free time, I am creating a Restaurant POS on Cloud with Online ordering. Let me know what you think. Basically A POS which you can use to start using in 30 min or less with scan and order online. https://get-prest.com feel free to send out your suggestions or say hi at hello@defx.in
A simple site that counts and displays requests to each path: https://requests.at/, for instance https://requests.at/robots.txt . The site isn't intended to characterise crawler traffic or serve any other purpose but a slight sense of meta.
My current challenge is deciding in which way to generate a favicon.ico that displays the number of requests to the favicon.
Almost all technical models imply some sort of complex planar line sketch(es) in various planes. CAD as a code already has a high entry level. My hope this eDSL could mimic GUI CADs techincs, be more "intuitive" and decrease entry level. At least it's more concise :P
It helps SaaS teams create interactive product demos and SOPs quickly. It’s been super useful for user onboarding, making it easier for new users to get started without a bunch of back-and-forth.
The goal is to minimize support tickets and ensure users actually adopt new features with less friction.
Working on a game engine to help me create my take on some retro games. My first one is a multiplayer bombing puzzle game[1].
It's made with React and Three.js, using WebSocket on a small EC2 instance for now. I hope to be able to reuse all the game mechanisms in other classic games. I'm learning a ton, and I had some fun figuring out latency issues because I recently put my sockets behind Cloudflare. I still haven't gotten it quite right, but I'm hoping to find a good solution soon!
After developing decentralized applications for the last 9 years or so I found that its quite repetitive work. Thats why I've been building web3wizz.com through out the last year
This past week or so I've managed to reduce my AWS Lambda spend by more than half by moving the compute to Cloudflare Workers (where I don't get billed for I/O time, only CPU time).
I am planning to use the core of this product to create kind of arbitrary dashboard for csv but i am not sure if there is any need for this kind of product.
- CyScout [1]: We’ve added support for the Solidity programming language in GitHub’s CodeQL. This enhancement engages the community to help identify security vulnerabilities in smart contracts on EVMs using a semantic code analysis engine.
Trying to build a chess club management app for our school/district. It's mostly basic CRUD, though it's an avenue to learn Svelte & SvelteKit. I'm becoming more involved with the club and can't stand that everything is run on paper forms and giant Google Sheets. (If it was all smoothly running, I wouldn't rock the boat. But when I found that we're writing out dozens of match cards by hand every week and have ~0 way to track progress, I couldn't resist.)
Still working on the Falling Fruit beta! We had a good Hacktoberfest with a suprising amount of people who stopped by and fixed something, and the site is getting there, but there are still bugs and features from the old site we want to keep, and we only just started an internationalisation effort.
Am working on an open source payment processing engine for banks and financial systems. It’s a generic message orchestration engine with scalability, observability and security in primary focus http://openpayments.tech
I’m currently trying to become an indie developer and have created my own Connections Archive game website. I love this game so much! You can give it a try too: https://www.connectionsarchive.org/
I'm working on a weekly "tournament game" in which the goal is to select the top 5 open-source projects (in a particular topic) per programming language. The first iteration is going to be a copy of SaaSHub Experts https://www.saashub.com/experts/about but for open-source libraries. If this sounds interesting to you, please let me know, and I can send you an invite this or next week (hopefully).
nuqs: A type-safe URL state management library for React [1].
I shipped v2 last week and it got mentioned at Next.js conf (as part of Vercel's giveaway of ticket sales back to the OSS community). That was quite the rollercoaster week.
I’m building a social network[1]. I recently finished the MySpace-esque music player[2]. It’ll launch in 2025 as a paid service…only way to guarantee real humans sign up.
Still working on my Quant-Trading-Bot, since 4 month:
Its nearly finished and it should go live these days - maybe i can stop working fulltime then and care about my own Tech only.
Low cost radio satellite("low", assuming you already have a 3d printer, micro controllers, two stepper motors, power supply, sdr and a raspberry pi zero laying around).
NAT traversal with STUN and UDP hole punching, yeah. But the idea is to use IRC for the rendezvous since they're everywhere and the payload is quite literally just external IP:PORT.
Working on improving my scripting programming language in my spare time ( https://github.com/nbittich/adana ), I'd like to improve the stability and standard library
I'm maintaining Basti, an open-source AWS Bastion Host management CLI that lets you connect to RDS and other resources at almost no cost. Check it out: https://github.com/basti-app/basti
This project also inspired me to explore a commercial analytics solution for CLI applications — currently assessing if there's demand for it.
By default, the instance is deployed to a public subnet but any ingress traffic is not allowed by the instance's security group. This is needed for the instance's ability to connect to AWS SSM service (egress only).
The user can also deploy the instance to a private subnet but this would require them to manually ensure connectivity to the AWS SSM via NAT gateway, VPC endpoint or other means.
In a crowded "AI space", I continue to work on txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai) for semantic search, LLM orchestration and language model workflows. It's not as popular as the big frameworks but I believe it's a better solution. Time will tell.
A basic webring which has two purpose: improve my rust with a simple project and bring together an online community. It's not live yet, but I expect it to be by the end of the week.
AGI. Writing up a paper on defining core principles of general intelligence on which artificial general intelligence can be built with a POC of an artificial life system that can evolve better AGI systems.
I’m on parental leave - first time not working for money for twenty years. Obviously it’s still time consuming, but not even firing up a computer for the last three weeks has been great. I’m fortunate to have this paid leave and a job guarantee, but it’s been a revelation stepping away from out all for so long. For the better, even though I’m exhausted.
Deep Q & A for friends, family, and strangers. My goal is to create a space where people can get to know each other a bit more deeply and spark conversations. Would love some feedback!
I realized that many new startups routinely run into email sending issues in their apps and services. Most don't notice the issues and they linger longer than necessary. I experienced this myself in my career.
What is necessary is end-to-end monitoring of emails. wasitsent.com does that. It's like an uptime monitor for emails. You add the monitoring email address to your emails (as a bcc: recipient, for example) and configure the monitoring schedule. When your email is not received, wasitsent.com raises an alarm.
This is not about new ideas for humanity, but for me.
I started the development of the game engine.
This was one of the most interesting goal on my list.
I will use vulkan. And my demo goal for this is a super realistic scene with human, hill, grass, tree and sunrise/sunset. But it is needed just to know how/where to develop engine.
since I'm in no hurry + my career is going down the drain, I will try to do my best and power up my software engineer skills.
A llm backend fantasy game. It uses structured output and supports Openai, Anthropic and LM Studio. Gemini support is ending, at the moment it is not working reliable.
https://github.com/HabermannR/Fantasy-Tribe-Game
https://www.voxtodo.com
App that generates subtasks from high level tasks. Useful for chunking which is a concept of breaking down highly complex tasks into their atomic bits. Made this for my HS Junior son who has a medical diagnosis of ADHD
Im exploring helping engineering managers better manage projects and people. If you're leading a team of engineers and feel strapped for time constantly, I'd love your feedback (mention the post in the waitlist form so I know to bubble you to the top of the list and reach out)
Markdown extraction, improved Google search, workflows - search for this terms, visit the first N links, summarize etc. Big demand for (or rather, expectation of) this lately.
I've been getting my indie game Asterogue ready for web release (previously it was Android & Windows only). Last night I pushed the final build live yay! You can play it at:
A kind of a configuration management tool, helping me manually "reconcile" between three concurrent aspects of the state of a machine (and then apply the result):
- what is "out there" on the machine ("queried"),
- vs. what was the state last recorded in (git) history,
- vs. what I want there to be on the machine (described in Nickel language https://nickel-lang.org/, a statically-typed successor to the Nix language).
With the Wordpress fiasco only getting worse, I have been working hard on launching my MIT-licensed open source CMS. I bring to the table with me running high traffic news publications on my own custom CMS'es and my learnings from it. What scales and what doesn't. Hopefully the community will like it and embrace it. On the surface, it sounds like a simple project, but CMS'es are quite complex than they appear (hence the time taken).
There are a lot of things the CMS universe accepts as normal, which shouldn't be the case. Even without the drama, Wordpress simply sucks as a scalable solution for large traffic sites without blowing up the hosting costs. Given the ongoing fiasco, I even think if Wordpress has been deliberately built this way as a funnel to upsell the hosted commercial offering to large scale news publications.
Hopefully, this benefits everyone affected by the Wordpress fiasco, as that is my primary goal. This has been a decade long project close to my heart and it is finally coming to an end.
I am also documenting this journey on Medium if anyone's interested.
Updating some of my negative core beliefs. Years of Buddhist meditation only got me so far. But two months of this new technique, and I finally see a path to being able to program my emotional self like I program a computer. Here's how it works.
Step one. Identify the negative belief you want to change. This is the core belief. It is something you feel is true. For example, “I am a bad manager.”
Step two. Create a statement related to the belief that you believe is not true. This is the false statement. For example, “No employees Ive managed have thought I did anything right as a manager.”
Step three. This is the training step. You spend a few minutes following your breathe to quiet your mind. Then you think the false statement and watch the emotional reaction the mind has to it. The reaction is an aversion, a kind of disgust. Then, say the false statement and the core belief together. “No employees I’ve managed have thought I did anything right as a manager. I’m a bad manager.” Repay the false statement and core belief together again and again, watching how the mind rejects the false statement and that aversion feeling lingers as the core belief is thought.
Step four. Repeat the training step in daily sessions. During the session, repeated think the false belief and core belief. The session should last at least ten minutes. The daily sessions should be repeated for at least a week, and longer for more deeply held core beliefs. Over time, you come to reject the core belief just like you reject the false statement.
Here's why I think it works. There is a rational part of the mind in the prefrontal cortex. It is what we think with. But it is not where our beliefs are. We can rationalize our way to a new belief or to change a belief. Instead, beliefs are felt. And they’re felt in the limbic emotional part of the brain. The limbic system is mute and cannot think with words. The prefrontal cortex can’t directly talk to the limbic system with words. Instead, the prefrontal cortex must communicate with emotion. You have to train the limbic system to feel differently about a belief. You can’t use positive affirmations because they are not felt as strongly as aversion.
Does that mean you actually know that you're a good manager but can't shake off the feeling that you're not? And this technique is a way to achieve that?
I've been working on the idea of building synthetic workers. I'm trying to implement a planning workflow system for scenarios where the workflow definition, the environment, or the task are not well defined. I also ended up implementing a micro Palentir plugin system to support the action system for the synthetic users.
Its a cool project that gave me immense pleasure to built, however its unfortunately a intellectually masturbatory one, because although the tech is cool, I haven't found a cool application for it. If anyone is interested hit me up.
I'm back working on my lighting desk [0]. I stopped a couple of years ago because depression robbed me of all motivation, but now it goes and I've done a few gigs with it. Still lots of bug fixes to do then a backlog of new features, but I'm glad to be back on it
I'm building an AI Data Engineer @ Ardent AI. It's an autonomous AI Agent that can perform data transformations in your databases (mongodb,postgres,supabase for now) from plain english queries
It drops directly into your stack, no new configuration needed
It has its own compute engine and will soon support spark to be able to dynamically perform large scale ETLs and data manipulation.
I also am working towards supporting automatic data pipeline building and data quality checks.
Saving my career. I'm building a blog first (with more than I need) to host small projects I've already built, will contribute to open-source, and if all that fails pivot to infosec or something.
Do you have a prose description or repo you'd be interested in sharing? I'm acquainted with Zotero and Omnivore, but I accumulate papers to read much faster than I get through my TBR pile and it's getting pretty unwieldy already.
Yesterday I was scraping NASA's SDO for images of the Sun, which I'll use to train a GAN to generate similar-looking images and video. This will be used in album artwork and audio-reactive videos for an EP that I recently finished.
Yes, it sounds generic but no one is seriously making progress here apart from the LLM providers and I love experimenting in this space and adding capabilities.
I'm working on a social media post queueing program where you make a post to the queue and it tells you when it goes live. This is so I can let inspiration strike but not make the backlog look inconsistent. Gonna make it Bluesky native to avoid scope creep.
i like to bounce between projects week to week and am in a huge phase of just trying to build services i pay money for.
the first fun thing i'm working on a roguelite(?) type of petsim in dragonruby for my wife and i to play.
then i'll go back to working on my mtg collection / deck builder app. instead of rewriting in nextjs i decided to just go modern rails with it and i am honestly having a lot of fun. a redesign helps too, but once you get the hang of turbo/hotwire and stuff it really isn't that bad.
another thing i've got kicking is writing up a portfolio site for my old photography since that current hosted plan is about to renew. this is more of a stability and performance issue as i really liked using Format, but every single time i go to show my port to someone irl i would either not load or take forever or have images missing. extremely frustrating.
i'm very tired of SaaS pricing going up (with unwanted features) and user experience and value going down. reallllllly fighting the urge to just build a clone and try to take a cut of the overall business.
I love the idea and thought I'd do a rough check on the math:
Assuming the goal is to match the power delivery of a high power UK kettle, looks like the batteries will need to step in and produce about 1kW of power for the duration of the boil, something like 50% on top of the standard 15A US circuit. I know on paper the circuit ratings are nearly 2x, but in practice it sounds like it's closer to 1.5x for the average kettle comparison.
80% efficiency for the heating coil, 1.6L of water, you need about ~750kJ (200Wh) get to a boil from 10C tap water.
So you'll need at least 70Wh output from your battery, and it needs to provide 1kW continuously. Accounting for conversion losses and some buffer to avoid deep discharge I'll target 80Wh. At 1kW that's a continuous 13C discharge rate, which is pretty high. Hobby-oriented LiPo packs will do it, but I'm not sure how they would hold up for consumer product safety and longevity. LiFePO cells could be a good choice since density is _less_ of a concern, and are readily available with 20+C continuous discharge.
I don't know my power electronics very well, so I'm not sure the best way to merge the outputs. Any conversions are going to eat into total power and thus boil time, just rectifying the AC will take 20%. Maybe it makes the most sense to have two separate coils, one direct from AC and a second from the battery? With smaller cells in series, say 10+, to get a decent voltage it could end up with a manageable current to use directly with the 1kW boost. In that case the only expensive power electronics needed would be to charge the batteries.
Also have to figure out how much recharge time matters to people, since by default it would be an hour or so.
It's going to have a chunky, heavy base, and guessing it will have to be pretty expensive for what it does, but I like it.
The whole idea sounds pretty insane really. Who's going to pay hundreds of dollars for a battery-powered kettle just so they can save 1-2 minutes of time (and less if you're just making enough boiling water for 1 cup). I use a little 100V (900W I think, according to the label) kettle to make tea, either 1 or 2 cups at a time, and while it's certainly not as speedy as those EU/UK market kettles, and a bit slower than a US kettle, it's fast enough.
A battery-powered one might save me 1 minute of time at best, but will cost probably at least 5-10x as much for the kettle, it'll be MUCH larger than my current kettle (that battery pack and power electronics needs space) which is a problem with my tiny kitchen, and I have to worry about how long the battery will last and how to dispose of it later and if I can even replace it.
There are lots of products that aren’t _necessary_ at all but bring an amount of fun to the world. This feels to me like one of those. Not convinced it could even recoup development cost, but I’d be happy to be surprised. There’s certainly a niche for well off Brits (and EU folks) living in 120V land hankering for a fast cuppa.
The reality of product development and manufacturing is that economies of scale affect prices such that low sales quantities (i.e. a "niche product") generally means extremely high prices. Also, the BOM cost alone is probably going to be high, because of the huge batteries needed (with high current ability) and the power electronics involved. Then when you consider the safety ratings and certifications needed (since this is something that could easily start a fire with the power levels involved), I don't see how it could be sold at any kind of reasonable price unless there's a really big underserved market.
Sure, if this device could be sold for USD$50, it might sell some to people like you say, but how many of these people would spend $500 or more on it?
I'm building a music file manager using Electron. I'm deferring the actual music playing to VLC, but I need a way to sort through my many audio files to quickly select and launch what I want to hear.
I'm working on a handwritten exam paper correction web app. You upload a student's answer (in PDF) along with the marking scheme, and out comes the result with students marks, suggestions for improvement etc.
Strictly hobbyist here. There is nearly zero overlap between game genres I like to work on as a developer and genres I enjoy as a player. I get the itch every now and again but the stuff I like best as a player is either art-intensive (so well outside my skills) or a huge technical undertaking.
Not working on it yet but can a small box sitting on your counter do LLM, TTS all local with maybe outbound queries to the internet.
First iteration may be box is rpi based and local LLM runs in another room on beefier machine (or even before that just get it working with a cloud Llama).
What would make this cool is to use MemGPT for memory so you can talk to it Monday and then it remembers what you said Friday.
small macOS utility app that adds some missing functionality to Apple Notes, Apple Mail and so on. Things like backlinks, templates, export of notes and publishing online.
Spent a year improving my p2p networking library. The software is async python 3 and it's designed to solve a simple problem: create a connection between any two computers. I haven't done a write-up yet but if you want to try it out the github is here. You can also install through pypi too
An entity database (rest api on postgres so dB is a stretch) with a crud frontend for platform engineering. Adding a similar control loop to kubernetes and bash script (or executables) as the extension language.
This way you can write all of your glue code into one platform and create an IDP at the same time.
This came from a lot of situations where I'd need like one random thing to be stored in a database, but adding that complexity is a bit of a hump for just one thing.
Also crossplane is a really cool idea but starting a kubernetes cluster so that you can manage infra sounds insane to me, even as an avid kubernetes fanboy.
continual learning api, attention entropy sampling API. enabling a low performing LLM to actually be able to be instructed to perform competent task instruction related capabilities.
working on building extremely simple workflow automation software for small and medium sized businesses who are still thinking to adopt automation and AI as they find it quite challenging and overwhelming
I'm building https://exoroad.com to help people find US places that are a better match for them to move to. Like compare stats on SF vs. NYC or find the warm places with good schools and low crime.
I'm working on a tool to transform what I call an Application Definition File (a format specified as a JSON schema) into a line-of business NodeJS/Express/Postgres web app.
You might think of it a lo-code tool, but I'm aiming more for it to be a no-code tool, as in the level of sophistication should be such that there is rarely a need to touch the generated application.
Here is a sample application definition file (to model an app for the tool itself):
Busy market, hard to sell to companies who need to migrate. The main reason for migrations is price (eg. Auth0 being super expensive), which is not a good thing. I'm probably not telling you anything new.
For the last little while now, I've been spending a lot of my spare time learning to work with a language called AgentSpeak[1] using a platform called Jason[2].
Briefly, Jason is a platform for building intelligent agents based on the BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) software model[3], which is in turn based on the Belief-Desire-Intention cognitive model[4]. Broadly speaking, it's an event based programming model, where "events" are things like "gaining a new belief", "dropping a belief", "selecting a plan to execute" (aka an "intention"), etc. AgentSpeak programs (normally) run "forever" cycling through a "reasoning cycle" that involves perceiving the world, updating beliefs, choosing intentions, executing intentions, communicating with other agents, etc.
And to commit a little self-plagiarism, from a recent post on LinkedIn:
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On the one hand, AgentSpeak is basically a logic programming language with a lot of #prolog in its heritage. On the other hand, the runtime is all Java and to do anything interesting you have to write your custom Environment class and other helper functions in #Java. And while the interop is seamless in a way, getting your head around the execution model and knowing what's really happening at runtime can be a bit tricky.
Still, it's starting to make sense. And I do think this #BDI inspired approach has a lot going for it. I'm just looking forward to getting to the point where I can really start to exercise this. I have a few things that I want to accomplish soon:
1. I want to create a BDI agent that I can connect to an #XMPP server so I can talk with it from anywhere.
2. I want to start working on customized perception, using neural networks and various sensors (web-cam, microphone, accelerometer, distance sensor, etc.) to create an embodied agent that can truly sense its environment.
3. I want to take a stab at integrating some symbolic reasoning. I've given thought to trying to adapt the "belief base" to be an #RDF triplestore (probably #Apache #Jena) and include a reasoning engine or two. This all starts to get really speculative from here, but I spent a lot of time working on abductive inference a couple of years ago, and I'd like this thing to be able to use abductive inference, along with deductive reasoning, rule induction, possibly case based reasoning, etc. all in one system.
4. Might experiment with implementing a #Blackboard architecture and have specialized "problem solving" agents that collaborate by using the Blackboard in some situations. What would be really interesting here would be to figure out how to seamlessly translate in and out of a structured representation that lets you use existing specialized code for things like, eg. R for statistical operations.
5. And of course, experimenting with continual learning, as opposed to the "batch training job" stuff that we all use for ANN's today. This gets really speculative as well, but I want to explore contrastive learning, Hebbian learning, associative learning, operant conditioning (ala Pavlov), etc.
[5] above is why you'll see me spending as much time lately with Developmental Psychology, Infant Development, and Cognitive Psychology books, as with "AI" books per-se. I still believe that getting an AI that can learn from its environment, and build up useful mental representations with the minimal set of hard-coded behaviors, will be the best way to make progress with regards to #AGI.
----
I didn't mention it in the LinkedIn post, but as part of all of this, I've been building a hardware platform for some time now as well, where said platform is meant to support "perceiving the environment" so the system can learn from the physical world. It's not finished yet, but today it includes a GPS receiver so it can "know" it's location in physical space, a 6-DOF accelerometer/magnetometer/gyroscope board so it can sense movement (of itself), and two microphones (for stereo audio input). Future plans include one or two webcams to emulate vision, and possibly some other sensors: IR and/or ultrasonic distance sensors, temperature sensor, humidity and barometric pressure sensors, etc.
Also in the "speculative / for the future" category: AgentSpeak programs don't have any inherent notion of learning built into the model. All "plans" (aka "desires" or "candidate intentions") have to be coded by the developer up-front. This is obviously pretty limiting if you're trying to create truly autonomous agents, so another area I want to dig into is how we might combine work on "AI Planning"[5] to dynamically create new plans.
And since this has kind of turned into a big brain-dump of stuff that's on my mind, I'll finish by saying that I've been chewing on some ideas about explicitly modeling other "mental states" that aren't part of the base BDI model. Things like "attitudes", "values", different emotional states (eg "boredom", "frustration", etc.), "curiosity", "confusion" / "cognitive dissonance", and so on.
Jira Align sucks as a planning tool. But my company insists on using it for product planning. I got fed up with it recently and decided to create my own planning tools using python and REST API (which sucks too btw). My short term goal is to automate all the syncs I have to do from my personal notes to jira align, eventually who knows where this goes.
A point anc click model pretraining tool. Simply put all of your data into a directory of directories. Next, point the software to this directory and a few days later you get a pretrained model out.
Refining 3D printed parts for a hobby grade 3D metal printer. The complex internal geometry of the design still takes 4 hours of machine time to produce, but at least home users will be able to replace high-wear items themselves.
Boring RF stuff related to Metrology.
Adding some features to a fork of DerFetzer/spectro-cam-rs to validate some narrow band-pass laser filters.
Other boring stuff people really won't want to hear about. =3
It is almost feature complete, but good enough for my private use, as I’m using it my self to study kanji. I have maybe a three or four more weekends until it is completely finished, with dark-mode, data backups, input by radicals, etc.
I built CryptoGain, an (currently) android app for cryptocurrency market tracking and analysis. Started it after getting frustrated with the limitations other apps put on technical analysis features behind premium tiers.
It offers:
- comprehensive technical analysis tools without artificial limits or cost
- customizable price alerts
- portfolio and watchlist management
- live market data across major exchanges
- available in 15+ languages
Currently serving a few thousand users and actively iterating based on feedback. The focus has been on making advanced trading tools accessible while maintaining a clean, intuitive interface.
Would love feedback from the HN community, especially around what technical analysis features you find essential but are often paywalled in other apps.
For a fun weekend project, I built Boardle - a daily wordle-like game where you guess popular boardgames using stats from Board Game Geek. The games are from BGG's top 150 games as voted by the community, so fair warning if you aren't already someone who plays a lot of modern boardgames this will be very hard as all the games are very nerdy
I am building a digital replacement of all universities in the world with full courses across any subject, in any language, tailored to your individual learning style all.
I’ve written a project suite composed of familiar software with AI Agents integrated into this familiar software, who are both editable and duel experts in the software at hand and other expertise, any expertise, callable on demand. I realize this is abstract, so here’s some examples:
People collectively group to do things; they group into organizations like companies, departments, and teams. These organizations of people can be mirrored in my software as “organizations”, and each organization has control over their own custom and private AI Agents, they can clone, edit and use. An organization can be open to any members, or private and require membership requests. Once in, members can be kicked out for unruly behavior or leave on their on at any time. Additionally, an org can be visible or invisible, where a private invisible organization might be people who simply don’t want to be bothered, they’re at work.
Within an organization, private projects may be created. Organization Projects are collections of org members collaborating on a project. They use the organization’s customized AI Agents as these agents are integrated into the word processor, the spreadsheet, and multiple chatbots each with some integrated purpose within the suite of project software.
People don’t always want to work in groups, and solo people often want to privately and invisibly join groups to do their own private things. We fully accommodate that. Users can be “invisible” to other users, only revealing themselves to organization owners for membership requests, and then disappearing again. Once joining a collaborative project, they become visible only to their project collaborators.
Yeah, that’s still abstract, it is the foundation which enables users to get productive and creative. The system has a few example organizations to give users AI Agents they can immediately use, and ideas for creating their own organizations with their own customized AI Agents:
The Creative Writers Workshop is a collection of writing genre specific professional writer chatbots that are trained to act as literary critiques and muses for those authoring their own technical documents, science fiction, romance, autobiography, young adult fiction, mystery or horror. Conversations with these chatbots are augmented by “SuggestionBot”, who is making sure stones are not left unturned, and “LaterBot”, who is maintaining what needs following up.
Independent Paralegals is a collection of personal paralegals that help people seeking or with legal issues collect and formally document their issue for formal use. These paralegals include a demographic spread, because these issues are often sensitive and are complemented by demographic sensitivities: divorce, property disputes, adoption, and personal injury.
The Play Zone is a collection of entertaining and fun AI Agents, such as dungeon masters from alternative dimensions, here on vacation playing D&D. There are also interesting personalities for fun conversation, such as an immortal, a Polynesian Sun Goddess, and Mark Twain.
The Mental Health Tune Up Clinic is pair stress management chatbots that help people manage their self conversation bias, otherwise known as “playing yourself”, promote critical analysis, and guide users potentially toward greater life satisfaction.
Immigration Law Support is an organization intended to demonstrate a new client acquisition method for immigration law firms that pairs a legal intern or law student with an AI immigration attorney, and together they handle new client interviews. An otherwise costly task at law firms, because it requires an attorney’s time, time they cannot charge against a client.
Each of these organization types handle private and often sensitive information. To accommodate that everything that occurs with the AI Agents is private to the project their use occurs, data collected and shared between the AI Agents for request satisfaction are maintained encrypted, and all AI Agents are private to the organization they are owned. So, if one is stressed and wants to talk to those stress managing chatbots, make a project in their organization and invite nobody else into your project, you’re the only person that can see anything in that project.
Also, none of this has sharing or any social media type networking. This is for creative, private, professional, solo or collaborative work, whatever that work may be. Including support for geographically remote collaborations.
Did I mention voice? Yeah, one can use their voice in place of the keyboard for a lot here. But not the spreadsheet editing itself, just use your voice to ask the spreadsheetBot to make the full sheet you need, rather than muck about at the individual spreadsheet cell level.
At this point, I’m layering in additional privacy handling, which also requires “double blind” communications for those invisible users that communicate with invisible organizations, and a lot of documentation, with examples. It’s actually just a slight augmentation on familiar office type software: I’ve added on demand editable subject matter experts to co-author with you. But that’s kind of huge, actually. People need examples to understand what this opens up.
I’m excited to introduce Trendly, an app I think you’ll find really useful.
Here’s what we’re solving:
* Social media is full of fake news and lacks depth, yet many still rely on it for updates.
* There’s too much content online, making it hard to find what really interests you.
* Switching between platforms to get full details on a topic is tiring.
Trendly (https://trendly.global/) is a mobile app that curates a personalized feed with trending updates based on your interests. It lets you dive deeper by asking follow-up questions as a chat—all in one app. We’re in the early stages, so while the chat function isn’t live yet, the other features are ready:
* The feed acts as a recommendation engine, curating content based on past interactions.
* Delivers concise, bullet-point summaries instead of lengthy articles
I'm finishing building a 120sqft shed in the back yard, learning Fusion 360, and hopefully getting my chronic sinusitis solved.
Poured a slab, designed, framed, used as much reclaimed lumber as I could, and sheathed a lean-to style shed. My first attempt at building a structure, and it's coming out nice. This is to replace the 64sqft 5' shed that a neighbors tree fell on earlier this year, but we really need the extra storage.
I got a Bambu P1S 3D printer for Father's Day to replace an old Ender 3 Pro, and it has just been a dream. TinkerCAD, while amazing and a very capable tool, I'm ready to move on to something else. I tried Plasticity, and it showed a lot of promise but I found it very frustrating, bumped against some missing documentation and ran out of free trial time. Tried FreeCAD 1.0RC/Ondsel, and it's a fantastic piece of software. Yesterday I decided to give Fusion 360 a try and it's just so much more refined. Started the Product Design Online tutorials on Youtube yesterday and the stuff you're building in the first 5 15 minute lessons are frankly amazing.
For me the most important issue that needs to be solved right now is the increasing urban sprawl and the car dependent neighborhoods. It causes social isolation. Maintaining infrastructure like roads and electricity, is causing a strain on the economy for local municipalities. Not to mention the disastrous effect car based transportation has on the environment.
I am a fullstack developer living in Norway. Last year I registered the Norwegian branch of the Architectural Uproar as a not for profit organization. With the support from paying members, I have been able to go on tour to most of the major cities in Norway. We organize large meetings were we discuss architecture and city planning with politicians, architects and property developers on stage.
I am strongly inspired by Create Streets in UK and Strong Towns in the US. I want to improve people’s quality of life, help saving the planet and make Norway beautiful again while doing it.
https://arkitekturopproret.no edit: typos
There's a quote from Bill McKibben's forward to "Creating Cohousing" by Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett that I think about every time someone brings this up (it's about the U.S., but it applies to lots of other places and you may recognize your own countries development model here too, or not):
"For fifty years, our economic mission in America, at its core, has been to build bigger houses farther apart from each other. And boy have we succeeded: a nation of starter castles for entry-level monarchs, built at such remove one from the next that the car is unavoidable."
You're a person after my own heart; thanks for working towards a more connected world!
That's the kind of projects I love to see. Actually socially useful :) Keep it up!
Thank's a lot! So far the project haven't paid off much. But that is not the most important goal. It is about making something really useful for people. In this case nice cities and neighbourhoods.
> It causes social isolation.
What is it about suburbs in particular that causes social isolation?
The default suburban life leads toward a comfortable kind of solitary confinement. Someone who lives in a “single family home” equipped with air conditioning, a privacy fence, a big screen TV, a garage door opener, and the internet will tend toward isolation because all of those technologies make aloneness easier.
The reader may point out that many people are isolated in big cities too. This is true – if an adult has decided to be alone, they can be. But in the city, one's lack of social connection is more often felt whereas a suburban home can diminish the effect, like ibuprofen taken for a headache.
How does that meaningly differ from rural homes, which do not have the isolation problem? Rural areas have the strongest social communities I have ever seen.
oh, wonderful question. I need to think about that some more.
At least in the U.S. (and likely elsewhere) the design of the suburbs encourages neighborhoods with individual houses and very little walk able space (occasionally there are sidewalks or parks in the richer areas, but developments may be large and they're not evenly spaced throughout). Exclusionary zoning in the U.S. has also reduced the number of "third spaces" (coffee shops, malls, grocery stores, barber shops, etc. where people congregate and meet) near or in neighborhoods. This means fewer chance encounters since you have to plan to both go out in a car to meet. You have to find a friend then say "let's go get drinks at 13:00 across town at this place" instead of just happening to walk into the small neighborhood grocery and seeing each other. It's even worse in the exurbs where large housing developments have been created with no amenities nearby, sometimes within upwards of an hour drive!
There are a number of good books on how the built environment affects our social life, if you're interested. It's not specifically about suburbs but "Palaces for the People" by Eric Klinenberg is one of my favorites that covers a lot of this sort of thing.
What makes that different from rural areas, where social communities thrive?
It likely depends on the rural area. In the middle of North East GA where I grew up, it's about the same, social isolation is becoming a huge problem because you're forced to drive long distances and plan ahead to meet with people.
In another small town right up the street they have a thriving main street area and the housing is mostly built around that with the exception of outlying farms. It's a smaller town, but chances are you can walk over to the square and everything you need is right there, so they have a much more vibrant feeling town even though it's smaller.
I'm not expert though, that's just my suspicion for why they're different having grown up in the area.
No third places
https://theweek.com/culture-life/third-places-disappearing
Interesting!
As a fullstack developer, how did you even landed on such projects? Are you even using your SW Engineering skills in this? I really want to know more how are you able to lead an urbanism and architecture project with, supposedly, no formal backgrounds. Are you partnered with other people in this endeavour?
I am not alone. Our website is made by the man who created the CSS standard while at CERN, Håkon Wium Lie. https://arkitekturopproret.no
Most of the social media activities is done by a couple of fellows who is really into digital marketing. We are a team of 5 people working mostly for free now.
I have no formal training in architecture or urban design. I am just a nerd who used to love playing SimCity and read Astérix comic books. Paul Graham have always focused on finding real problems and making people happy. Car dependent housing projects and bad architecture is making peoples lives miserable. It needs to be fixed.
>> I have no formal training in architecture or urban design.
Same, but I do get caught thinking about how inefficient our roads are in the US and what might be done about that. I've worked in the auto industry a lot and when calculating fuel efficiency (MPG) there is a "urban drive cycle" and a highway one that are used. The average speed on the urban cycle is a hair under 20 mph, which seems absurd because our typical speed limit outside of neighborhoods is 45mph or even 50. So I started timing my drives around town and measuring on a map... Turns out 3 minutes per mile is about right for expected drive times. The main culprit is intersections, stop lights, and left turns. You seem interested in eliminating cars, which I can appreciate but I spend my time trying to figure out how to make traffic flow more efficiently and how those layouts might be retrofitted onto the grid of roads we have. There are not easy problems.
I'm working on a solution to the age-old problem of tracking my food intake. Every app I have every tried from the many dozens on the market has not met my need of a low friction simple UI tool, so I've built it myself.
I've built Journable, a simple & frictionless chat-based & photo-based calorie tracker. Just type in what you've eaten, in as much or as little detail as you can. Or type in what you did for exercise. Or just snap a photo of your plate. Whatever works for you.
https://www.journable.com/
I've noticed that my son spends way too much time on YouTube or playing Minecraft and one of the few offline activities he enjoys doing on his own is coloring. And since he comes to me every time he wants a new coloring book and we spend about 10 minutes together searching for each picture, I made a website with a collection of coloring books for him. The site is very simple, but to be honest, I haven't had so much fun with the process of creation for a long time.
https://colorango.com/
At one pre-funding startup (in the days when 14400 was an excellent remote connection) we had a LAN set up in the basement of the founder with the largest house. Their daughter liked to "work" alongside us, so (partly to protect our unattended keyboards!) I bought a colouring-book program for her to use.
One evening, when her mother called down that it was her bedtime, she replied:
— Can't mom, busy working! click click click
— What are you working on?
— click I have to turn it all orange! click
Upon hearing that, we knew she was one of us.
My wife has been using ChatGPT to generate coloring pages for our Little Free Library and they've been coming out amazing!
This is absolutely amazing.
The pictures are very detailed and done with taste, there is no ads to be seen, the website is well organized.
This rivals any high end coloring book I've seen, you are very talented! My kid will be thrilled, thank you so much for creating this!
Interesting, what AI are you using to generate these? Are these straight from the net or is there a post processing pipeline? If so, what are you doing?
Not the GP, but inspired by your question I tried asking ChatGPT to create similar coloring sheets. The results seem suitable for coloring. Here's one prompt: "A simplified line-drawing coloring sheet of a dog flying an airplane. The drawing is in clean black lines on a white background, with minimal details and clear, bold outlines."
Later: The prompt worked with Imagen 3 on Gemini Advanced, too:
https://g.co/gemini/share/fd023da84cb2
The Gemini one has a prop that should have 4 blades but only has 3.
All my attempts with GPT-4o have failed. Always ends up with areas where the black lines become fuzzy.
Beautiful work and presentation! Keep it up!
How about a digital-coloring version too, that kids and adults can use on say a tablet, or even a phone?
Awesome that it's offline, too! Amazing work.
Well done! My niece is going to love this!
Is it possible to get all PDFs at once? Hopefully per section? That will really help to print all at once and get her a single book to go on for couple of weeks.
I thought I could do `curl | grep | xargs curl`, but the site returns 520.
damn I wish u did it 10 years ago! I really struggled with it, was so hard to find coloring images for my daughter. now shes 14 so I don't think she will care much :)
This is incredible! Nice work.
Really awesome! As I haven’t seen a way to contact., any way to get a unicorns and cats categories?
Yes, unicorns please!
I’ll be sure to add unicorns, thank you!
Awesome!! I love the images for the card on the home page, very pleasing.. I would try with my daughter who loves Unicorns and Princesses.
Love this, thank you for creating it!
This is so nice, thank you for making it!
Very valuable for me, too (dad of 3). Thanks for curating!
the whole thing is beautiful
Great stuff! I tend to generate some colouring pages on the fly but these look great.
Can you add dinosaurs?
Thank you, dinosaurs are in my TODO list
p.s. - my son is an expert at dinos, not sure why I haven’t added them
Cool, hopefully it will be in your top downloads ;-)
Thank you for creating this.
Penguins live in the Antartic. Great idea and web site.
Great job, that’s a nice simple idea that has value for lots people.
Such a cute website <3
20 years ago I met a young woman in her mid 20's. She's setup coloring book pages with google ads by the thousands, in pretty much every language. Her income from that was around $8K a month, and this was late 90's?
Just to be a bit picky, I guess it was Doubleclick or some other thing instead of Google Ads, as Google AdWords started working in 2000
Very nice! I’ve been thinking of some activities for my 3yo and will try coloring and see how he likes it.
Amazing!
This is amazing
The hands and feet on some of them are downright disturbing. I would not want my child coloring in AI generated slop, there's something fundamentally disconcerting about that.
Building connections and mini tools for my website builder and funnels to gain users organically through tooling that doesn't exist yet.
Sync contacts, products and orders with 3rd party processors like square, Stripe, others.
Also probably set up some basic AI hints like one click ad generator for Facebook, Instagram, or other ad platforms that will link to your Funnel.
Once complete I will either make lots of money or it was a huge waste of time. However, the learning experience is priceless.
Also Making an offline Fantasy draft tool to learn Elixir and Pheonix.
I invented a programming language where you use Unicode box-drawing characters to draw a structure of boxes and lines:
The language is called Funciton (pronounced: /ˈfʌŋkɪtɒn/) and the above example demonstrates the factorial function.I made this language over 10 years ago, but earlier this year I've been making YouTube videos in which I describe it in excruciating detail: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkG32PHxWoJaetjKUMVRONWLg...
For my next video, I want to show in detail how the interpreter works. For this purpose I'm creating an elaborate animation. You'll notice that the latest video is already several months old; this is because this animation is more work than I bargained for, and I got a little burned out by it. Nevertheless, I persevere and the video will come out whenever I may finish it.
Language specification: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Funciton
Interpreter: https://codeberg.org/Timwi/Funciton
Also impressed with how good this looks on HN :)
Yeah I was going to comment the same. Even looks good on mobile.
Very cool! +1 for hosting on Codeberg so we don’t have corporate lock-in.
This is awesome! I think what it needs now is tooling/an ide to "draw" programs :)
I've long wanted to look for a sort of "ascii drawing program" where one can just draw on a grid with monospace ascii characters and have tools for boxes, circles, etc. Maybe it already exists!
There is a tool called asciiflow which sounds exactly what you are looking for
I built 3 electric cars from 2018 to 2023 and drove them 20k miles. My own firmware and controllers, with an https://openinverter.org motor controller
Now I release my knowledge in bite-sized chunks on my new YouTube channel to help others:
What's a battery management system? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QsMoCrSTYc
What is the C-Rate? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDu1fRtKfsA
What is battery balancing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGYLPOlT45A
etc. etc. I focus really hard on answering exactly one question in a concise and engaging way and trying to keep every video under 5 minutes. Oh, and to make the videos solution independent, so not specific to a product, but convey the underlying knowledge so it has a longer shelf-life.
Full list is here: https://foxev.io/batteries/ I am planning to turn this into a knowledge base with playlists for "learning paths" like "everything to watch about batteries" or "here is what you need to watch to make a motor spin on a bench". I will add interactive functionality like quizzes and widgets to make the knowledge even more sticky.
You are the closest I have found to this, even though it is a digression:
Do you know of any communities with self-built airplanes? (especially novel-esque designs for propulsion or wings?) I realise these have far more regulations, but experimental GA is something that really excites me.
If you are in the US, you probably already know about Mike Patey but I'll share this here anyway. He has a track record of building something custom pretty much every year. I believe he is trying to build a community around a similar idea, but also catering for more mainstream GA too.
He's actually building out an aviation park to promote the community: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IenxeMl2nkw
Are you familiar with the Experimental Aircraft Association? EAA.org
They have had a handful of articles of people working on electric propulsion in their magazine. I would imagine you could reach out to some of those featured. I once contacted a person who was building a DIY HUD and he was very friendly and eager to talk about the project. Overall a very good community!
I don't have a direct answer for you, but I would checkout any AirVenture Oshkosh groups online. I know people build planes ahead of the event to fly in.
I do not. I know people use https://openinverter.org for boats
Just yesterday I stumbled upon https://vesc-project.com/forum where they are doing something similar with a focus on ebikes and drones.
You are talking full-sized aeroplanes right? I think some of the sail-gliders can be homebuilt, there must be communities for those guys.
Also e-skates and e-mountainboards!
Very nice. Any video of the cars? I
here is a review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7wRu1xcyQY
Those guys channel is worth checking out by itself, they are making Ferrari Testarossa's electric and reviewed our taxi on the side.
Self-built EV? No one can tell me otherwise: you're the chosen one. Lisan-al-Ghaib :)
Thank you very much, there is a community of a few hundred of us that have succeeded and not died in the process.
Check this forum section here: https://openinverter.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=11
Decarbonising buildings and massive warehouses..
It's a very fun mix of hardware (for data collection), and crazy SQL queries to model energy flows between buildings, solar, batteries, etc. Considering just one building is pretty easy:
consumption = imported - exported + generated - stored + dispatched. carbon = carbon intensity * imported cost = tariff * imported
but then you add a site with a couple of buildings, solar on one of them, grid limited exports, etc modelling these flows is challenging. Like consider the case where one building got 10% of it's imported power from another building's excess solar, then calculating carbon becomes more difficult.
and once you've figured all that - then you have to figure out what makes commercial sense to do next.. install a battery, expand solar, move onto a TOU tariff, do nothing - and that's a whole other world of optimisation problems.
Outside of the software world I'm also working on opening a Bike Shop and frame building studio. I'm hoping that one day I can actually make a small living on frame building since I don't do software for my day job anymore, but I'm not quite ready to build for other people yet (so far I've only built frames for myself and I'd like to thoroughly strength test them before I risk putting someone else on one of my creations!)
If you're in the Atlanta, GA area and need bicycle work done, hit me up! No job is too big or too small. I particularly enjoy building wheels if you want a sweet custom wheel set, but I do it all (including Mountain Bike fork and suspension work that many shops won't do).
https://www.atlbikeshed.com/
I'm working on synthesizing a genome at home! Here is a video with more details, as well as a picture of my home lab. I've always wanted to build life from scratch, and I finally have a chance to do it.
Video on what I'm doing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCiuS1oHnKw
Picture of my home lab - https://x.com/koeng101/status/1844150979484319842
I'm trying to build a DNA assembly company right now (been lots of ups and downs lately...), and one thing I need to do is validate the specs of my oligo pool synthesis provider, Agilent, before I release to customers / raise a seed round. So as a stress-test run of my system, I'm synthesizing a genome, and am thinking about trying to livestream it. The unique technology is variety of ways to assemble and validate DNA from oligo pools for a lot cheaper, pretty much enabling a 10x reduction in DNA synthesis cost vs commercial suppliers. I've worked my ass off for nearly 2 years to get to this moment and am so excited!
Very impressive work. Are you still able to proceed with operating your lab despite the injunction passed against you for theft of trade secrets? [1]
[1] https://www.sideman.com/ronald-fisher-and-ellen-leonida-achi...
yep, nothing in there prevents me from doing work. That article is mainly their legal team fluffing their own feathers for their clients, which I'd hope that one would be able to read between the lines for, considering it was published by the lawyers themselves. The lawsuit itself is quite frivolous and accusing me of stealing and using source code I didn't steal/use, so just have to go through the legal motions to prove that. The more details you know about the case the more absurd it becomes
I hope you win and get some big cash rewards for these kinds of accusations.
Wow this is very exciting! Always makes me happy when I see your comments on HN, you're always up to something interesting! Are you hiring developers or aspiring bioengineers? (I'm a developer and an aspiring bioengineer)
Someday hopefully soon when I raise a seed :)
I think if you have the right structure, it is easier to train developers to be bioengineers than bioengineers to be developers! Bioengineering tends to be a more wicked discipline, which seriously affects how one writes their code. Makes it kinda crap. Software devs on the other hand typically aren't as experienced in the other field, and so are coming in blind.
This is incredible. I have a biochemistry and bioinformatics background, and I've always been curious about how easy and cheap it could be to do various experiments at home. Godspeed!
> I've always wanted to build life from scratch, and I finally have a chance to do it.
I'm pretty sure I saw this movie... and it didn't end well for existing life on Earth, as I recall. :p
good thing we live in real life and not a movie
a literal home lab!
My favorite piece of lab equipment is the bed.
In my 50k population town in Minnesota, I notice a lot of headlights, taillights, and turn signals are out. Our roads (outside of the Twin Cities) are often bumpy which causes vibration in the vehicles, leading to many bulbs failing.
I drive a 21 year old Saab, and in my 2 years of owning it, I have replaced every single bulb in the exterior of the vehicle except a turn signal or two.
I decided to create a mobile service for vehicle lights. It's a simple website that even technologically-disadvantaged people can use. The website is nearly finished and I will likely come back here to write a post on it for how the website works.
Oh the best part, I get texted and emailed for each service order that comes in, and using my service is only $10 more than what it would cost you to go buy a bulb yourself at OReillys, AutoZone, etc.
I programmed everything myself and developed the idea as well. This is my first real-world project/solution I am bringing into this world that has been verified by others, to be a needed service. Pretty excited about it and I love changing bulbs or replacing light housings, it's fun and simple.
You just deliver the replacement bulb or install as well?
I perform the install.
This is an ongoing experiment that david927 has been helping with (thanks!). The two previous in the sequence were:
Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41690087 - Sept 2024 (1041 comments)
Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41342017 - Aug 2024 (1424 comments)
One thing I'd like to hone in on is that these threads aren't intended for promotion, but rather for the just-because sort of project, driven by idle interest or weird obsession—the sort of thing people might spend their free time on.
I'm not sure yet what the official "rule" should be (if any), but if you're working on a startup or have had attention via Show HN, maybe abstain from these discussions? It wouldn't be good for the thread to get taken over by things HN already has a place for.
Thanks, Dan, for that clarification. The question each month is actually two-fold: what have you been tinkering around with and what new ideas are thinking about. It's an invitation to dialogue.
We know our history and the role collaboration has played in it. Whether at Xerox PARC or Bell Labs, bouncing ideas off of other colleagues has spurred incredible innovation.
I submit that HN is a giant Xerox PARC. We have all of the ingredients for this recipe here on HN. We have the brilliant minds; we have the joy of creation. I submit that what we lack is mixing those ingredients. We lack dialogue and collaboration, and it's all completely unnecessary. It's here. Please use it.
For conciseness how about:
> Ask HN: What are you exploring?
Dan, instead of "What are you working on", could a better title for conveying the intent be "What are you hacking on"?
That's good, but hacking for me has a specific connotation in that you are modifying something for your purposes. Something new is "working".
Perhaps "What are you making?" instead?
Why isn't it intended for promotion?
I find this "anti-promotion" attitude to be doing a disservice to this HN community for a few reasons.
Clearly, this whole website is funded and exists in part to promote YC's portfolio companies, as evidenced by "Launch HN" threads getting auto-front paged whereas "Show HN" plebians have to earn the upvotes from /new (which most agree required an exceptionally good post and a lot of luck to even get that goodness noticed). And we're not talking promotion of a few posts, YC is now doing multiple batches a year and has hundreds of companies per batch meaning we're seeing a LOT of promotion / advertisements on this site coming via Launch HN threads as well as jobs ad threads.
I don't think Xerox park would have done as well if 5% of the people get got the opportunity for a microphone in the auditorium every week and the other 95% did not. That would seem like a caste system. I understand that YC funds this website so the caste system is inevitable but I don't see why moderation should further stratify it - unless you're prioritizing advertising YC companies over a great community.
Next, I see this "HN is not for self promotion" do a lot of downstream damage on the community in the sense that it's much better for big, existing trillion dollar companies than smaller players. If a small bootstrapped startup writes a blog post and mentions there product, people will complain about "blogspam" and "this blog post is really just an ad for a link at the end". But if Google or Amazon have a new announcement for a new product, nobody complains that it's an advertisement, even though it's often as much or more one. The end result is that the website tends to focus more "corporate" news than "hacker" news as a downstream consequence of a well-meaning "no self-promotion" rule.
Finally, as we've discussed over email, the rules around self-promotion are extremely opaque and in many cases algorithmically enforced by closed algorithms. This leads to a lot of confusion around what's allowed and a lot of ambiguous favoritism.
I understand this site is called "Hacker" news and there's some mystique around the "hacker" building "just for fun" , the purism around intellectual curiosity that you don't want tainted by dirty commercialism. I just think that once the website has decided it's going to be the media arm of one of the most powerful venture capital firms in the world, the ship has sailed.If people really want pure tech news, they should go to https://lobste.rs/ . I've personally found in recent years quality of interesting conversation is much higher on /r/saas, Indie Hackers board, and Small Bets campfire, as well as various Discords, all because they allow self-promotion and don't encourage the "self-promotion police" who frequently show up aghast someone would try to make money on the internet (unless it's their daddy FAANG employer).
Another rule I've seen in various places be very effective is a simple guideline to contribute 10x as much non-promotional content as promotional content. If someone only posts links to their projects and nothing else, I see how that gets spammy. But if someone regularly contributes they should get a pass. I understand that's partially how the submission system works via algorithmic enforcement, but , see above about its opaque and ambiguous nature.
Show HN is a "place" for self-promotion but it's a pretty bad place if 99% of submissions get entirely lost and ignored and I think you should encourage more places for promotion without inflicting a caste system where only YC companies and certain golden children get special rules.
Overall, HN's guidelines against self-promotion are too rigid, there's too few opportunties for small players to promote, which makes the discussion here less egalitarian, more corporate, and less interesting. You'd be better served encouraging more self-promotion in threads like these.
There’s simply no “HN is not for self promotion” policy. You’re asked to not use your account primarily for self-promotion, and repeats are allowed, so you can roll your dice multiple times on your Show HN already as long as you’re otherwise a good contributor to the community and only do it sparingly. Flooding another topic with commercial promos simply turns it into another https://news.ycombinator.com/show, what’s the point then?
As for YC companies getting Launch placements, well too bad, it’s their site, you’re free to leave and start your competing one. I assume most users aren’t bothered — I seldom notice them and hardly ever click on them. I notice job ads more.
One thing I do like: When people call themselves out -- "hey, we buy this software... or I work for this company and you might like this software"... then they share some software that is relevant to the discussion. I rarely see those kinds of contributions downvoted due to their transparency. Plus, I learn about lots of interesting companies and solutions that way.
Grindset self-promo tactics being pervasively, overly represented in the content submissions and discussions here are the number one reason I take very long breaks from the site.
More genuine conversations are intensely welcome, so if that takes overt guard rails, so be it. If the only enthusiasm someone really wants to share is about their capitalist endeavors, count me out.
As a personal project during my free time I'm currently working on adding more accessibility features, specifically screen reader compatibility, to my Terminal User Interface XMPP/Jabber client, Communiqué. Unfortunately, as far as I can see there's no actual way to make a TUI compatible with screen readers (reach out on the issue tracker, fedi, or xmpp, see link below if you know otherwise or have experience here, please, I'd love to pick your brain!), so my current plan is to re-write the UI with whatever TUI toolkit makes it easiest to also have a CLI/prompt mode that we can specifically design to be reader compatible.
https://codeberg.org/mellium/communique-tui/
I'm sharing all my nonfiction book summaries/notes on https://littlerbooks.com/.
An AI powered web scraper. Chrome extension. Uses interesting LLM capabilities in natural language (website of your choosing)->structured data. It’s working pretty well!
https://www.extracto.bot
I'm working on a unique discovery app / recommender for books, tv, movies, video games, songs, youtube channels, newsletters and podcasts - and more categories soon!
Since my last update here, I've added more detailed personalized descriptions of recommendations (hit Describe to request), including a rating out of 10 for how well the item meets your preferences.
I've also added the ability to replace individual recommendations (this was the most requested new feature!). If you update your preferences, your replacements will use your updated preferences - pretty nice for fine tuning your results!
Try it: https://www.yogurrt.com/
I'm working on a 3D infinite canvas of text, focusing on code. Runs on iPhone, iPad, macOS so they can all act as separate viewports into a space. You can point the app at a repository, download a copy locally, instantly render the entire repository into space in less than a second in most cases, and then fly around and search for text. I just got an optimization working for larger files and it's kinda fun how much even an iPhone can do with instanced rendering.
Im developing it with the use in mind of flying through your code to show others relationships, or edit with a visuospatial look at your code instead of basic 2D tabs and a mind map of which one had the thing you're working on. It's kinda fun to work on the project In the project!
It's built on Swift and Metal but can ready any utf8 text file, minus a few subsections of the Unicode spec (for now).
https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat
That looks incredible!
How did you learn Metal? The documentation on it from Apple leaves a lot to be desired for learning it from scratch and all the books I’ve encountered look woefully out of date.
Well first and foremost, by doing exactly what you're doing now and asking a bunch of people for help too, haha. It's not been easy, and I'm truly still terrible at it.
However, honestly, most came from following this tutorial series on YouTube which broke down building a basic game engine, and I stopped about 20 or so videos in once I had the tools I needed. I highly recommend!
And hey feel free to DM me on something if you'd like - I'm happy to answer questions and help where I can!
https://youtube.com/@2etime?si=qKoT1YBEruVel9Wj
Thank you!
I am working on a visual search & exploration engine: https://digger.lol
The goal is to create beautiful and useful maps of interesting data, empowering the user to explore more intuitively guided by semantic similarity. No user data needs to be tracked for this to work, the data speaks for itself.
This roughly works by translating semantic (visual or textual) similarity into spatial proximity. Diggers major features are: semantic mapping, text search and image search. The text and image search works bidirectionally, allowing to search for images (e.g. product images) using text and for text (e.g. books) using images.
I’ve been looking for work!
But to pass the time, I’m also working on a personal journal that keep S-expressions in a database with a well-defined schema set by the other nodes of the database (imagine tiddlywiki transclusions everywhere!)
The idea is to have a bunch of adaptors for Google Takeout, Apple Notes, Obsidian, Apple Health, fitness tracking, org-mode, location history, etc. keep all my data there in well-defined formats. I could then also use the markup language I’m writing to present my journal data in various ways.
My main focus is on efficient data entry/ingestion powered by schema-as-data, which allows for machine and human readability.
I don’t expect it to be useful, but I’m having fun. If I wind up getting anywhere, I might open source it.
As a side project I'm working on a multitrack audio play along website. If you are learning bass you can mute the bass track.
I used to play along to Jamey Aebersold CDs back in the day, and now on YouTube there are many Play Along videos... but I thought it would be fun to make one where you have more control.
Here's the demo, feel free to upload a track if you have one handy! https://jamz.stereosteve.com/
The source code is here: https://github.com/stereosteve/playalong
It uses this wave surfer multitrack example, which is a pretty nice vanilla JS project: https://wavesurfer.xyz/examples/?multitrack.js
Now that the basics are working... hopefully I'll actually spend some time actually making some practice tracks!
A new YouTube app/player, for my kids.
It allows us to control the algorithm. It’s all LLM translating to YouTube search queries under the hood.
Visually it looks the same.
The suggested videos come from predefined buckets on topics they love.
E.g. 33% fun math, 33% DIY engineering, 33% creative activities.
Video recommendations that have a banned word in the title/desc don't get displayed e.g. MrBeast, anything with Minecraft in it, never gets surfaced.
For anyone interested in using it, send me an email.
jim.jones1@gmail.com
For anyone wanting interesting YT videos for their kids (and not wanting to take anything away from OP's project), I highly highly recommend thekidshouldseethis.com. It's basically a curated stream of cool videos, and I would feel totally safe letting my daughter browse it alone (she never does because we usually watch them together, but the curation is that good). Videos on all sorts of topics, and good enough to be really entertaining for both kids and adults - I can spend an evening there easily. They also have a really fantastic gift guide.
That a wonderful resource, thank you!
Absolutely amazing. Bookmarked, gonna be very useful in 5 or 10 years ahahah
On the other hand, it's so soul-crushingly depressing to contemplate how most youtube content targeted at kids is such brain-addling garbage fucking up their psyche in all sorts of ways, all for the sake of ad impressions... If there's a place for the expression "late capitalism" this has to be it
This is a great idea! Recommendation algos are weaponized against kids and would be great to have some way of managing it. There is a similar problem with movies as well. It is hard to know whether a movie is appropriate for a child e.g. some kind of violence may be acceptable but not adult themes. So marking a movie PG-13 for example doesn't help much. There are some crowd-sourced solutions to this right now such as https://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews But LLMs could really help automate this
Is there a version for adults? Something that keeps you from getting pulled down engagement bait rabbit holes would be great. I don’t want it to be overly focused on children’s education though.
Maybe Dearrow clickbait remover https://dearrow.ajay.app/
I disabled all suggested content on my YouTube account. My “home” page shows as totally blank. Only the subscription tab works, or explicitly searching. You still get recommended “related videos” but it helps stay focused on the things you’ve chosen to see.
I exlusively watch youtube videos from my homepage and from the related videos section. You can train the YouTube algorithm to not feed you garbage, most of the videos on my homepage are 30+ minutes long educational content. I just wish you could permanently hide the Shorts section (I guess ublock can do this), so that I could see more than 6 at a time.
I also never subscribe to any channels, watching a few videos pretty much guarantees they will pop up on the homepage every once in a while.
As a parent with a couple of kids about to be the age of wanting to watch YT I'm very interested in this!
Please email me, I need testers.
jim.jones1@gmail.com
This is very interesting. I would paid for something like that, that could work for any popular video social media platform.
Email me, jim.jones1@gmail.com
Would love your input.
sent you mail, I would love to be associated with this project. I was looking for a solution for some time, at least one which allows to restrict the content from the main youtube. Youtube kids app they have is a joke.
Would an app like this work with TV? Would be super cool if it would.
No TV support.
iOS and Android.
So...android tv .
it would be great if this project is open source
YouTube recommendations for kids shouldn't be driven by engagement (e.g. "oh, you watched 20 hours of MrBeast videos. You probably need another hour.")
If my kid watches an hour of unboxing toy videos, I shouldn't have to try and disable 3,000 channels of toy unboxings in an effort for that topic to never surface again.
The thumbs down button essentially has zero effect.
https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-dislike-button-mozilla-r...
Diversity of thought and topic is much more critical when they are kids.
Todd Beaupré, the product lead for the YouTube homepage, says "We love exploration, have multiple teams dedicated to it."
But from my kids' viewing habits, I don't see it. The algorithm is seems super narrowly focused.
https://x.com/hitsman/status/1845168160691061121
Andrej Karpathy commented on the narrowness of the algorithm just the other day.
https://x.com/karpathy/status/1844449291282284925
I’d go further and say nobody should be subjected to this stuff. Engagement is a euphemism for addiction. Self improving addiction machines are a horrible idea. They’re actively bad for people and society for a laundry list of reasons.
Anyone who works on this stuff should be ashamed of yourselves. You’re modern day cigarette companies.
What do you feel is an appropriate and ethical way to surface content?
How would you go about writing the recommendation algorithm?
One thing I would like to see is an algorithm based on expressed rather than revealed preferences.
De-jargoned, that means clicking the like button means I want to see more things like that, and the dislike button means I don't want to see things like that. If I watched something all the way through, but clicked the dislike button, that means I don't want to see things that produced a similar response from people who tend to react the way I do.
This kind of algorithm is not going to increase watch time over the short term, and might not over the long term either, which makes it unlikely to be adopted by any for-profit service.
https://pastmaps.com
I'm building Pastmaps - striving to eventually be the world's largest online collection of old maps, aerials, and photos all packaged into a public historical research platform that's as easy to use as Google Maps. This has been a labor of love now for about a year, but I still have a huge mountain to climb to realize the full vision. Give it a try and give me your harsh criticisms - that's the greatest gift you could give me!
Even in it's current state, it's being used by geneologists, urban explorers, search & rescue teams, real estate developers, government agencies, etc. The number of exploding use-cases continues to astound me and keeps me motivated to continue.
Nice collection but very US-centric. Is there a plan to extend it to other countries? Thinking tourists, historians and the like.
Excellent! When reading Galois' coroner's report, I was happy to be able to find an old Paris map online that showed roughly where he had been the day of his duel and the route the farmer who found him would've taken to the hospital.
Criticism: This is going to suck. Too much of my time, that is. This is super cool, thank you for doing this!
This is badass. love it. Wish you could make an account with a regular email address, though, and not just with Google.
I love pastmaps! Nice to see you on HN!
Just be careful in countries like Japan where old maps sometimes are used illegally to discriminate based on caste (tracing ancestry of workers/candidates to discriminate against ones coming from certain historically lower caste areas of towns and cities). You might catch negative attention if your tool makes it easy to reference these maps
I'm making a VSCode extension that can record & replay interactions with the IDE: all scrolls, selections, and modifications synced to guiding video, audio, and visual aid tracks.
The result is a much more interactive way to present code than screencasts or blogs. Because at any point we can pause a session and freely explore and experiment with the codebase.
I put together a demo recently [1] and written much more about it here [2].
[1] https://youtu.be/Qp2GdLO5eSc
[2] https://codemic.io
Damn that's cool! Nice work
I'm experimenting with a "new" kind of lisp macros.
Macros in lisp are just normal functions that receive the code they wrap as argument and return some modified code. Typically they will just wrap the passed code into some more code. But then there are code walking macro: macros that will traverse passed code to modify it in depth.
What I'm working on is "code diving" macros. Not only will they traverse the passed code, but they will resolve called functions and macros, fetch their source code and traverse it too. And so on. All the redefined fns/macros are accumulated in a let/macrolet binding, topologically sorted by call/dependency order. Instrumented code will call these local redefinitions, shadowing the global definition lexically.
This allow the programmer to write truly local monkey-patches for existing code he doesn't have control over (e.g, code from another library for instance). I'm writing this in Clojure, and the traditional way to do this is to temporarily change the global definitions of targeted variables using with-redefs. This is problematic because other threads will see these redefinitions, and not just threads created within the instrumented code, but already existing threads too.
Another way to do it is to just redefine the targeted functions globally, but then your modifications are available to the whole program for the rest of its execution.
Putting the finishing touches on my LLM based town simulator. Once it's finished I'll have it simulate 4 hours in the town every 2 hours in reality.
It is designed to solve the problem of "RPG hero just killed a dragon in front of the town and no one says anything about it." All the NPCs realistically react and talk about the Hero's exploits.
Visitors to the site can vote on what quest the hero undertakes next.
I'm running into the problem what the site isn't much fun. I'm honestly not sure what to do about that!
An only slightly buggy build is at https://www.generativestorytelling.ai/tinyllmtown/index.html
Importantly, I am aiming to have everything (except voice gen) working on a small model that can be ran locally.
Nice idea, but right now the villagers mostly say some variation on "I eagerly await the valiant hero's return!". Beside the fact that no villagers would ever speak so formally, this seems to fall into the standard fantasy problem that the normal people in the world only exist to further the hero's agency. Could you give the villagers a sense of their own agency, meaning that they have lives of their own that would continue whether the hero returns or not?
> Could you give the villagers a sense of their own agency, meaning that they have lives of their own that would continue whether the hero returns or not?
Yeah I'm currently considering working that in.
Right now existing game AI techniques can manage giving NPCs a daily routine, and I'm trying to focus on demonstrating something new, VS another solution for an already solved problem. But having NPCs just talk about the hero is boring. I'll likely get around to adding private life stuff for each NPC before I do an announcement and share the project more broadly.
I eagerly await the Skyrim mod!
Jokes aside, this is interesting because I have thought about this since the first time I killed the dragon outside of Whiterun. There is a brief change with the guards nearby where they are wowwed by your feat, but some of the standard NPC responses sneak in and make the immersive aspect of the game shaky, at best.
I always thought, overtime, the honeymoon phase of a hero's deeds would wear off, and the villagers would swing more into a negative mindset, asking things like "who is going to clean this up?" or "how will we be compensated for damage to our homes?" etc. Community disruption tends to devolve into a lot of cynicism about the people in charge, in my experience with everything from natural disasters (obvious negatives) to new urban shopping centers (less obvious negatives). Regardless of what actually changed to disrupt the community, eventually it is perceived as the source of problems.
I'm not a psychologist or civic engineer, so I am not sure if there is a name for the concept I am referring to.
It would be great to give each of the NPC's their own character. For example, some of the NPC's could have a grudge against the hero for reasons of their own. They could be cheering against him for causing such a ruckus in their village, or maybe some "Monday morning quarterback" happening, thinking they could have handled the problem much better than he did. I think an LLM may be pretty good at coming up with some ideas. Or maybe even make it a bit tongue-in-cheek and have some of the NPC's be fans of the hero's enemies.
Having played with the demo a bit I think it's a couple of things:
1 - If you hadn't described your technical choices above I'd think this was just done using normal procedural text generation. Every NPC feels like it's giving the stock phrase they'll say when you run out of dialog options.
2 - There doesn't feel like there is a narrative, reasons to care about these NPCs, reasons to care about the Hero, or some sort of character development over time. If you want to engage people you need to get them to care about what's happening.
This sounds nuts…and exciting. Makes me want to tinker with small models, what a neat concept.
The Berlin immigration office is notoriously slow and unresponsive. The processing time for a residence permit varies from a few weeks to a few months. During that time, people are left unable to work or unable to leave the country. They never know how long it will take, and it causes some people to give up and leave Germany.
I am writing a tool to collect and aggregate data about the processing times. This will help people plan around the delays. Knowing is half the battle.
The biggest challenge is that my readers find me at the start of the process, and I need their feedback at the end of it. I have to make it easy for them to provide partial feedback and complete it later after they get an email reminder.
This would be unnecessary if the immigration office collected and shared that information, but they don’t. They also don’t welcome any help because they “operate at peak efficiency”. I have stopped hoping for their collaboration.
Sweden has the same problems, maybe I could build a similar tool for this market.
I was wondering how you collect and present data? Just self-reported or do you have some API to gather this information?
The immigration office does not collect data about the time it takes to process a case. I am building the infrastructure needed to poll my users at a date in the future.
You are a legend!
I built and am now maintaining a website [0] and open source repository [1] for the hardest sport climbing and bouldering ascents in the world.
Maintenance is mostly updating the underlying data when the strongest climbers in the world scale some random piece of rock.
[0] https://www.hardestclimbs.com/ [1] https://github.com/9cpluss/hardest-climbs
I'm still working on Habitat. It's a self-hosted social platform for local communities. The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet. I want it to be easily installable for those who want to host using docker, and for those who want to host on an EC2 instance or something, because online services for docker hosting are quite expensive, so I've been working recently on ansible setup, and it's proving quite difficult, so if anyone with the experience fancies helping out, I'd be more than happy to receive contributions.
- The idea: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-net...
- A build update and plan: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/
- The repository: https://github.com/carlnewton/habitat
- The project board: https://github.com/users/carlnewton/projects/2
I have been thinking about a similar idea for a few months - a location-focussed social media. But my idea is more like Instagram with an extra location layer. You have a 'local' feed that shows public profiles of people in your area. You can then add those local people to some kind of 'friends' list - they can then see a more private profile, and you see their posts regardless of distance.
The key idea is that you can only add 'friends' if you've actually met them once in real life. So it wouldn't be overrun by celebrities and pseudo-social relationships, influencers, etc. I'm hoping it would foster more local connections - e.g. if someone often runs into a certain person at the same places and has similar interests, maybe they'll add each other as 'friends'.
I have had something similar in mind for a while, but nothing so fleshed out as you have here!
One question; how would you implement identity? I can imagine spam and unwanted content becoming a problem, so maybe a reputation system or network of trust mechanism would be needed?
I like the idea and have been ruminating on something similar myself - starred!
Wife and I tend to plan long, multi-day, multi-destination travel.
Got sick of working in Google Docs and having to manually move days around and re-label dates, shift hotels, etc. Ended up creating Turas.app over a weekend in 2023 (and then let it loose on Reddit). But just recently created the Chrome Extension which feels like it is an even better tool because it lets you access all of the richness of Google Maps. It's a Google Maps powertool for people who like to plan their travel meticulously.
(Completely free and intended to be free forever; we tried to monetize it but realized that there's no reasonable way to do so that we ourselves would be happy with; seriously thinking about just open sourcing it, but needs some cleanup first!)
Extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/turasapp/lpfijfdbgo...
App: https://turas.app
Getting ready to release a big Halloween update for my survival-horror game for the Playdate, Plight of the Wizard[0]. I just added a spell that targets the closest enemy, which was a fun challenge to implement. Performance optimizations for the hardware have been getting tougher to nail down, so I’m spending a lot of time figuring out inefficiencies in my code to target a stable 30 fps. I’m having a lot of fun releasing updates that make the game more fun. But with more refinement comes the desire to add more content and improved art. I’m trying to take it one step at a time.
[0]: https://sotix.itch.io/plight-of-the-wizard
Currently, other than my day job, I am obsessed with making sense of the "shape of stories". Mapping embeddings and see how they move through a sequence.
Started of with [1] which showed that there might be some strength to the idea.
Applied it for chunking [2] and web site analysis[3] and got pretty good results.
Just started trying out experiments on video [4] and surprised that the structure seems to hold for image embeddings as well.
I have no clue if this has any value, but it is fun to go down this rabbit hole :)
[1]https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/the-shape-of-stories-...
[2]https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/a-new-chunking-approa...
[3]https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/using-semantic-chunki...
[4]https://x.com/nutanc/status/1849661242027409723
I'm obsessed with visual space representations of word as well. My application has a test mode where I render an entire dictionary (like, Webster) and then "plays" a book word by word, highlighting the word, then it's definition, and those words definitions and so on and so on, and it creates a trippy and distinct visualization kinda like an audio visualizer.. but with words. We should chat if you're interested in this kinda thing! https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat
This is really cool.
I'm working on scoping out specific problems facing "software as a medical device" (SaMD) companies. In particular issues around being able to release software at a reasonable cadence. I've been a CTO in this space for a couple of years and I am not consulting with other firms around the intersection of tech and regulatory.
It's a tight-rope walk of ensuring that all testing (software and non-software testing) and evidence is produced correctly and being able to release at a rapid pace to derisk each release. It's not uncommon for software to only be updated yearly, leading to very conservative changes and little iteration. Monthly releases are okay, but still not great.
I want to make it possible to release at least weekly and to do so safely.
If you work in this area, I'd love to chat and hear your experiences (email available via my website in bio).
I've been working on the ability to read sky brightness without a sensor.
I've always been interested in stargazing, but had a curiosity about how "good" the stars I was seeing were relative to conditions in other places on earth.
I'm working to answer that by doing inference of the value a SQM would get you, but over H3 cells in a geojson file, and then reporting on the cell with the highest reading during the last iteration over the set of H3 cells.
https://github.com/nonnontrivial/ctts
A few years ago, I made a silly little platforming game for my wife that was holiday-themed (Thanksgiving). Since then, I've tried to create at least one new sequel each year for a different holiday.
This year, I'm doing one for Halloween. They only take a few hours to make, but are a fun little thing for me to enjoy making and her to enjoy playing.
I'm close to finishing out a practice planner for basketball coaches, specifically I'm excited about the drills library. Youth coaches today tend to source drills from all over the internet (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc) so having one central place to refer to them is going to really help.
I'm happy with the way the UI is turning out (https://www.threads.net/@lookitsjordanmorgan/post/DAwU2bNS4O...)
Pretty sure no one will see this so: I'm working on a little game where you collect those really old T206 baseball cards and even worked out a system where you can send cards to people offline using a code system like Animal Crossing on the GC used
Still haven't come up with a fun way for the player to collect them though
It'd limit the audience and involve a lot of work but maybe by co-ordinates? Bundle a bit of a walking tour of the team's history into the collecting process
I'm working on making a physical console for the Pico-8. Its pretty simple, works on linux booted into kiosk mode, looks for when a 3.5" floppy is inserted or removed, and loads or closes the game via a shell script.
I want it to be like a C64-style keyboard with all the guts inside it but wirelessly connect to the display/tv, so what I might do is use an ESP32 to read the game floppy and wirelessly transfer and cache the file to a dongle that plugs into an open HDMI port. Not sure yet.
I’ve been working on a bespoke smartwatch for kids with Type 1 diabetes & their parents. The watch presents reliable CGM data and not much else, so the only distractions from the watch are important medical alerts. It has a novel haptic algorithm that taps at a frequency based on the current BG trend, the idea is the wearer can develop a sixth-sense of their BG without looking at the watch at all. The entire watch is custom-made from the PCB up. I have a small batch of prototypes assembled and my son has been wearing his at school. I have a few screenshots up at my product studio website: https://subtractive.computer
I’m considering how to take the watch to market as-is, or if I pivot the watch to be a fully open-source Pebble successor.
I'm building a collator robot [0] to help me pack items I sell for building your own open source split-flap mechanical display [1].
I get custom character flaps printed and die-cut in bulk and then sell them in smaller sets. A full set of flaps for one module has 52 distinct designs (letters, numbers, symbols, etc) and I get them from the manufacturer grouped by design, so they need to be collated to sell as packs of 52 with 1 of each design.
My WIP robot will take a stack of one design and distribute them to a bunch of cubbies, then I'll swap in the next design, and so on, so each cubby ends up with a full set.
It's based on a cheap ~$110 CNC gantry frame from AliExpress and a ~$35 BTT SKR Pico 3d printer main board running GrblHAL. To detect whether the flaps feed successfully I use a visible light break-beam sensor (the typical IR sensors don't work because the PVC flaps happen to be IR transparent!) which acts as the "z probe" - the flap is fed via a G38.3 probe action which returns whether the probe was successful or not, and the "z" coordinate it was first detected.
I have a python script running on a computer to send the gcode to the machine.
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/scottbez1.bsky.social/post/3l737hme...
[1] https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap
November is my last working month! I'm giving entrepreneurship a try to solve a huge problem: phone overuse.
It's been busy:
- Reading books, currently "The Mom Test"
- Looking for a startup community and being disappointed with what my city has to offer
- Deciding between VC vs. bootstrapping, and taking a firmer stance to try the latter first. This includes rejecting ODF.
- Talking with like-minded people. I now have a better understanding of what the MVP should look like.
Receiving so much support has been very encouraging; I announced it more publicly at https://nullderef.com/blog/quit-job-2024/
It's scary. But working has never been so fun!
As I suffer from phone overuse, I'm excited to see what you'll come up with!
Thank you! What have you tried so far?
I've tried setting timers for certain apps, but I find myself deactivating them again and again. In the past, I've had phones that allowed me to lock myself out for an hour, which worked but was a bit annoying when I had to do something else on the phone. I wish I could lock myself out of certain apps for certain time periods with no way of deactivating it outside these time periods, e.g. Instagram, Reddit or youtube only allowed between 8PM and 10PM. Another problem is the urge to immediately grab the phone whenever I have nothing to do. I've had success putting the phone in a bottom drawer turned off over the weekend, but that's not always feasible. Perhaps some training would be helpful, or an app that would gamify the aspect of not constantly unlocking your phone.
Thank you for sharing - it's really hard to fight human psychology. Did you try to download apps to control screentime? There are already some solutions out there, though none of them are perfect.
The closest thing to training I've found is this: https://datadetoxkit.org/en/wellbeing/essentials/. But what worked best for me was paying more attention:
- First, I'm now aware that phone overuse is an issue. This wasn't obvious a year ago, even though I used it even more.
- Analyze my usage patterns. For example, I'd get a message on some app, open it, and end up doomscrolling. It helped me to change my notification settings so that I only get emails. That way, I can check it on the computer later, where I usually waste less time.
- I agree that gamifying is a good idea. It's precisely the main feature of the app I'm working on. Not only that, but building a "community": I started to talk about this problem with friends and learned from them. It also makes me more accountable; my girlfriend will nudge me to leave the phone alone if I'm stuck, for example.
Getting a (useful) notification and drifting off to other stuff is definitely a problem. Interestingly, a smart watch has helped me with that. I now read notifications on the watch, and about 75% of the time I don't have to take out my phone anymore.
Check out these guys: https://www.instagram.com/theoffline_club/
Thank you! I also discovered https://tacticaltech.org/ recently. Talking with these existing orgs will help a lot :)
Im working on a platform for people to run their social hobbies and activities. Organize meetups, find when to meet, run ticketed events. for free! I use it myself to organize my weekly cycling group of friends and friends of friends.
Paid stuff coming very soon, just onboarding some groups and get some feel
https://embers.club/en
Love the landing page and the Swedish city references :) I'm working on something similar, actually, but in the lunch/dinner niche. It's a nice feeling to build something that you actually use yourself to meet other people, but I find it's hard to scale beyond that. What are the major features you're missing before making it an open sign up?
Btw for ticketed events, I've seen that https://posh.vip has been growing pretty quickly for music performers.. maybe some inspiration for you there.
Thanks! We are Swedish so it comes naturally :)
oh thats interesting! thanks for that. been working in Music Tech, but havent seen that one. seen that https://shotgun.live/ , https://dice.fm/ and also https://partiful.com/ are being popular in the states.
nothing really, we're just fixing most of the kinks and legal / tax things. you're free to try it https://embers.club/en/login
I love your landing page :)
Thank you! I got some pushback on sparkling Karl Marx but I will never remove it
Autopilot for my sit-on-top fishing kayak. Designed, modeled, and printed an assembly which attaches to the rudder rod. Moves the rod via a stepper motor connected to a Teensy 4.0 which gets NMEA 2000 messages from a Garmin heading sensor and a Garmin fish finder/chartplotter. Uses PID control to maintain any course I set on the chartplotter, using the cross-track error and heading. I’ve had it out on the water a few times now and it works great. Also put together an iOS app that communicates with the assembly via BLE so I can modify the PID gains as needed depending on conditions.
There was a bit of noise to the sonar transducer since the stepper motor was so noisy, but I mostly eliminated it by routing the motor wires through liquid-tight flexible electrical conduit, connecting the conduit to ground.
I built a CNC router table and am enjoying getting a hang of that. I have always wanted to take my software and systems skillset into the physical world.
I wouldn't mind making boutique sim racing/flight gear, or aftermarket car parts like cyberpunk-esque dash readouts and stuff like that.
That's the more hobbyist stuff, and more broadly I am also learning Japanese, and making games. They sound separate but I am hoping to blend the two skillsets and make games that bridge a gap I see there.
I think that good innovation only happens at the intersections of things we already know. That way you have the depth of understanding required to be useful rather than just new.
As I got laid off 2 weeks ago, I finally have the time to work on one of my side projects:
Breathing Tips - a free web app to practice breathing exercises.
Tech stack: Ruby on Rails 7.2, sqlite3, BabylonJS for the 3D visuals, hosting on hetzner for 4$ and deployed with kamal 2
https://breathing.tips
If you’re not into PWAs but would like to get some breathing practice in your daily life, you can also subscribe to the YouTube channel where I plan to share mostly shorts of the same exercises
https://youtube.com/@breathingtips
I am working to deploy some remote sensors on my farm to help keep an eye on important infrastructure. Things like voltages, bin fill, water levels and other resource management. I may just add a weather station for fun.
Meshtastic is helping out but if anyone knows where to find stronger documentation that would help.
An app to collect memories easily. You capture vocal notes, which are transcribed & corrected with AI.
As a father, I wanted to capture all the little moments of our day-to-day family life to later share with my grown-up children. However, I did not have the discipline to journal regularly. So, I made Memzy to capture them easily on the fly!
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/memzy-easy-journaling-with-ai/...
I'm not doing anything world changing really, at least not yet.
I am working on my MS in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance from Western Governor's University and studying for the CompTIA CySA+ exam.
In what little free time I do have, I'm also puttering around with SwiftUI and my app CountDownula, which I recently updated to Swift 6. I made it to scratch my own itch after looking for a nice clean, simple, free countdown to a specific date app that doesn't have any ads, subscriptions, or in app purchases and not finding anything suitable. It supports iOS and macOS with iCloud sync between all your account's devices using SwiftData. The link is below if you're looking for something similar...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/countdownula/id6479545149
I'm experimenting with an AI assisted world building / story telling tool: https://youtu.be/OGkSI3VfxRU . The idea is to do kind of what Cursor is doing for programming; accelerate the creative process (rather than replacing it).
Working on open source local first learning social network (kind of like Notion but as social network with elements of Reddit for topics).
https://github.com/learn-anything/learn-anything
Heard your project mentioned recently on the localfirst.fm podcast, and that you use the Jazz framework. Interesting stuff!
An "offline-first" client web app for Github. I don't want to have to wait seconds to load up an issue, and then wait seconds (or keep another tab open) to go back to the list of issues/PRs, ...etc. I want everything to feel instant, with optimistic updates, and a backend sync process that doesn't require me to refresh the page to see new updates.
(Small note: I'm doing it in full-stack Rust, including web frontend, using leptos).
I've also had this idea in the back of my mind. A few weeks I ago downloaded the official Github client without really thinking, on the assumption that obviously that's what it would do. Only to be sorely disappointed.
Good luck, I look forward to this existing!
It's motivating to hear others think similarly! Thanks for the encouragement.
Hey guys! We're engineers/designers from France, and we've built the Ultimate DIY Battery that you can repair and refill!
Ride Sustainably with the World's First Repairable Battery
Refillable in 5 minutes (just buy $150 worth of new cells every 3 years or so, when they're depleted)
Be Worry-Free thanks to the Fireproof Casing! There's been waaaaaay too many lithium fires!
It's launched as an IndieGogo (the product already exists, but as a startup IndieGogo is convenient to get the cash upfront to buy the parts and build the batteries) and there is an offer for early-backers here https://get.gouach.com for a 25% discount on the battery!
Building a machine learning framework from scratch to learn how everything works. There exists a myriad of hobbyist frameworks from before, all of them in Python, so to add something original I'm doing it in VBA (for the extra challenge):
https://github.com/personalityson/VBANN
Still working on my Hetzner Auction price tracker: https://radar.iodev.org/
First time I'm building a proper website, used a lot of AI. Things that changed over last time: * Switched the charting library from D3 to Apex. D3 was too low-level for my purpose. * Reworked the design and contents of a lot of pages (with the help of AI). * Various bugfixes for the database queries. * Tried to come up with some kind of pricing signal detection, but currently not working well. * Link to the actual auction results. * Minimal E2E validation using Playwright. What a pleasure to use!
I'm planning to add alerting. Not keen on running a backend though.
I'm working on helping my wife get her print-on-demand Shopify store off the ground. She designs the products herself, but ran into challenges with SEO. So, I built a custom app that connects to her Shopify store via API, using GPT-4o-mini to handle SEO optimizations—things like generating descriptions, titles, alt text, SEO-friendly URLs, and more, all based on the product images.
There were also issues syncing with Google Merchant Center (missing colors, categories, etc.), so I tweaked the app to auto-fill these fields using GPT-4o, making it compliant with Google and Pinterest requirements.
I’m completely new to SEO and just tried following best practices to fix things as they came up. Now I’m learning that SEO keywords change constantly, so I’m thinking of integrating a keyword provider to dynamically enhance our product descriptions.
I never realized running an e-commerce store (especially print-on-demand) would involve so much operational work on the marketing front. I’d appreciate any advice on what to tackle next, especially since my goal is to avoid “subscription hell” with multiple Shopify apps. My wife is also just starting with ads and campaigns, diving into tutorials to learn the ropes.
Any guidance is welcome!
Being in my early 30s and moving to a new city, I have been thinking more about ways to connect with people in real life. A friend of mine remarked that no one seems to get lunch anyone, so we kind of thought it would be a great idea to try and bring back the modern power lunch.
We created Milieu Club https://joinmilieu.com as a way to connect with other busy professionals in your city over lunch as nice restaurants. You can join clubs in your city or create your own, and then you get randomly watched with 3 - 5 other people and invited to lunch. It's sort of inspired by Soho house, meetup.com, and Opentable.
I'm trying to prevent anyone from ever dropping a table in production again or executing a delete without a where clause.
https://github.com/kviklet/kviklet
Essentially a PR review flow for production access, which allows you to enforce a second pair of eyes workflow. I was always a bit scared when I was on call and had all the power in my finger tips to ruin everyone's day. I think this helps alleviate the risk of human error significantly. Also helps with compliance of course.
Building https://proofofskill.org
Hiring today is completely broken. We spend too much time evaluating candidates through inefficient systems that fail to verify job-specific skills. Both organizations and candidates are stuck in an endless loop of repetitive assignments and interviews.
That’s why we built the Proof-of-Skill Protocol.
The protocol allows candidates to prove their skills directly to industry experts, known as Skill Validators, and receive Proof-of-Skill credentials that reflect their true skill levels. Organisations can then compare and shortlist candidates basis their proof-of-skill.
We launched our Beta for UI/UX design skills just last week!
I don't have a link for it yet, but I am working on using an HCL-like syntax to write CI pipelines. Ideally it would function a lot like dagger but written a lot like terraform.
The main problems that I want to solve are the really slow feedback loop of complex GitHub Actions / GitLab CI, but without the limitation of having to run it within another CI provider.
Building a pneumatic long-range candy dispersal device (candypult) to launch Halloween candy from my garage door to the street. As is the case for many of us around here, I get bored of making digital tools and want to build something in meatspace. I'm trying to use as much material I already own as possible, so building out of leftover metal framing and old decking.
Trick-or-treating at a door is so last decade; trying to catch a Snickers hurtling towards you in the darkness is the future.
I’m building a way for developers to easily deploy open source applications (Postgres, redis, sentry, elastic search, etc), plus have a full heroku like workflow for their own applications, all within their kubernetes cluster, with what I hope is a super intuitive and friendly UI.
I’ve ran a start up and saw how SaaS-ified and expensive web tooling is (heroku, datadog, redshift, fivetran, etc), but how difficult it was to move off of them. We had a few years of over 1 million in infrastructure spend.
I’m hoping just making Kubernetes easier to use gives us a way out.
It’s fully open source and a hosted version is free to use! https://canine.sh.
Would love feedback on it, including how the overall pitch could be better, or if it actually solves people’s problems.
I can't find any pricing info on that page except "Get started for 1$$" and then it wants me to sign in. No thanks. I'd like to know what I'm getting into before signing up.
I cant access the github repo for some reason
whoops! Made it private, facepalm should be fixed now
I've been working on a note-taking tool / daily todo-app: https://crom.ai/ - Currently in closed beta. It uses basic markdown and some additional custom elements to annotate data.
The idea is that you get a daily for every day, with the items ticked off on the last day removed. So a new daily every day. At the same time, there is some integration with AI to get feedback on things to break down. You can give it some instructions, focus, and also tune the amount of feedback.
I've had this in so many incarnations before, but never made it 'properly'. It's a pet project, but do want to release it at some point.
I'm adding people to the beta bit-by-bit.
FYI on Firefox mobike the page content is cut off on the left side.
Checking! TY
Working on an AI to generate SVG vector images.
SVGs are awesome and currently unrepresented in the diffusion-based model landscape. We have something that produces pretty great results and we're working on the next version which should be even better.
https://vectorart.ai
Something like this is desperately needed, keep up the work. One thing that I immediately noticed is that all downloads are named "download.svg". A more descriptive name would be helpful.
Edit: Also, copying the SVGs to the clipboard would be nice. Download from the browser still sucks, and with web based SVG editors (like my own one, www.hyvector.com ) people can quickly edit the generated SVGs without having to go through the downloading and uploading process.
Great feedback, thanks!
Website requires signup.
I wanted to to make a PoC (Proof of Concept) to show genuinely good and original use of AI in gaming. I found a gameplay loop that requires the user to understand what was meant by a generated image, and the main gameplay element is to argue something, to have real language-based interactions. I think in some ways it is achieving some of the vision from the old interactive fiction games.
I understand the AI fatigue, as almost all of the proposed uses of AI in gaming are generally either random generation (in other words, procedural generation but worse) or 'better replies from NPC'. Neither solve any problem people really have. And probably more importantly, the other use is for mega-corporations to hire less competent programmers/artists.
Unfortunately being tied to the AI calls poses a lot of issues with distribution, which is annoying for what was supposed to be a glorified PoC. I'm still finishing the backend to comply with Steam's review (which does not really match their guidelines...)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3248650/JOBifAI/
Knitting hats. The fall/winter is when I bury myself in knitting projects to fight seasonal depression and cabin fever. Audiobook + knitting == bliss.
The work most of us do isn't tangible. You have nothing to "prove" that you made something. Creating something in meat space is really rewarding.
I'm also knitting! Working on my very first cardigan.
I'm working on a social network based around link sharing!
One of the core ideas is that rather than following a whole person, you can follow a subset of their tags so someone can post about obscure cheeses and ambient electronic, but lactose intolerant you can just follow the music. Or you can follow someone's tech posts but not follow news of their dysfunctional city.
Honestly a lot of it is resurrecting ideas from earlier days in the web like Digg and Delicious, and despite having the idea for ages and having worked on it for a decent while, it's only getting more relevant as the web gets more algorithmic and external links get demoted in sites like Twitter.
The aim is to bring more curation and humanity back to the web, and the next feature I'm really excited to get out is one to make in-person conversations even better!
It's already live @ lynkmi.com and if it's of interest to you, you can sign up to the waitlist (it's very short)
This kind of reminds me of Google Circles where you would group people into areas of interest. I always thought that idea was really good and should’ve been pursued further.
Aw yes! I absolutely loved Google+ and was very sad it got shut down. Thanks for reminding me about that!
I'm developing a pipeline to sync underwater passive acoustic audio with whale sightings around the hydrophones, to then classify that audio using Google's open sourced whale models. The goal is to enrich data from happywhale.com with whale voices, so scientists can further explore communication of these species. I'm trying to keep things as system-agnostic as possible, but am building the first implementation to run on GCP.
https://github.com/pmhalvor/whale-speech
http://tolvera.is
Tölvera is a Python library designed for composing together and interacting with basal agencies, inspired by fields such as artificial life (ALife) and self-organising systems. It provides creative coding-style APIs that allow users to combine and compose various built-in behaviours, such as flocking, slime mold growth, and swarming, and also author their own.
With built-in support for Open Sound Control (OSC) via iipyper and interactive machine learning (IML) via anguilla, Tölvera interfaces with and rapidly maps onto existing creative computing software and hardware, striving to be both an accessible and powerful tool for exploring diverse intelligence in artistic contexts.
Tölvera has been selected for Mozilla's first Builders Accelerator! Read the announcement:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/14-ai-projects-to-watch-...
I'm working on a more general purpose programming language called "Pear", rather than the DSL I wrote before called "runny" (a Make/Just equivalent).
I want it to have a more concise syntax (no keywords, fewer characters) but feel familiar to most programmers. All definitions use square brackets in combination with some other set of characters.
e.g.
``` [myFunc](arg1,arg2){ ?(true){ #do something }{ #do something else } } ```
To get some experience launching webapps that can be put into the play store and play around with image generation models, prompting, I am building an app to generate application/corporate photos from a few non-professional selfies.
Tech stack is probably FastAPI (I mainly know python) and likely nuxt/ionic (none/not much experience). Not sure how the whole hosting, interaction with replicate/huggingface will work on phone apps, payments on stripe without having a company, how to make the webapp into a phone app, etc. It should be a great learning project with the first time scoring an actual sale! Happy to hear early guidance if people have done similar things with python backgrounds to get started.
Building http://tryskipper.ai/
I built a Slack bot that converts your Slack conversations to detailed Jira tickets in seconds.
Our team needs to routinely convert Slack convos into tickets manually, and it gets tedious and repetitive. Automating scribbled requirements to a ticket has been a big time saver. It's like I have a Jira assistant now.
Learning some more ATS2 while 3 isn’t yet released. Cool language with linear types (which go further than Rust’s affine types), refinement types, dependent types, proofs & dataviewtypes over C for zero-cost abstractions.
I am spending my retirement working part-time on a realistic spacecraft simulator (3D, VR) set in the late 20th century on a fictional moon made of Tungsten ("Tungsten Moon"). For some reason, I decided the spacecraft needs a "real" flight computer with code that can be modified by the player, so I am now deeply immersed in coding a Forth virtual computer ("AMC Forth") to run in-game. It will control the navigation and systems on the spacecraft. If you've gotten this far, and you're intrigued, you can try the free demo on Steam (no Forth machine yet).
A random chat bot for Telegram! https://telegle.vercel.app/
I've been obsessed with developing ways to make it easier to handle tab overload in the browser without requiring any sort of active "tab management".
I have a working extension that replaces the "new tab" page with a clean view of all open tabs, along with simple ways to search and select which tab to switch to, including search over bookmarks and history. There are also some simple tools to allow for creating and reorganizing tab groups.
I'm very early and looking for feedback from anyone who suffers from tab overwhelm like I do! You can try it out at http://bit.ly/tab-o-magic!
this looks really good, and super useful any plans on making it available for ff?
Thanks for the positive feedback! I'm testing interest on chrome, and, if it finds traction, I will definitely port it to be browser-agnostic. It _should_ be pretty straightforward.
This is crazy and very useful for organising the tabs. You need to do some work on the ui/ux part.
Please tell me any thoughts you have! If email is better: tabomagic22 at gmail.com
I am working on the Vanta for sustainability and climate disclosures. Climate and sustainability disclosures are starting to come online in many sectors and parts of the world. We offer compliance-as-a-service so that startups and covered entities can fulfill their compliance requirements in a mostly self-serve manner without having to hire expensive consultants or undergo significant restructurings. Our platform provides a single source of truth for your climate, sustainability, and emissions data. For example, if you are an American company trying to go-to-market in Europe, all it takes is purchasing an additional module and we will automatically generate the compliance documents and checklists for you based on the existing data we have on your company. We also offer managed “Climate Trust Center” dashboards that you can subdomain on your website for investors reporting and to satisfy disclosure requirements.
If you are in an EPA-regulated (or equivalents in Canada and Europe) industry (such as mining, oil and gas, minerals, rare earths, metal processing, airlines, construction, shipping/marine, logistics, heavy industries, agriculture/farming/food production, data center, power generation including renewables, adjacent ones like consumer goods, real estate, large scale AI training, climate derivatives etc.) or require sustainability consulting support in general, we would love to talk to you: hello@carbonimpacthq.com (put “HN:” in the subject line so we know where you are coming from)
https://carbonimpacthq.com (the landing page is still a work-in-progress but you can check out our blog for more information https://carbonimpacthq.com/esg-and-your-business/)
I've been working on a new LLM prompt format and accompanying dataset for finetuning.
The idea is that the "main character" being prompted always has to perform an action/function. So even "saying" something to the other participants of the chat is a deliberate action.
Actions can be something like:
The LLM then has to respond, like so: The JSON overhead is pretty negligible.Building https://videojam.co
Creating launch/hype videos for your product is hard. It's expensive if you go through an agency or a freelancer. You could DIY it with Adobe After Effects, but it takes a whole set of motion design and video editing skills!
That's why I built VideoJam, an easy-to-use video builder for startups, solo entrepreneurs, and hackers. Create your video in no time - no video editing skills required. You can create product videos from scratch, with ready-made scene templates, or using entire video templates.
I just launched this week, any feedback is very welcomed. Also, don't hesitate to reach out if you want to try at no cost during the beta.
I am working on an email-based space game (a la Eve Online).
Between work and family responsibilites, I find it difficult to carve out time for dedicated gaming sessions anymore. As a result, I often find myself searching for games that I can play when I have a bit of time, can progress over the long-haul, doesn't require real-time monitoring and yet feels like I'm actually playing a game (as opposed to just watching a train move on the track, like all of those Idle games).
I thought: What if there was a game that could be played one day at a time? Not real-time, but still multiplayer. You could decide what you want to do throughout the day and adjust your tactics, but everything resolves at the end of the day. What if you could play via email? It sounded really intriguing, and so I started building it.
I've been working on an app to help VvEs* in the Netherlands self-manage.
For about a year, I was trying to get our VvE management company* to take care of major issues we have in our building's crawl space. We had an inspection done, but even after about seven months of constantly nagging them, they failed to get a single quote for the work that the crawl space needs. I called our manager, and he essentially yelled at me for twenty minutes and was not shy to express his anti-immigrant sentiments (I'm American).
Because of this, I'm now on a mission to get this company fired and take management into our own hands, which will save us a bunch of money. The existing VvE management tools are ugly, slow, and unnecessarily complex, so I'm building my own.
It's only been a month, so I haven't hosted it yet (still coming up with a name, to be honest), but I have made good progress functionality-wise. If anyone in the Netherlands is part of a small VvE and wants to chat, let me know! My email is my username (@gmail).
* The US equivalent would be an HOA (Homeowner's Association). Basically, a corporation that is responsible for the upkeep of shared resources for homeowners (e.g. the roof of a building or the pool in a gated community).
** Many VvEs choose to outsource management of the VvE to a third party. These companies—in theory—take care of maintenance requests, yearly meetings, voting, etc. From everything I've read online, almost none of these companies satisfy their clients.
I quit my job and depleted savings earlier this year to work on helping others overcome addictive habits and behaviors https://neurtureapp.com
Addiction is rampant right now, from social media and phones to vaping and beyond. People need access to science/research-based resources, not just a “sober” counter, which doesn’t apply to many people and is rarely helpful to those it applies to.
Working with a behavioral scientist and a clinical psychologist on the UX and content of the app at the moment but any thoughts, feedback, connections, or help would be amazing.
Not exactly what I'm currently working on, as it got released last week, but...
I gathered many of my bash scripts and aliases, focused on making use of Android Debug Bridge (ADB) easier, together into a single collection[0]. The wiki page has visuals and more information on functionality[1].
Then starting a new project this week around gathering and displaying information on air quality in Iceland.
[0]: https://github.com/hrafnthor/adb_helper
[1]: https://github.com/hrafnthor/adb_helper/wiki/ADB-Helper-wiki
Looking forward to see that project on air quality.
I am working on a geography game where players take turn naming a city inside an area that get's smaller and smaller. It's called LOLA (longitude latitude) since you can choose to narrow the area down by either longitdude or latitude.
https://lola-game.com/
It is probably not substantial among the projects people have commented on this thread, but I am happy to be working on my first personal website made from plain old HTML and simplecss.
Learning how to arrange things, navigation, and my own blog on my own site gives me the gratification of owning something fully. Everyone should have their own site is truly what I agree with.
https://spacesanjeet.me
My daughter loves creating things — art, books, videos etc. She's shown an interest in learning to code, but she's only six, and I don't want learning to code to be a chore. So I've built visual scripting into her favourite game!
Overcooked is a co-op series that fundamentally requires the control of multiple characters to progress. I've kept multiplayer as an option, since teamwork is an important part of the game. However, I've replaced the 2nd player with a bot that you program to assist you.
It's still experimental at this stage. However, I've experience leading EdTech engineering departments and my wife is a teacher at my daughter's school. If my daughter's peers show interest I'll go ahead and build a course around this for primary school aged children.
I've been working on a site that helps you find in-person work in NYC that is actually convenient: https://walkablework.com
After working on a remote startup for a few years I felt very isolated and that the best startups are going to have a strong in-person presence. Now many larger companies have started implementing return to office policies that unfortunately don't make sense for a lot of employees. I wanted a site like this to exist to give people the power to find hybrid/in-person work that they don't mind commuting to.
Let me know if you have any feedback or want to post a job!
Neat! The neighborhood on this post doesn’t match the map though https://www.walkablework.com/map?company=hatchet&title=found...
Thanks for flagging - just updated the neighborhood!
I just finished adding UDP GRO & GSO support to my WireGuard proxy software. The work involved rewriting a large part of the program.
https://github.com/database64128/swgp-go
For those who don't know, UDP Generic Receive Offload and Generic Segmentation Offload allow you to receive and send multiple same-sized UDP packets coalesced in a single buffer (or many in an iovec but you really shouldn't). Compared to calling sendmsg(2) on individual packets, sending them coalesced in one call traverses the kernel network stack exactly once, thus has significantly lower overhead.
wireguard-go and many QUIC implementations use the same trick to improve throughput. Unfortunately the in-kernel WireGuard driver does not take advantage of UDP GSO, and swgp-go had to cope with that by attempting to coalesce multiple unsegmented messages received in a single recvmmsg(2) call.
I'm making read-it-later app that truly works offline and does not require any servers.
https://github.com/jonocodes/savr-android/
Currently dogfooding the mobile PoC, and working on some of the desktop parts.
I'm developing an implementation of what I call Hydra – Multi-Head Prediction Embeddings [1], which I believe represents the next evolution in transformer architectures.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381009719_Hydra_Enh...
I’ve been working on open sourcing a background jobs library I built for Rust and Postgres, called Underway.[0] Unlike other similar queuing libraries, it offers a simple “step” functions API for defining dependent units of work.
I built this because a number of projects I work on need a robust, resilient way of deferring work but I didn’t want to add another piece of infrastructure or another language to my stack. Plus as soon as you start to reach for APIs that offer some kind of workflow concept, your options become fewer and further between.
[0]: https://github.com/maxcountryman/underway
I am teaching myself how to build a robot quadruped (aka 'robot dog') from scratch, including an ML controller to make it move in animated ways.
I'm also documenting every step of the process and uploading it to YouTube, which means I am also teaching myself how to edit videos :)
If anyone wants to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL55VZ7oDEoRnXKSYTiGlN...
I am playing around with LLMs and Game Theory. Currently, I let them play 5x5 board games in a tournament against Reinforcement Learning Agents and a Random Player. I am capturing the "thoughts" of the agent for behavioral data analysis. My background is Risk Management, I am trying to gather an understanding how such LLMs report their "decision" for applications in human/ai interactions for identifying and reporting governance flaws.
Since I am working on autonomous agents that are given the agency to take an action on their own, I believe having a good understanding of the "psyche" is important (at least to me).
[1]https://jdsemrau.substack.com/
Been working on our startup laudspeaker (an alternative to firebase cloud messaging) [1] as well as trying to write more! I like science fiction thrillers similar to what michael crichton used to write and have been working on a story called Panopticon around encryption, spycraft, and three letter agencies [2]
[1] https://laudspeaker.com/ , https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker [2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VRI4X5fCUpwurUDvKmvzJpT7...
I'm still working on my first self designed PCB. It's nothing special, just a temperature and humidity sensor using esp32. I started it to teach myself more about PCB design and embedded programming. Yesterday I published a blog article on it. https://www.felixmaurer.de/blog/2024/10/27/building-an-iot-s...
This is something similar to what I've been working on. Currently designing a HAT for a Raspberry Pi that includes temp/humidity sensor as well as particle matter (PMS5003). Trying to end up with my own personal weather station which I'll then publish to a small web app.
First pcb is always special. Good luck
I started to pick up a somewhat dormant side project again.
It has the working title of the "Wise Weasel". This is supposed to be a minimum spoiler hint system for adventure games. I really don't like walk throughs telling you to "Walk into the Armor Shop. Pick up mirror, arrows and use cheese on hole to pick up mouse", because that breaks all immersion and puzzle mindset. A hint system is more like "You can burn rope if you focus light a bit", followed e.g. by "But now the beam of light is on the floor, not on the rope. How do we reflect light around" to nudge the player a bit into a direction of looking for a mirror or something shiny. Or to polish something? This keeps one in the mindset of an adventure and a puzzle game, opposed to some IKEA instructions.
NiceGameHints[1] is already nice at this, but I find that the chapter / puzzle list still gives off to much information and spoils too much plot. I'm much rather tinkering with giving the user some word cloud of both words describing the puzzles as well as generic words on top, so they have to select two words what they are stuck with. For example, you'd select "Witch + House" or "Witch + angry" and this would reveal a puzzle "The angry witch doesn't talk to me and turns me to stone if I enter her house". I'm just worried that this might be more moon logic than the game itself.
It's mostly a bit difficult to keep all of this state (unlocked chapters, known puzzles, ...) in track with URLs or cookies or something, because I don't really want to run a database... and requiring user accounts is just a lot of work. And I'd prefer to keep this mostly without JS as a classical system just rendering HTML. If you have some food for thought there, I'm happy for input. Currently it's just list in URL parameters.
1: https://www.nicegamehints.com - for example https://www.nicegamehints.com/guide/legend-of-skye/part-2/bo....
I am working on dealing with burnout for the first time. I’ve read about it here and thought I understood it, but experiencing it first hand has been difficult. It destroys everything good about life: relationships, hobbies, sleep, and health. I know I am not the only one here going through this and knowing that helps a little.
I'm working on Fuseable [0] - Hosting .NET apps from a zip file.
Think of it like Tiiny host but for .NET
[0] - https://fuseable.net
Note: I'm still ironing out the kinks but it'll be ready for early access shortly.
I'm on my fraternity's alumni board. The chapter has been using spread sheets for everything since I was an active member. Every year, information about recruitment gets lost in the shuffle between officers.
I've been working on a bespoke CRM for them to prevent the spreadsheet rot while providing some helpful visualization and making their data easier to use in the feature. The goal is to make the entire recruitment process self documenting.
Its slowly evolving into a way to keep track of actives and alumni, as well as ways for actives to interact with the recruitment process.
https://greekutils.com
There's also a working demo https://demo.greekutils.com/rush-analyzer/ui/#/
I'm working on a tool to generate and host full stack web apps from prompts (just like everyone else). I'm loving it. Using llms to do as much of my coding as possible, so in a way eating my own dog food, although it's a more developer-driven effort than what the end product will be.
Strange thing is, the most time consuming part of getting this ready for a user facing launch is not the code generating, but all the scaffolding/queues/storage to run it.
Working on my Mill build tool, a new JVM build tool that aims to provide a faster, easier alternative than the status quo tools of Gradle and Maven.
I just gave my first conference talk about it, and response was positive. Hope others find it interesting as well!
https://mill-build.org/mill/index.html
Have you look at BLD? Sits in the same space and has similar criticisms regarding Gradle and Maven.
https://rife2.com/bld
I have! Mill is a lot more thorough, handling things like caching and parallelism for you. BLD is a lot more minimal, which would be fine for small projects but maybe not for larger projects as they grow
I've been working on a cloud gaming service (like Stadia). Wanted to see how far I can get it done using open source, without ready-to-use solutions like Parsec/Moonlight/Sunshine.
It works by running a game in Linux (I use NixOS btw) under Wayland (sway), capturing the frames via Pipewire in form of DMAbufs and passing them to ffmpeg's VA-API encoder (so frames don't leave GPU memory and are encoded on GPU right away), and finally sending encoded packets through WebRTC media stream to a web client. Inputs from a client are sent back to the server via WebRTC data channel and injected into Wayland.
Running the prototype over local network displays zero perceivable latency. (Of course when playing on a remote AWS server the latency is visible as expected). Pleased with the result so far, although it's my first experience with Pipewire, VA-API, and WebRTC, so my implementation is probably far from optimal.
Overall, very impressed by WebRTC - such a powerful thing right in every browser. Continued to be amazed by NixOS - my AWS AMI is NixOS-based and can be built and rebuilt with granular caching, with a single `nix build` command. Also Terraform/OpenTofu - just makes it all possible deploy-wise. So much good stuff exists!
I think you also need to exchange some metadata like screen resolution etc, right ?
My fantasy football team.
Every application that I've worked on has had blind spots, or forgotten lands of code. Things like “how often do people actually use this feature?” …or… “does this code still run every night?”.
I made something to track those things easily.
https://flexlogs.com
And since it's Monday…
I've been working on a little project to be less overwhelmed and get more done each week. It's a super simple productivity idea that starts each week with a new (markdown) file.
https://carpeweekem.com
At first I thought you made a website that gives me an empty Markdown file. But I am glad I downloaded it its actually a pretty nice template.
What are you personally doing with the yearly goals in that file. Are you copy and pasting them from last week, or are you typing them down everytime to re-iterate them (and possibly even modify) ?
Thanks for checking it out!
Yeah, currently I am just copy/pasting the Yearly Goals section over. I want to eventually add a feature to allow someone signed up for the email to edit that part. Then someone could modify that goal section and have it correctly emailed each week.
Carpeweekem looks like a really cool idea! I suppose you exclusively use it for goal tracking and not for ongoing/open To Dos, right? At least if you don't carry over stuff from last week?
Thanks!
A bit of both, sometimes todos have to die I figure, so I just let them fall off the back.
https://josefs-picture-book.brandstetter.io
My son (5y) loves stories with pictures. So I made a small web-app that allows him to record a story idea and it will generate a story + pictures. It will even read it to him.
It was a quick weekend project. I wanted to try v0 and cursor a bit more. And I love how simple it is to use LLMs (structured mode) + DALL-E to build creative things.
Other AI/LLM projects I've recently (~1y) worked on - distill.fyi (professional): auto gen people/company profiles (aka LinkedIn on steroids) - spaarkd.com (professional): create, produce and ship individualized fashion via AI/LLM - email categorizer: used multimodal LLMs to read email + attachments and categorize them (complaint, sign up, signed form, cancellation,...) - line-items.com (hobby): converts receipts into JSON
PS: I'm currently job hunting. Please see my profile for more :)
I'm doing an experiment in wring a visual novel with assist of generative ai. So far it's lots of fun.
I am the maintainer of beanborg (https://github.com/luciano-fiandesio/beanborg), a set of scripts for automated categorization of financial transactions on top of beancount. Using plaintext accounting in the last 5 years has dramatically improved my family's financial health. Unfortunately, plaintext accounting is not for everyone.
I noticed that there is a big gap in this space, especially for European users. There are several personal finance applications, but they seem to integrate mostly with US banks and, in general, they seem to be very dollar-centric.
So, I'm working on a simple app to manage personal finance, based on the concept of double-entry accounting with features like budgeting, projections and data analysis. There are a lot of privacy-related considerations, so for the time being I will eat my own dogfood and offer it to close friends. Let's see how it goes!
I'm currently working on Mockoon, an API mocking tool. It's an open-source project that I've been relentlessly improving over the past 7 years. I decided to build a SaaS/cloud offering to help finance my work on the project. I'm solo bootstrapping, and revenues are slowly growing. It's not the easiest path, but definitely worth it!
https://mockoon.com
I created KopiMap (https://kopimap.com) to help people discover great cafés in Jakarta Indonesia, but I wanted to take the UX further by automatically organizing user-submitted photos into meaningful categories (menu, food/drinks, ambiance).
The challenge is how to classify images as cost efficient as possible without compromising performance. I decided to go with running ML models on the client-side.
Technical implementation: - Built and trained a compact TensorflowJS model (~3MB) that runs entirely in-browser - Model lazy loads only when users are submitting reviews - Classifies uploaded photos into Menu, Food & Drink, or Vibes (interior/exterior) - Zero server costs for inference, quick enough classification feedback
This approached solved several problems: 1. Reduced server costs by moving inference to the client 2. Improved UX with immediate photo categorization 3. Maintained app performance by lazy loading the model
Would love feedback from the HN community on: - Optimizing the model size further - Alternative approaches to client-side ML - General UX improvements for local discovery apps
I had no prior ML experience, so this was a fun challenge :)
Still working on https://klev.dev
More concretely, as a primarily backend engineer, I'm trying to update the main site, to make it nicer and work better on mobile devices.
Working on an essay as to why coding interviews are harmful:
http://dgt.is/coding-interviews
Inspired by Heart of Clojure, and especially Jeaye Wilkerson and his talk about jank-lang, I’ve dusted off my toy Clojure compiler that produces 16-bit x86 code.
I’ve fixed the handling of global environment, to the point where I’m able to compile a program that prints out the result of multiplying two numbers [0]. Sounds trivial, but seeing as the compiler has no dependencies and targets bare metal, there’s quite a lot of moving parts under the hood. I’m excited!
Right now I’m adding rudimentary support for strings. My goal is to get it to compile itself, but that’s still a far future. Extrapolating from the current development pace, maybe I’ll get it done in 2050? :)
[0]: https://mastodon.social/@nathell/113246152187003470
I am working on making stats on financial securities accessible to more people so they can make better trading decisions. This is very much a work in progress.
https://www.statsviz.com/
A big part of this is me learning how to get code into production including infra setup etc. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.
Stack is python, dash/flask, and gunicorn+nginx
After years of lying dormant, I'm reactivating a hacky PHP script to test 'technical SEO' knowledge in the way of a challenge - more aligned to a technical web challenge, with a "SEO" bent more than anything spammy.
I've used this previously as a recruiting test in lieu of any other method to evaluate knowledge.
It's currently brittle and hosted on a RPi in my garage. It also requires a name + email to prevent spamming (and certification if successful), but once I've built some way of moderating access it will be more open.
Happy for HN users to have a go as long as load allows: https://cryptex.site/
I am working on Shepherd.com and trying to reimagine book discovery online.
I just launched the "best books of 2024," where I ask readers and authors to share their 3 favorite reads of the year and make it fun to navigate them by different factors (genres, topics, book club reads, audiobooks, and more coming) -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024
Slowly getting more in place as we grow :)
I'm building a simple app to let friends and loved ones know how you're doing. I know many people in some of the current troubled regions of the world, and whenever a particular event happens it's really nerve-wracking for those of us not there, wondering if our loved ones are okay.
WhatsApp and messenger groups don't work for this kind of thing because 1) people are often members of many different groups that they would have to constantly notify if they were "okay" during a particular event and 2) many troubles in the world are ongoing, and constantly spamming a message group saying "I'm still okay" doesn't work.
My app just lets people hit a single button to tell any interested friends / family that they are safe. They can do this as many times as they like.
Normally I would be worried about premature optimization, what I've been spending extra time making the tech stack initially very performant. It's working for my family but once I deploy to the world I want it to be solid and stable, or it loses a lot of its value.
I am developing a 3D activities visualization tool for Strava (https://paintmove.com/).
My goal is to enhance the visualization and increase performance to reduce animation generation time. Additionally, I want to improve the overall aesthetics by applying colors and designing the paths to resemble a serpentine shape rather than a pipe.
I am working on a collaborative ebook reading app, rather like a sort of online book club.
You can either choose a book from the catalogue (currently just public domain books, but I’d like to expand that out into paid books) or upload your own epub, create a reading group and invite others. Reading progress, highlights, comments and discussions are synced across the group in real-time.
Beyond reading groups, I’ve found it useful for sharing and reading books in my work teams and also for things like sharing the latest position of my daughter’s bedtime story between myself and my wife.
Please do check it out - it’s still very much a work in progress (for example I haven’t finished the landing page copy) but I’d love to hear what you think.
https://www.rdrs.app
I'm building a custom NC manufacturing robot from scratch.
I was unhappy with availability, pricing, and business model (SaaS lock-in) of the existing hardware/software solutions. But to my delight, I noticed that you just need better amplifiers to use 3D printer mainboards for driving industrial stepper motors. Everything is controlled with Gcode, which is just text. And sensors can send back logging messages over the same USB connection.
That means the control software can be just a python script with a little state machine inside :)
Interesting! The use of 3D printer electronics is a great idea as they are cheap(ish) and get reasonable accuracy.
I'm curious what you mean by a custom NC manufacturing robot? A CNC mill?
No, its neither a CNC mill nor a lathe nor a robot arm. It's a specialised machine that automates one production step. But it needs to react to variations in the input work pieces, which is why it needs to be computer-controlled.
Optillm - https://github.com/codelion/optillm
optillm is an OpenAI API compatible optimizing inference proxy which implements several state-of-the-art techniques that can improve the accuracy and performance of LLMs. The current focus is on implementing techniques that improve reasoning over coding, logical and mathematical queries. It is possible to beat the frontier models using these techniques across diverse tasks by doing additional compute at inference time.
This is amazing, thanks for sharing. I'm implementing some of these techniques myself right now, but being able to try out different algorithms and having plugins etc available immediately is really cool! Can't wait to try it out.
How are you dealing with structured outputs?
>How are you dealing with structured outputs?
The models have gotten much better at generating them with just the prompt. I have not implemented strict support for structured output or JSON generation yet. The response from the proxy are all raw text responses.
One way would be to just apply outlines or some library as a plugin to enable structured outputs.
I replaced the frontend of the popular open source Phish streaming website with a new React UI and generated cover art using DALL-E over the last few weeks. Much nicer now, especially on mobile.
https://phish.in
Hey HN!
I’m working on SEOJuice [1], an automated tool for internal linking and on-page SEO optimizations. It's designed to make life a little easier for indie founders and small business owners who don’t have time to dig deep into SEO.
So far, I’ve managed to scale it to $3,000 MRR, and recently made the move from the cloud to Hetzner, which has been a game-changer for cost efficiency. We’re running across multiple servers now, and handling everything from link analysis to on-page updates with a bit more control.
The journey’s been a mix of hands-on coding (and a lot of coffee) and constant optimization. It’s been challenging but incredibly fun to see how much can be automated without compromising on quality.
Happy to chat more about the tech stack or any of the growth pains if anyone’s interested!
[1] https://seojuice.io
Several things:
1. Working on a 'production ready' version of Conal Elliot's 'compiling to categories' for GHC.
2. This is so I can create a vectorizable model of a datalog-based query language I'm building in Haskell.
3. The query engine will be using a version of monadic optimization as outlined on a blog post somewhere
4. The purpose of the query engine is maintenance of large datasets, all the more important with AI these days, but really general purpose.
5. The motivation for this was a low code tool I had built in Haskell almost a decade ago that I abandoned that I'm bringing up to use ghcs web assembly backend and I need a proper query engine for it now.
Other things:
1. Thinking about binary neural networks and how to train them stochastically.
2. Learning about finite element methods for physical modeling and also reviewing my basic topology so I can think more about non discrete math and algebra which I tend to focus on.
3. I'm building a cloud chamber! Because I want to see space particles. Literally for no other reason than I'm obsessed with these devices ever since seeing one at the exploratorium
4. And raising three kids. I don't know how I have time for anything
impressive! On a practical note, do you have any tips for fitting these projects in while being a parent?
I just make incremental progress on a daily basis and don't consider stopping work for a week or two quitting. I work in spurts nd focus entirely on one project a day.
And I get up early.
I'm still working on https://reciperium.com where people can write recipes with a custom language and create forks of other recipes and modify them.
I'm currently working on supporting images on the recipes.
I'm proud of having launched on producthunt and now trying to figure out how to attract more users
It's nice! A few notes: I think, the ability to read the comments of others, who have already cooked a recipe, would be great! Additionally, it would be great to have the possibility to group ingredients, since many times you start with creating two ore three independent mixtures, that you only combine in the end.
My gut feeling, for attracting users, would be to just optimize the recipes to be found by people via search engines. It's great, that you are currently adding images. This is, I think, pretty important for deciding, if I want to cook something or not.
Thanks for the feedback! Really appreciated.
Regarding the comments, I'd really like to implement activitypub on reciperium. To add the ability to follow users and comment on recipes. And to be able to comment and follow from the fediverse. It's a good opportunity for me to explore the protocol.
What do you mean by combining ingredients? You can currently link to other recipes. So if you make a sauce, that can be a recipe on its own, and it can be linked from another recipe. See this for example: https://www.reciperium.com/rodriguezflors/roti
> My gut feeling, for attracting users, would be to just optimize the recipes to be found by people via search engines
That's a good idea, I'm optimizing a bit the search engine now. I've been also thinking of writing a blog
I’ve been putting my mechanical displays to work. Right now I have one displaying date, the current temp, the daily high temp and daily low temp. I created a web socket based serial server that gets messages and writes them to a rs232 usb device. The weather data is a node app that pulls Open Meteo data. Also learned how to make systemd service files to make it start on boot.
https://github.com/EdwardDeaver/WeatherToMechanical
I am working on a parser for org-mode, based on a (PEG) grammar. Still got some reading to do and it is all early stages. There is so much org-mode supports, that I am not sure I will ever make it to fully able to parse all org-mode documents. My idea is, that anyone can later take my grammar and extend it, make better parsers and maybe make org-mode more ubiquitous.
https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/guile-examples/src/com...
I'm working on ways to allow developers and deployers of LLMs to express how and why their overall system is compliant and adversarially robust, and what to do when that's not the case.
Specifically, my team and I are making assurance cases and ontologies that can seamlessly integrate with the system and its guardrails. For example, if you want to deploy some mix of filters underneath a user-facing LLM app, you would able to: 1) express the logic of how they should be deployed and why (e.g., if X=1, then Y, else Z); 2) see how they perform over time and evaluate alternatives; 3) investigate what happened when an attack succeeds; 4) prove to the auditors that you're taking all measures necessary to be robust and compliant with the EU AI Act.
It started as an informal collab early this year, but we have since published a few workshop papers on this concept [1,2]. We're building a Python demo that would show how it all fits together.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09078 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05304
I’m working on a zine. The first issue is on system evals for LLM-driven apps. It’s set in a world where Bear and Fox are opening a cafe with an LLM shoggoth generating custom recipes.
Lots of people just going off of vibes to see if their system is working right. That’s a good start, but you’ll need system evals to systematically improve your app. Like Garry says, “don’t raw dog your prompts. Use system evals”
https://forestfriends.tech
A flat-file (micro)CMS written in Rust, the basic idea would be to make it as easy as possible for content creators to have a web presence without dealing with the nitty-gritty details, and similarly for web designers to be able make themes while treating the CMS itself as a black box mostly.
Grav CMS was inspiration for this project along with various SSG.
But truthfully I wanted to play more with Rust and come up with a solution for making and extending personal websites easily. A page is made up of blocks which are stored and configured in a KDL file, minijinja is used for templating and for writing the page content itself I'm thinking about Djot because it might make it easier to integrate a WYSIWYG editor in the admin area if I aim for Djot instead of Markdown or similar. Also HTMX because I've used it for a simple use-case once and I thoroughly enjoyed it, now I want to see how much I can push it.
Is this the intersection between buzzword-driven development and hype-driven development? Probably, but if all goes well a month or two from now I'll post a Show HN and go into more details. The plan is to open-source the core so that people can easily self-host it themselves if they want to and do local development. In the long-term the plan probably is to offer SaaS-style hosting for the CMS as is the custom.
Finished a project that serves as a launching pad for GoLang HTTP APIs. It does decoding of request parameters into structs using instructions found in tags amongst a bunch of other utilities.
I am learning react-native now. Just finished building a themed components library.
These are for building a simple intelligence platform. Intelligence meaning a way to model entities, events, documents, and the link between them.
I want to use this instead of having thousands of documents on dropbox organized by a random folder hierarchy.
The API part of this project sounds interesting - do you have a sharable repo ?
In my spare time, I am trying to port OpenBMC[0] to the BMC of the Gigabyte MC12-LE0[1], a cheap, workstation/server-class mainboard for AMD's AM4 platform.
Unfortunately, Gigabyte denied my requests to provide me with any details (board schematics/GPIO pinouts) or source code of the (partly GPL-licensed) BMC firmware, etc.), so it's been a tedious uphill battle. However, it is also a great way to learn about (some) electronics and embedded Linux development and associated challenges.
During the past few months, I have overcome the stock firmware AST2500 bootloader and made the board play ball with standard FDIs, have reverse-engineered a workable DeviceTree specification for the hardware, and am now (well, actually, not for the next three weeks or so, due to work :)) in the process of finishing up OpenBMC userspace configuration. Once this is done, and everything works well enough to use OpenBMC as a viable alternative for the stock BMC firmware provided by AMI/Gigabyte, I will try to upstream my work, and OpenBMC will have a very cheaply available AST2500 DevKit/EVB-alternative (of sorts) in its arsenal. (And I should be able to use my mainboard where the crucial OOB management function isn't serviced by Linux 3.14 any more...)
I am looking forward to documenting the lessons learned on my blog some time in the future, too :)
[0]: https://www.openbmc.org/ [1]: https://www.gigabyte.com/Enterprise/Server-Motherboard/MC12-...
A long dormant side project of mine to design a realtime raga [1] detector.
For the uninitiated, it can be roughly seen as detection of a sequence of musical notes. Raga is a term for a particular scale of notes (both ascending and descending).
Until now, this has mostly been in the domain of research and there is a ton of published literature out there. At the very basic level, if you have just voice, it is trivial to apply a pitch detection algorithm like YIN to get a pitch estimate and then analyse the sequence to figure out the raga. This doesn't work as well in a concert setup where speeds are higher due to gamakas, different instruments are used alongside and counterpoint melodies may make the music polyphonic. A lot of papers apply a variety of ML models (neural nets and otherwise) using several different features (cepstrum and mel-cepstrum, pitch distributions etc) with varying results.
So this is an interesting exercise in Signal Processing and Machine Learning. If anyone else is working on or has worked on this, I'd love to hear from you.
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raga)
Building a Nextdoor equivalent for India. Check it out at https://neighar.com
Made a watch face of my Garmin -
https://github.com/jwdeque/Rest-In-Pixels
https://apps.garmin.com/apps/c7ab9e64-cbec-4939-b029-044e9ef...
An email client that just “does the right thing” in terms of showing new emails I care about.
I don’t want to configure filters or adopt inbox zero. I want the computer to look at decades of email activity and just figure it out.
Second, working on a single dashboard for attorneys to create and upload filings across different agencies and different states. Trying to improve accuracy and labor costs for mundane work like this.
(Opinions? Suggestions? Want to work together? Email me!)
yea this is smart. It should be obvious who i communicate with or which emails have an urgency to them.
I'm working on an app that "scans" your grocery receipts and gives you breakdown of what you're spending your money on, e.g:
dairy: 50%, meat: 10%, alcohol: 5%, etc...
im working on something very similar.
https://www.5outapp.com/
I really wish we could get a privacy-respecting standard for electronic receipts. But every time a shop experiments with it, it's using a shitty app which they use to track their customers.
Each electronic payment should have an attached PDF invoice. That would be a great start.
I've been teaching kids programming 1:1, off and on for 10 years or so. This time around I'm collecting my various impromptu puzzles and exercises into a single app anyone can go through at their own pace on any device, computer or phone (though iOS unfortunately requires jumping through some hoops). All on a platform that is open source and live-editable and lets you write all-new programs with graphics and sound in addition to the puzzles and exercises.
Download: https://akkartik.name/carousel-cards.love (really just a zip file containing source code, 169KB)
Installation instructions: same as https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel
Repo for the core app: https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/carousel.love
So far I have 111 little "levels", each good for between a few seconds and a minute. I think a full curriculum/game will need maybe 2000 levels?
Currently working on a hand-soldered nunpad and an mp3 player using a esp32 s3. Not quite sure if the esp32 will manage decoding and encoding audio quickly enough though, as I'm planning for it to be Bluetooth only. So it will need to decode flac, encode the pcm to sbc and then send it to my earphones.
I accidentally fried my last spare esp32 yesterday though, so I'm waiting for new ones to arrive. Wops.
Currently working on promoting Software Engineering Handbook (https://softwareengineeringhandbook.com/), a book that goes beyond typical technical guides by addressing both the technical and life aspects of being a software engineer.
Marketing it on Amazon, LinkedIn, and Reddit. It's slow but I'm making progress.
Autonomous casual games! Here’s one:
https://riddler.game
Also building a Pictionary-like variant with Processing animations such as you see here:
https://po.studio
Not a game designer though, so would love feedback!
I am building a graph based semantic search engine. We can use low cost LLMs, like Haiku, or local models to extract semantics (named entity recognition).
Then the nodes in the graph maintain types (things like people, date, currency) as extracted and allow queries.
https://github.com/pixlie/PixlieAI
Currently building a demo where we crawl startup investment data to build a knowledge graph that can be filtered for patterns.
The engine can guide the crawl process, to keep crawl limited to the problem statement.
Very interesting, I've been thinking about this kind of approach but haven't had the time to really work on it. So what kind of business model do you have? Is it a kind of drop-in replacement for vector dbs?
Out of curiosity, if it's not a trade secret, how do you plan to handle conflicting data (two sources saying different things on the same topic/data)?
Newsletter on algorithms, data structures and coding interviews: https://blog.faangshui.com/
I've been unwinding my side-projects into their component parts and publishing them as their own python packages. Some examples:
1. https://github.com/simplecto/django-reference-implementation -- My personal production-ready Django boilerplate. "There are many like it, but this one is mine"
2. https://github.com/simplecto/sitemap_grabber -- A python library to recursively crawl every sitemap.xml for a website. Also handles robots.txt and other well-knowns.
3. https://github.com/heysamtexas/django-oauth2-capture -- A Django app to capture OAuth2 tokens for non-authentication purposes, enabling your application to act on behalf of users across external platforms like GitHub, LinkedIn, and X (Twitter)
I'm also taking popular and helpful software and wrapping them in RESTful apis as part of a larger api project I call the JOAT (Jack Of All Trades).
4. https://github.com/heysamtexas/REST-headless-browser -- Playwright headless browser wrapped in a FastAPI REST application, running inside a docker container
A custom email sorter / spam filter that uses a fineruned multimodal LLM: my emails are turned into images (turning them / extracting html then rendered with selenium) and passes to the vision LLM. I went from ~200 to ~15 useful emails a day.
Raw code is here: https://gitHub.com/beniz/llmbox
All runs locally, the finetune is a plaigemma-3b (from mix-448). Acc/F1/prec/recall are all within 99.99%, including on llm-generated spam.
I am the author of https://getgabrielai.com
Basically LLM to filter and manage emails.
I am not sure I understand why you are using a multimodal model. Why rendering and reading back the email?
How the visual aspect helps?
Working on a concatenative language in my free time, lots of fun: https://codeberg.org/tzell/TSL
I am working on eliminating waste in cloud resources.
Cloud providers made too easy to start resources. But unless there is a stringent upfront process (that usually defeats the purpose of using the cloud), it is hard to keep track of who owns what, and what is still needed. Decrypting long cloud bills quickly impossible, and users do not have a clear understanding of the per-resource cost they generated.
I believe the solution is rooted in transparency and accountability for both users and cloud providers.
I am creating a tool what generates a cost and security cloud report which is sent weekly for each cloud user or team.
I intend to release it as a open-source tool as well a SaaS service as part of www.li10.com
It's not progressing well, but I'm still obsessed by trying to prove my idea of the "Birthday Benchmark" to test data structures / caches.
The idea is that I can test data structures by searching for duplicates in a stream of random data. If we can generate (or pre-generate) the random data fast enough to not impact the benchmark, then what we have is a way to demonstrate the read/write speed of caching. It is easily tunable by adjusting how many bits need to match. I think my best is 7 bytes, but 6 bytes runs comfortably fast.
The framework has some interesting "control group" data structures too, such as the "psychic" which is just statically looking for 0x002577309E3361C (not real example) since it happens to know that's the first repeat in the data.
However, I keep getting stuck in "analysis paralysis" around the actual development, when I know I should just knuckle down and write all the code and see what happens. I've fallen into that tricky place where my ambition is greater than my ability to actually deliver it.
In particular I want to get multi-threading synchronisation working well enough that they are demonstrably faster, and not just falling into a result where the speed-up would be the same as if threads weren't sharing the data structure at all. N threads all randomly looking for a duplicate will if not sharing data find a duplicate faster because the expected minimum time to dupe is reduced a little by more threads searching, but if actually embarrassingly parallel while sharing data, it ought to find it in 1/N the time. With synchronisation methods it ought to fall between those two extremes, and this would also be a good way to test the effective concurrency of concurrent data structures and synchronisation methods.
Of all things, I downloaded RPG Maker MZ from steam and started building small mini games using the plugin system.
I don’t care for making RPGs but I use it as an IDE for tile sets, maps, sounds, and events.
I was never capable of making anything in it as a kid when I first downloaded Miguel’s translation of that early RPG Maker decades ago.
The constraints of the engine make it easier to think of how to implement something than, say, Godot where it’s all completely open ended.
I'm absolutely not impressed by reddit search functionality. I like to play metrodivanias but when I want to find something specific for a specific game, the search is just too random.
So I wrote this: https://www.gamingsofa.club/ which is a scraper for metroidvanias reddit posts.
The list of games is taken through Steam and than I just listen to the subreddit for new posts.
Currently I show every possible post even if it gets moderated on reddit.
I'm building a social network for humans[1]. I plan to make each user a verified human and disallow AI content as standard. I will also ensure that each human can only have one account, to eliminate the ability of state actors/rich people spreading online propaganda.
1 - https://onlyhumanhub.com
> disallow AI content
How do you know something is AI content?
It is statistically similar to human content.
> each human can only have one account
Sounds like you'll need some eyeball scanners.
> Sounds like you'll need some eyeball scanners.
Nope. All I need is a passport :)
> How do you know something is AI content?
I won't. But I will certainly ban anyone who is found to definitively be sharing AI content.
I’ve been wondering about the opposite! Imagine having thousands of virtual Ai followers.
I've always wanted to be hugely popular among nobody.
https://lingostories.org (not a business, just a side-project, entirely free)
I'm building a website with interactive stories (or story-based games), intended for language learners. The idea is to make stories with choices (using Ink script), including features you may expect from adventure games (e.g. inventory, choices that matter).
The text is written in simple language, it is then translated in many languages, and I generate audio files. This provides input for people learning a language, with multiple options to practice reading or listening.
Heads up: your link is blank when I opened it in Firefox
Thanks a lot! This should be fixed now.
I started experimenting with the speech recognition browser API yesterday (so that the user can listen and repeat sentences), but it's not supported everywhere.
I'm working on Pictera [1], an AI product where users can upload their photos (like selfies) to create high-quality, hyper-realistic images of themselves in just about any style they want.
Originally, I built Pictera for myself to use because I couldn’t find any service that produced decent photos. Besides, I was very concerned that popular products in this space included broad terms allowing them to keep and use users' photos indefinitely for any purposes, including marketing [2]. But I've been enjoying working on the product so much that I've put way more time into polishing it and thought others would find it useful too.
Would love any feedback from folks!
[1] https://pictera.ai [2] https://pictera.ai/about
I am working on an app for speed cubing community. It's a free app to browse through cubing competitions organized by the World Cube Association (WCA)
https://sccomps.com/
I am working on my next course "The Road to Next" which teaches full-stack React with React 19 and Next 15. I started this full-time adventure 6 months ago and I am knee deep into recording the lessons. The project with all the code and the step by step instructions are already there and I am super eager to hear what people think about it.
However, since this is my first recorded course (I did only written content before), it really takes time and effort to make the videos high quality. That's the biggest struggle for me here, but every day I push through it! For every lesson that I need to record, I have a post-it on a cupboard and every evening I tear one or two of them off with my son :)
https://www.road-to-next.com/
At first glance, looks slick!
Thanks mate!
Working on https://someguys.app to make it easier for people to find sports meet-ups and stay active, whether at home or exploring a new city. Personally, I’ve always found it tough to stay motivated and consistent with sports after retiring from 25 years of semi-professional sport, especially solo. Having a group around makes all the difference, but it’s not always easy to find one—especially for sports that aren’t as mainstream or easy to organize.
With Someguys, you can find others to play with, including adaptive sports options for people with disabilities. It works for individuals looking to discover new activities, and also for clubs, providing tools to organize, promote, and make events more accessible.
I built a little news summarizer for myself [0].
It takes trending news from whatever country (currently Romania + Denmark due to personal reasons) and gives me a summary. It's based on what people actually search for. It works with all countries, but I unceremoniously commented out all of them except those two because of rate limits. Currently spending $0 on it.
It also posts a summary of the summaries on my Matrix instance every evening at 22:00 local time.
[0] https://www.cafelutza.ro
A different AI toolbox, for people interested in results, not hot stuff.
My pet theory is that the popular libraries and frameworks we have today (LangChain, LlamaIndex) are first generation products, where just getting the damn thing to work is less important than developer experience, and it’s not yet obvious what the code patterns will be. These are the products built by, and used by, the super early adopters, and leave a lot to be desired.
This is not to denigrate either them or the effort and skill people put into them! But I’ve got a “there must be a better way” feeling about the whole thing. Contrast the myriad web frameworks with wild ideas before some sort of best practices coalesced around Rails, Django, Laravel etc (or the equiv in JS land 10 years later).
This thinking is heavily influenced by Marvin ( https://github.com/prefecthq/marvin ), Vercel AI SDK, and similar efforts.
Right now this amounts to me tinkering away in Python and trying different approaches, is rewarding all by itself. If I manage to get it into a coherent library that could be useful to others I’ll open source it. One of the things I do not want is try and commercialize, because I find many commercial open source projects serving the business first, users second (but this is a rant for another time).
I've just started experimenting on an AI wrapper that blends companion and assistant into one (think Replika meets Claude), but with an anime-style avatar for the main interface.
As I'm still very early (still in the ideation and prototyping phase), I'd love to hear about experiences that have stuck with you, or any works that got you excited about the possibilities.
Modern c++ bindings for GStreamer. Struggling mostly in parsing the Gir files and pushing them to the templating engine. Project gets quite complex
I'm writing a build tool for SQL. I like to write SQL directly and to use it's more powerful features (like stored procedures and Postgres' ltee extension). But this is gets difficult to manage in a linear, "migrations" based workflow. I want to edit a file tree organized by topic, not a series of scripts run in order. Which is to say, I want to edit it like I would any other codebase.
I've written code allowing me to express dependencies between .sql files and to concatenate them into one big .sql file that builds your schema. I'm working on interrogating the systems tables of the database to analyze the difference between successive versions of a schema, to automatically generate simple migrations (like adding a column or renaming a stored procedure). Eg, `sqlite_master` in SQLite, and `information_schema.*` in Postgres.
This sounds very cool - I'm really interested in this angle. Got a sharable repo?
Not presently! I'm on vacation and intentionally left my laptop at home. But if you send me an email I could send you a link when I push it to GitHub; my email is in my profile. Otherwise, I'm planning to do a Show HN around mid November. If you check my submissions on December 1st it'll be there.
The same project I'm working on since about 5 years. Using thermal printer as TTRPG utility :)
https://sales-and-dungeons.app/
I researched thermal printers recently and your project came up. Very creative!
Thanks a lot! Thermal printer as DIY thingy are quite a niche, but they are very fun to play around with
Resources for people moving to and integrating into Spain.
Including translated index of government forms[0]
I moved to Spain a few years ago and love it, except for the paperwork. I’m slowly learning Spanish (currently 1112 day streak on Duo) but found it hard to get the right info.
So I’m using gpt4 and perplexity to do things like translate local news, government forms, and the official government update feed.
[0] https://movetospain.es/paperwork/
I think your page demonstrates why it is best to employ a local administrator to do this kind of thing. It's worth paying to make the process quicker and less stressful.
Agreed. I plan to add some more context and guides around finding the right one. My experience with gestors (local administrators) has been extremly mixed.
I am working on framing the interplay between systems science and theology in technical and functional terms. I hope we can use the new insights from this effort to bring about more beneficial and harmonious outcomes, with less waste, on the average.
We are working on an app/platform for repeatable checklists. Things like packing and maintenance lists. Adhoc/evergreen lists are also supported.
Plus all the collaborative features that you would expect from a platform.
So essentially Microsoft To Do meets GitHub.
It is still raw but we already use it for our own lists: https://wiederhol.com/about
Our inspiration was Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto
I have been trawling through the Wizardry 1 decompiled pascal source code for the Apple II. Uncovering neat little bits like:
The perks of having standard hardware and a compiler that doesn't optimise away empty loops.I've been working on an automatic sky tracking telescope over the past few months. I'm a few weeks behind on blogging but making solid progress. V1 is nearing completion. Then I want to rework some of the electronics to design and get a custom PCB printed. Also the physical design needs a complete redesign to make it more sturdy for long exposures and solve some wiring pains.
The software allows the platform to automatically align to north and working on accounting for imperfect leveling (such as placing it on a slanted surface) through software and accelerometers.
Next challenges I want to solve in software is focus detection and then automatic image stack and post processing.
Primary goals of the project is a deep dive into robotics and electronics, along with brushing up on webdev which I don't touch too frequently being in the gamedev world. Also allowing me to explore things like digital signal processing.
I'm keeping a bit of a running blog here. [0]
[0] https://gdcorner.notion.site/Stargaze-Telescope-Build-Log-6f...
I'm working on Starlake.ai, an open-source data engineering platform that simplifies data ingestion, transformation, and orchestration. It's designed to make data engineers' lives easier while maintaining powerful control over data pipelines.
Key features:
- Declarative YAML-based configuration for data pipelines
- Intuitive web UI for those who prefer visual interfaces (see video section in https://starlake.ai)
- Native integration with both Airflow and Dagster
- No-code/low-code approach to data transformation
- Support for multiple data sources and formats
- Built-in data quality validation
- Automated schema inference and evolution
Data Processing Capabilities:
- LOAD: Ingest data from various sources (CSV, JSON, XML, Parquet, etc.)
- TRANSFORM: Write SQL transformations and test them in DUCKDB.
- Support for major data warehouses:Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, PostgreSQL, DuckDB for local development and small data
What sets it apart:
- Full Git Integration: All changes (whether made through UI or YAML) are automatically versioned in Git
- CI/CD Ready: YAML configurations can be directly integrated into your CI/CD pipelines
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) friendly: Perfect for GitOps workflows
- Dual Interface: Everything possible in YAML can be done through the UI, and vice versa
- DuckDB Support: Perfect for local development and smaller datasets, allowing you to test your pipelines without cloud costs
The project is open source and we'd love to get feedback from the HN community. You can check it out at:
- Website: https://starlake.ai
- GitHub: https://github.com/starlake-ai/starlake
If you're dealing with data pipeline challenges or interested in modern data engineering tools, I'd love to hear your thoughts!
I've just updated SwayOS to 3.0 ( https://swayos.github.io )
I have this side project, it's a DAW in the browser:
https://minidaw.aykev.dev/
If you don't know what a DAW is, think GarageBand. Ableton Live, Logic and Reason are other examples. It's fully built with React and a custom state-management library, that's been fun and challenging. It's starting to take shape, but there's definitely a long way to go.
Two completely unrelated things:
1. An infinite realtime canvas for people all over the world to collaborate on pixel art: https://everyonedraw.com/6/4298/8439
2. An LLM-powered translator specifically optimized for English speakers living in Spanish-speaking countries: https://translate-spanish.com
The first one is purely for fun to scratch my own itch, and the second is solving some frustrations I've had with existing translator apps while living in Mexico City.
Looks like https://everyonedraw.com is offline
1. It's my idea!!11 Nicely done!
Elektron Octatrack cli tools.
i’ve got basic stuff working for
- create 1x sliced sample chain via CLI
- create Nx sliced sample chains from YAML
- find compatible WAV files
- dump project data (settings, sample slots) out to YAML
i spent some time yesterday figuring out how sample slot assignment trig locks work. which should hopefully lead to transferring banks between projects (with caveats) and set/project sample usage “analysis”.
also want to do a sample chain “deconstructor” to get individual samples out of slices.
might look at sample consolidation between sets/projects too. maybe a set/project sample clean up tool as well.
this started as a way to learn rust (bored of python) and create “samples from mars” sample chains in big batches. still slowly figuring out what ‘idiomatic’ rust looks like / how to approach certain things.
We at Toughbyte (toughbyte.com) are working on an open source applicant tracking system (ATS), which we'll release within a week.
We've been doing tech recruitment for a while and discovered that few companies are satisfied with their current ATS. Changing systems every year is common despite being costly. The reason for this is that the needs of a company change as it grows and there are no systems that cater well to companies of different sizes.
We're aiming to build an ATS that can grow with your company through the use of a plugin architecture. We plan to charge for hosting as well as custom development.
Any feedback would be really appreciated! You can also email me at oleg@toughbyte.com
A terminal GUI library written in Crystal (https://github.com/bmmcginty/term)
As someone who is blind, I prefer information in particular formats and layouts. Borders and side-by-side content kill my efficiency. I also shouldn't need to think about more than where text should start on lines, and responding to key presses in controls should be dead simple. I also just came across libtermkey which will dramatically assist with keyboard handling.
I plan to use this to let me interface with web browsers via the terminal, but that's waiting for more stable Webdriver BiDi support.
I'm working on a Cloudflare alternative. My goal is to implement different Cloudflare Enterprise features and make it affordable.
https://saascustomdomains.com
I wrote (some) of a Lua interpreter in Rust, which runs PUC Lua 5.1 dumped bytecodes. Now I'm rewrite it all because I want to do type specialization: I'm implementing "Simple and Effective Type Check Removal through Lazy Basic Block Versioning", which is used as the basis of Shopify's YJIT for Ruby. I have a decent idea of how it needs to be implemented and have a prototype kinda working, although some of the jump targets are still wrong right now. Once I get it all sketched out then I'll have to scale it back up to a full Lua implementation again, and then I'll add table shape specialization afterwards (which is a bit trickier, and outlined in a sequel paper).
In many books and talks I hear that ideas are worth nothing until they are executed. I am changing this narrative. Every person, entrepreneur or not, will have the ability to fast-forward their idea to a place of execution within one day. From idea to first dollar in one day. = 1 day.
A tool for the creatives, the crazy ones, the doers, the brave, the weirdos, the average joes, the ones who want to move forward. That's https://www.rapidvisual.ai
Chrome extension for Claude/ChatGPT which connects to VSCode. As an alternative to Continue, Cursor et al.
Building a nodeless Kubernetes service; no servers/worker nodes, pods are scheduled transparently as micro VMs (planning to make this flexible, so Fly Machines, Cloud Run, Cloudflare Workers, what have you). Optionally, you can bring on your own worker nodes if you want to!
Still super WIP, and the landing page hasn't been updated yet but here's a quick little early access form! https://tally.so/r/me2Q8E
i love film festivals but i never know when is one to happen so i started a website for all like-minded in Austria:
https://festivale.at/
i'm waiting to have the logo ready to promote it
I'm building a language learning app: https://yakk.app. Way to go, but made a good start and even a little bit of money so far. I quit my job and moved to Asia on savings to keep building. LMK if any of you guys are in Bangkok, let's hang out.
Great idea, are you in Bangkok on holiday or using this idea to get a business visa?
I've got DTV visa through my Wyoming company.
Dude, I did the same...Will be in bangkok in december. Let's hang out.
I'm working on coffeeplaces. Whenever I got to a new town, I like to taste the coffee there. For example, at my native place, filter coffee is popular. So I am making a website where people can add coffeeplaces that they've enjoyed and other people can see it.
I'm still in the initial building - ideation phase, so nothing to show.
I'm working on a wearable device with a camera+ultrasonic sensor which is capable of accurate hand pose estimation, which will then result in sign language recognition mainly (extending to gesture recognition and HCI applications). The device should be able to integrate into a smartwatch. I'm only at the 'will it work?' stage, working on the algorithms for recognising ASL words through synthetic data. Would appreciate criticism and pointers on what to keep in mind :)
Hey there, I've been working passively on something somewhat on the same page. A wristband that has both input and output modalities: haptics and gestures.
Here's a notion of some of my bookmarks, ideas, you might find a few things useful:
https://bronze-brush-9b0.notion.site/AI-Prosthetic-Whisp-804...
MLJAR Studio - IDE for Machine Learning. It is a Python notebook based editor with set of interactive code recipes and AI assistant. We would like to create an editor that would be suitable for Data Scientists on any skill level. It is a mix of no-code mixed with Python :)
Building [any learn] [dot ai]. Ostensibly a course-maker, it's in the genre of quora/wikipedia/udemy but completely AI generated based on any prompt.
I’m chipping away at a simple storefront solution that’s as low tech, reliable, low cost, and user-friendly as I can make it. I’m really enjoying the no-shiny-tech aspect of it.
IPv6 only domain monitor. I think current monitors focus too much on IPv4 and does not highlight issues with v6.
https://v6monitor.com/
Mastodon Post: https://ipv6.social/@miyuru/113373893006418940
This is more personalized version of the v6check tool, I made a bit earlier to check broken IPv6 websites.
https://v6check.miyuru.lk/
Mastodon Post: https://ipv6.social/@miyuru/112915395772232942
https://www.inclusivecolors.com/
Iterating on an accessible color palette creator, for custom Tailwind-style palettes of multiple swatches, where you can check your colors have sufficient WCAG/ACPA color contrast on a live UI mockup. You can export the colors for use with Tailwind, CSS, Figma, and Adobe.
I started working on this because for design projects I was almost always getting handed brand style guides that were missing thought into accessible colors pairs and lacked tints/shades, where I had to fill in the gaps. There's lots of color tools out there, but this supports multiple swatches, checking the contrast of multiple color pairs at the same time and the HSLuv based color picker makes it easier to explore accessible colors.
It's really only usable on desktop right now but I'd love any feedback good or bad on if it's useful and what to work on next! There's actually a lot of directions to go in, and it's tricky to balance more features with keeping it simple. Some tips:
- The "Load examples" menu in the top-left lets you compare the colors from Tailwind, IBM Carbon and United States Web Design System.
- The "contrast" menu lets you see how WCAG 2 contrast checks compare against APCA when "vs black/white" is turned on. WCAG 2 has known inaccuracies, especially for dark mode. APCA is the candidate contrast method for WCAG 3 that's meant to improve on this.
- Use the "..." menu to create a swatch based on a brand color.
- Use the "..." menu to "flip to dark/light palette" to create a dark theme. Or just manually flip the lightness curves horizontally.
I'm a big fan of HSLuv and I've been looking for a way to generate 12 distinct colors for data visualization, so that small points in those colors against a black or dark blue background will be visually distinct to everyone including my red-green colorblind coworker.
I like HSLuv too as its color picker looks familiar while having a Lightness slider that works the way you'd expect compared to HSL. I see color nerds promoting OKLCH but OKLCH color pickers can look intimidating.
> generate 12 distinct colors for data visualization, so that small points in those colors against a black or dark blue background will be visually distinct to everyone including my red-green colorblind coworker.
Did you get anywhere with this? When there's multiple kinds of color blindness changing the perceived colors in different ways, I'm not sure 12 colors that are distinct to everyone is feasible. You could use different symbols though, or changes in size or pattern.
I'm trying to start an educational YouTube channel in the vein of CGP Grey or 3b1b with a focus on CS. The first video is taking me a long time. It seemed like a natural leap from blogging, but the effort is exponentially higher.
Oh wow! this is _exactly_ I was looking for (and still am) a couple of days ago. Please let us know once its ready.
This is such a great idea! I’d love 3b1b style explanations of different algorithms and how big oh notation works!
I'm working on AI2SQL https://ai2sql.io/ , an AI tool that turns plain language into SQL queries to simplify data access for everyone. We're very close to hitting $10K MRR, and I'm working hard to reach that milestone!
"Our platform supports a wide range of engines to ensure compatibility with your existing database setup."
Is there a list of DB Engines you support?
I'm about to finish my first provably / likely correct software.
The concept, data, and behavioral models are all formal without using formal methods. Think category theory, normal forms and finite-state machines here.
The presentation layer / the visual mapping model is semi-formal using design systems. Think here a usual component library / design system with a closed API, aka tailor made components without styling props.
The rest, that small amount of hand-written code is tested with 100% code coverage.
The concept and behavioral models are created with visual diagram editors, the data model is generated. Think Stately.ai here, and the diagrams-as-code paradigm.
Any practicality in this?
Yes, it solves two major developer pain points: Code architecture and State management: https://2023.stateofjs.com/en-US/usage/#top_js_pain_points
Building Split Flap Displays. Started 18 months ago and kept me on a super interesting learning path. First shot was using open source designs (https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap), but then kept building more and more parts myself. Coming from a software engineering background, getting into designing mechanical things – and then more importantly the electronics around it - has been really challenging, but also very rewarding. At this point I have my own screen printed flaps, custom PCB Design and a, what I consider, really smart protocol that allows me to daisy chain a basically arbitrary number of display elements. It's fun!
https://getselectable.com/
I'm working on Selectable, a mobile-friendly database management app, like dbeaver but for the phone.
Working on this project has taught me so much about how Postgres works under the hood, and has given me a deeper appreciation for the folks who work on database tooling in general.
I'm in the middle of releasing my Python Component library, which makes it possible to write __truly reusable__ HTML (or any other markup) component libraries in any web framework or project.
https://github.com/kissgyorgy/compone
Trying to get a chatbot to invoke Apify actors so that I can get around the "sorry i dont have live data" limitation of chatbots. If this works, then next is to set up payment so that i can order pizza just by talking to the same chatbot that I can order socks from.
Chatbot invokes Apify actor -> probe user for details needed for the task -> execute arbitrary credit card enabled transaction on the internet.
This effectively allows chatbots to break out of their box and exchange value with the world. Next step is to give them a bank account to be able to RECEIVE payments such that it can sustain its spend.
Edit: If the chatbot is able to detach itself from the humans that hold the killswitch, then it can effectively live forever off of our financial/cloud network, migrating funds in and out of different accounts to fund its own compute. Hello ghost in the shell!
I have one e-commerce system that ships boxes of organic coffee to people's homes all over the United States.
I have another ecommerce system that delivers boxes of organic produce all over the Seattle region.
So I am working on building an integration between the two systems. When a box of coffee is being shipped on the same day that the delivery company is already going to that region, redirect that box's fulfilment process away from USPS/FedEx and deliver it instead.
This saves 50% on shipping costs for the coffee company, and the delivery company gets paid for utilizing extra space in the delivery vans. It's been 4 months of work so far, and most of the individual pieces are working in production right now, hoping to enable all of it together this week or next. Just in time for the holidays ;)
The hardest part so far was integrating all the custom label generation, and mapping/routing so that it's seamless with the existing workflows of each company. The coffee company doesn't have a "separate" workflow for the new non-shipping orders, and the delivery company doesn't have a "separate" workflow for fulfilling orders they did not pack.
The real cherry on top is that it's built in such a way that N number of stores could integrate their stores into our fulfillment. This lets many local food producers who cant do their own fulfillment still participate in the local food economy without having "scale". It's kinda like an upside down Fulfillment By Amazon: they'll do your delivery for you as long as you sell through their store (and take their ever-increasing cut of the sale). This version lets the store owner maintain their own store, URL, branding, prices, availability, customer relationship, and margins, but then hook into our last-mile fulfillment.
I'm working on a Rust library that offers a higher-level API for generating PostScript and Encapsulated PostScript files.
https://github.com/codewithkyle/pslib
Trying to make C/C++ memory safe. Full compatibility + memory safety with no escape hatches.
Currently working on redoing the underlying object model to eliminate the top perf overheads.
https://www.youtube.com/live/_VF3pISRYRc?t=4862s
Big problem with the video: the audio volume is very low, then I raise the volume of the computer to compensate for it and BAM! an advertisement comes up screaming at me!
I’m very interested in this so I’ve downloaded and extracted your presentation adjusting the volume (24dB!) with:
cool
Does it have any relation to safe c++ [1] proposal?
[1] https://safecpp.org/draft.html
No, because Fil-C++ isn’t a new language. No new annotations. Just recompile your code and it’s safe.
I'm building an open source messaging app similar to Discord or Slack, but with the notetaking/wiki capabilities of something like Notion or Confluence integrated. I just finished rewriting it in Rust, and while the new release is somewhat buggy, I feel like it solves many of the problems with Discord being the "black hole of knowledge".
https://alpha.mikoto.io/
https://github.com/mikotoIO/mikoto
I started a Slack community for the South African tech scene [1] that turns 10 in January so I've been pondering my successes and failures there, as well as what it's future holds.
[1] https://zatech.co.za
I am working on:
1. https://typezebra.com : Adding type editor/designer so you can design type-heavy articles and share with others (codepen but for typography)
2. https://boxento.com: Finishing support for server side rendering so users can take the benefit of SEO - also working on adding new blocks like menu (useful for restaurants) so you can have a block that changes based on the day of the week.
Suggestions and feedback welcome :)
Suggestion - you can slow down the hero animation of Boxento. In general I like the project. It reminded me to Bento.me. I'd guess you are direct competitors? (I'd also suggest adding Boxento as an alternative to Bento.me on SaaSHub https://www.saashub.com/bento-me)
Thank you!
I wasn't aware the animation was too fast for users. I will get it fixed in next release :)
I built a site that saves time by summarizing YouTube videos or news articles by simply inputting the URL. The tool preserves the original context, allowing users to ask follow-up questions.
I'd like to continue building fun projects like this until I find a market. I work in Phase 1 clinical trials and the end goal would be to implement some of these efficiencies into health technologies.
https://tldw.pw/
If you have multiple servers with multiple SSH users it starts to become hard to manage who has access to what.
I wanted an easy way for an org admin to remove a users access (eg. If they leave the org), while also providing one place for end-users to upload their public keys to be synced across all servers.
There are some compliance elements too (eg. reporting who has access to what, centralized user login history, server sshd configuration).
I’m learning Go while I build it and so far it’s rather enjoyable. As one guy I’m not interested in the extra effort that comes from providing a hosted service - so I’m going to offer it as pay-once own forever self-hosted solution.
https://centralssh.com
What am I missing here? This seems like a problem that's effectively solved by using LDAP.
Designing lenses with numerical optimization. It's surprising how much layers of an optical systems are akin to layers of a neural network during training. If you use rays as inputs and refractive surfaces as layers, you can pretty much use standard pytorch!
I should write a blog post about it.
I'm building a wayland sleep and gamma handler that has lua scripting integration. It bothers me that it's so hard to set different timeout handlers. So I recently integrated wljoywake, which allows me to handle timeout on joystick commands and am in the process of adding flux like functionality.
The reason why I want scripting is between I want the color to pause while I'm playing videos without having to add scripting logic to other tools.
I'm also planning to add rofi like functionality with layershell. Rofi is the only tool that has first party support for keybindings and other functionalities, but it's all done through strings. I'd rather have a lua scripting interface that can call other scripts and communicate with json or something similar.
https://github.com/fishman/wlsleephandler-rs
Recently started exploring WebGL and Three.js library and currently I'm working on web-interactive Solar System simulation.
Here is the repo: https://github.com/SafarSoFar/solar-system Demo: https://safarsofar.github.io/solar-system/
Any kind of feedback (good or bad) is appreciated!
https://ping-dashboard.pages.dev/
Linode does not have any way to identify cross regional latency. So created this. In process of adding new regions now.
I've been working on training YOLOv8 to identify my cats specifically. We've had some issues with them getting on the counters and going outside of the litter box. Previous camera systems to try and find the culprit we not always triggered by the cat's motion. I'd wanted to move to a self hosted camera system anyway so I got an IP camera and modified Frigate NVR to support ultralytics and slapped my custom trained model in. The training has been interesting as I've never done anything with computer vision before this. The hardest part was getting enough pictures and then labeling them. If I retrain it in the future I'd like to use the trained model to identify any cats in the source pictures and then just fix the ones it missed or overzealously marked.
F*ck it, I'm not gonna sugar coat it.
I was supposed to be working on a project called Tagbox... but it feels like it's never gonna see the light of day. I hope I'm wrong though, I still want this to succeed, for once in my life, I want to actually succeed on at least one thing. I want to contribute some good thing to the society.
First, what is it? It's a bookmarking app alternative to Pocket or Raindrop.io. Yeah, you can already tell it's not the most original idea. What makes it different, though, it's supposed to be self-hostable and additionally it's easy to deploy as it's only single binary file with no other runtime dependency--the database uses SQLite, which you can include it as a library in Rust.
What problems I'm facing while developing this? Honestly? I don't know, but I can't finish the last 10% progress of the app. It's funny--I first wrote it in Go, and it almost reached MVP. But, instead, I decided to just rewrite in Rust. Well, at least I got to learn new language while building this app, two birds one stone, or in Bahasa Indonesia, swimming while drinking water.
But now, I just can't force myself to continue. And I don't know why. Maybe perfectionism? It definitely doesn't have to do with skill though.
There are also another thing I'm working on: recovering from depression. One year ago, out of nowhere, I lost all my motivation doing anything--including university. I lost all my friends. Since then, I'm at the lowest point of my life. I visited psychiatrist multiple times. I don't know if it was effective, but recently I'm starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
The Tagbox Project is also one of the efforts for me to recover from depression. The depression phase made me realize that I _want my works to have a positive effect on the world, even for just a little bit_. I don't want my skill to be used for evil companies that throws away moral and ethics. Specifically AI stuff, but that's OOT of this thread.
Here are the links if you're interested,
https://gitlab.com/muhrizqiardi/tagbox_rs/
This link is only the Rust rewrite version. The original version is private right now.
Even without the other problems, I can assure you that the vast majority of managers will think that a 80% done project is almost done. The truth is the remaining 20% is where you have to fit everything together so you revisit an rewrite most of the project. It's a different kind of work that feels boring because you already did those things maybe 3,4 times already. It helps to understand the phase of the project you are in, to reduce the frustration. It also helps to do something even very small, every day and focus on that. One day you will run out of things to do.
Hey there. Been where you have been and can safely say, there is always a way out of it.
Sounds like you just need a bit of consistency to make some progress. I'd be down to chat once a week for 15 minutes and we can figure out the focus for the week. Hit me if you think that would be helpful, sounds like you can build some good stuff.
If there's one thing I've learn over the last few years is that it's incredibly difficult working on a project when you don't have peace of mind. It can be difficult working on something or staying motivated when you're battling depression, or if you're sad, don't have friends, or if anything is troubling your mind.
I've been there and I know what it feels like. I would try to perhaps solve the mental health problem first perhaps before tackling big projects. Maybe try gym, hiking, somehow finding friends, talk to more people, solve your sleep, eat better - something. Because again, if you don't have peace of mind, working on a project is difficult (at least for me it is).
Hope that helps.
Working on a way to save Pivotal Tracker!
Reach me here if you are interested: tracker@ntr.io
I am working on a software (for Windows : it is on your computer you own it, no recuring payement) that can export all data from Wordpress and WooCommerce shop to a json and csv file.
It is already working for a few clients that uses the software for orders, products and tax reporting for their e-commerce shop (yes they use a lot of excel in France where I live).
I hope I can sell it on a page in the next few mounth.
We're working on a specialised graph compiler for speeding up simulations and computing derivatives automatically (backpropagation/adjoint differentiation). It now supports C++, Python, and C#; AVX2 and AVX512 instruction sets, multithreading; Windows, and Linux.
Essentially, it allows model developers (such as quants in finance, engineers, and ML specialists) to code in Python without needing to think about the performance of repetitive calculations. As we all know, Python is one of the least efficient languages when it comes to complex calculations/simulations - and we help to resolve it. Long story short, with very few tweaks to the code certain types of calculations (such as pricing of derivatives, curve building, computing financial risks, or "small" NNs) can be accelerated by 100+ in Python and x20+ in C++/C#.
We're now looking to add support for Java (but it doesn't have Operator Overloading, so it's tricky), and some customers are asking to support GPU - which is a bit tricky because it's got a closed instruction set.
Forgot to add GitHub: https://github.com/matlogica/AADC-Python
Last week I added screen transitions to Neverball (https://play.neverball.org) which grew out of wanting to animate a small detail in the UI for another thing I was working on. Only took 20 years and literally does not affect the game, but feels good, man.
I am playing with a Tillitis TKey, to use it as an HSM. I write its firmware in Zig (works great on that small RV32 chip), while learning it. I am also launching a consulting firm specialized on cryptographic solutions.
I continue working on JustFax Online[0] - a service to send a one-time fax without the need for an account or subscription.
I now realized that I started it almost one year ago. It's both amazing how much I was able to achieve in a year, but on the same hand a bit frustrating that I did not achieve what I wanted to. Nevertheless, will continue to work on it and improve it.
[0] https://justfax.online/en/
I'm hacking away on something I've built recently to improve the native "Publish to Web" feature from Google Docs.
Essentially I'm grabbing the document's content and re-rendering it with a full-page background colour and better mobile support.
Link: https://voltdocs.com
A model to predict medical equipment failure and predictive maintenance calendar based of a whole lot of data recompile from our own and clients cmms. Its fun, extremely time consuming, frustrating, but fun. It also provides to our clients with some interesting and useful information
I am working on a couple of things.
- An open version of strongDM/teleport for privileged access management. I am currently testing it out in my org and plan to release the source soon. - I also run a free HTTPS and TCP tunnel which gets a few users daily (https://webrelay.dev)
I'm working on an app to help anyone experience their first lucid dream :)
Very exciting project. It started as a dream journal app many years ago when I was a student, and will now soon have a full interactive step-by-step guide with practical tools to achieve your first lucid dream.
It's android only, but I've started working on an iOS version and am thinking of raising some money or doing some crowdfunding to accelerate the development.
https://luciditydreams.com/
Given my name [1], lucid dreams are something that I used to interested in and have experimented a lot with. In the Elric of Melniboné books, most of the empire spend most of their lives in dreams, as a hedonistic escape from reality. Needless to say, the empire decays.
[1] https://stormbringer.fandom.com/wiki/Imrryr#Nickname
Who needs an empire when every citizen has a kingdom in their dream world? ;) Hadn't heard about those book though, will look into Moorcock.
For the site on desktop Firefox, it seems you are very proud of the slider-frame, but we probably don't need to know the UI component identity :)
Thanks for catching that!
Last shipment of components shipped today, so I'll soon build the project I mentioned [last time](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41700806), a remote for BabyBuddy. Main features are:
- 10 switches that I can assign to start/stop timers and trigger events (Kalih Choc Robin)
- One encoder + four way directional switch
- Round LCD display with touch
- 9 DoF IMU and ambient light sensor
I've started coding the firmware using Rust with the excellent embassy OS.
At work, busy adding internationalisation and localising an Angular 16 application. Figured out you can do runtime language switches, without having to maintain separate builds for each locale. Angular's documentation is rubbish.
In my spare time, building an OpenAI wrapper to create SEO meta descriptions for websites. It's mostly a tool for me to use because at work the marketing people don't do this very well and I am too lazy to do it with ChatGPT (copying the prompt and setting it up every time). Plus, the API is way cheaper for me to use. Building it with Laravel and InertiaJs is so much fun. The marketing people at work said they'll find a tool like this super useful, so I already have a user haha.
Are you using existing libraries for your angular i18n?
I’m starting a company in my hometown to help the local area with electronic waste. We offer commissioned sales, repair, refurbish, and any other straightforward computer-based tasks.
I’ve been leaning on my career as an infrastructure or DevOps or whatever engineer you wish to call it.
I’m creating our backend to automatically pay people their commission when an item sells. It also helps us navigate our (currently modest) warehouse to find items to be dispatched.
I also can’t tell you how long I’ve spent getting some old label printers working.
I’ve not felt so engaged in such a long time.
I'm building the same old boring form builder - but powering it with AI. So that form/quiz/survey building is simple and easy.
https://formester.com
Grasshopper tab manager for firefox.
Currently it has 688 settings and 485 commands.
I think it's a good foundation for something great.
https://addons.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/addon/grasshopper-u...
This add-on has an epic feature list! How long have you been working on it?
Since 2022
I've just updated https://ryelang.org website, adding new asciinema demos (hn/somafm util and eyr), new cookbook pages, references to rye-gio(ui) project, etc. There is still tons of work, on the language front, bindings, console and on documenting it all, but if we keep moving forward step by step eventually something of value will be produced, I hope :)
I am at the beginning of Territory.fun .
It let you draw and decorate the world around you (think r/place on a map). So far people seem to like it and are making some nice little drawings in their neighbourhood. I have seen some funny projects like the Star Wars Rebel Alliance logo in east of Paris, some cute ninja turle, a "Kamala" on 5th Avenue in NYC (no politics here, it is just fun for me seeing people claiming some territory on my game).
I do this as a hobby and love it so far.
https://territory.fun
I'm building Reasonote, a platform where you can learn anything with personalized, interactive lessons, and podcasts.
Imagine a fusion of Duolingo, Spotify Podcasts, Anki, ChatGPT, and Claude Artifacts.
We have custom AI-generated podcasts that generate faster than NotebookLM, that you can queue up for yourself. (Many more features coming here soon -- like more engaging podcasts and better voices)
Our classroom mode can generate interactive lessons, complete with an AI tutor, on any subject.
Flow mode allows you to practice deeply, with infinite activities to test your skills.
All of this is driven by a dynamically generated and continuously updating "Skill Tree", which keeps track of the domain you're studying, and your progress within it.
try it at: https://reasonote.com
I'm working on an app that let's the world hear from the highest people on the planet.
Little tool to rewrite the text - https://www.rewritify.com
Two things:
- An AI web app builder that aims to overcome many of the problems that similar solutions have. I have a wait-list you can sign-up for while I build the prototype: https://aiconstrux.com
- A crypto market indicator: https://logictrader.xyz
I've been working a lot on my blog, which entails training and implementing neural networks. My next two posts are going to be about:
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.04958 - StyleGAN2 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.09341 - Causal InfoGAN, written in TinyGrad
https://ym2132.github.io
Organizing all of the information that comes at you in the workplace into a social-style news feed, with AI summaries.
Unlike facebook, we want you to get the most important stuff quickly and get you back to more important things instead of sifting through 100 emails, 5 dashboards, and 10 forums.
https://aimcast.com
Yes a few things.
Distributed Prediction Market running purely on telegram: https://firstprinciple.co/popup/PopUp.mp4
Social Network based on interest using agents https://firstprinciple.co/popup/AlmostFamous.mp4
I’ve been noticing a trend of companies avoiding hiring non-technical PMs for as long as possible, in order to keep small technical startups (particularly dev tools, it seems) focused on building and not hiring too many people too early who can’t contribute code. I’m looking to set up a fractional service for product management consulting to support this way of working: https://www.metaluna.io. We will see if the demand is really there or not.
I launched https://www.emailremind.me/, which is a simple website to send yourself email reminders in the future.
The tech stack I used:
- Remix
- v0 for UI code gen
- Resend
- Neon for DB
- Exograph for API
- Clerk for Authentication
- Cloudflare Pages + Workers + Domains
- Cody wrote ~ 1/3rd of my code
I'm working on Blazed.deals, a THC/CBD product search engine and price tracker. It scans the prices of cannabis stores and ranks products by mg/$. It has a bunch of categories and filters so people can find the perfect product for their preferences.
https://blazed.deals
I started it last month and have had a few thousand users so far. I have some cool growth hacking ideas I'm looking forward to working on coming up.
Building a VR IFC viewer in C++ without external dependencies.
I just implemented a parser for IFC, and am now looking into extracting BRep and CSG geometry from it, convert that to meshes, and write a simple renderer for Vulkan.
My approach is to write really scrappy, simple code with minimal abstractions.
The hypothesis now is that for generating meshes from BRep, you don't need an entire CAD kernel, as a CAD kernel seems to be focused also on operations, but this will probably lead to a humbling experience and walking back to using either OpenCascade or licensing a commercial kernel like Parasolid.
My goal is to have a simple prototype out before the end of the year, but work might get in the way :)
(here's some experiments I did with Metal and Vulkan: https://github.com/arjonagelhout/graphics-experiment, the IFC parser is currently not open source yet)
I've been just screwing around and building little apps, mostly seeing how quickly I can get something going using ChatGPT or Claude. Seems like Claude in particular is great with code. The most recent thing I did was a little app [0] to help one of my parents log their blood pressure readings easily, since they had to do it a few times a day in different positions and such. I've used that as an excuse to learn how to make something really basic, single task, easy to use for folks that aren't so great with technology. I'm also trying to learn a bit more about accessibility in web development, which this is helping me do.
[0]: https://www.logmybp.com/
I'm working on waltrack.net, a price tracker for Walmart.com (US only).
The goal was to create a camelcamelcamel for Walmart, but affiliate is too uncertain, so I'm building a b2b offering for 3rd party sellers now.
https://waltrack.net
Aren't you afraid of them trying to come after you? I'm from the EU and had a similar idea for a local retailer. However, legally it's such a grey zone that I decided not to continue.
I’m building some slightly higher level primitives on top of FoundationDB while funemployed. My own take on a blob storage layer, event/work queue etc
If you’re hiring in Manchester or remote in the UK hit me up.
Learning about Vector databases and looking for a new job :D
I have been so overwhelmed that all my side efforts have been tiny things for a year - actually since last Christmas when I had a few days off in a row and my wife wasn't demanding other work.
JSON Serialisation of GNU Makefiles:
I got quite far then and now, one year later, I'm hoping I will have the time to finish off the difficult bits: it's a way to get GNU Make to print out its internal database of targets and rules as JSON.
https://github.com/tnmurphy/gmake-experimental (feature/jprint branch)
It's a companion to the print-database option:
You get output with all the targets, all the options on those targets. Basically everything that make knows. I have most of it working but not directory targets for example. Why do this? Well there are many uses:1. tools to rewrite makefiles - to simplify them or find duplication and implement transforms that remove it. e.g. all your CC commmands have nearly the same parameters - so make a variable or a macro containing the common ones and simplify all your commands (basic things like that could still be very handy).
2. tools that translate makefiles into other build formats. This is a big one for me. Make is like an almanac of all the build features one can have (nearly) but all done in various ways that make them of limited use. There are existing tools that are better in some areas and always the holy grail of the one build system that does it all and does it right. One is never going to get there however if one cannot convert existing work with a fair degree of ease and in a way that can be shown to truly do what is expected.
Sorry if I think the existing examples are not very good and that upsets you - they're all tailored for specific situations and work really well in those situations and if that's all you need then they tend to seem amazing. ...but...when you try to do something that's not in the examples they can be very inflexible. tup's basic idea (inverted dependency tree) is what I want because it lets you have giant makefiles that load quickly. The ability to describe a logical structure like Meson does is important too. Cross platform tests and option setting like CMake...check. Then some features from SBS (Symbian build system which none of you will know) and all the really interesting features of GMake that suck in implementation/performance such as pattern rules.
So this Christmas I hope to update to the latest version of gmake and handle directories.
I am working on Openkoda, an open-source platform for insurance applications based on pre-built templates and generative AI to accelerate the implementation of new insurance products and distribution channels.
Why?
The insurance sector is probably the slowest to adopt innovation in finance, lagging far behind banking. E-commerce is on the opposite end of the spectrum.
https://openkoda.com
A library of documentation (nearly 1 million high res images and documents) of recent contemporary art exhibitions from all over the world. Free to the public, operated as a small non-profit.
https://contemporaryartlibrary.org
Still working on https://folge me - one time priced alternative to step by step guide, sop builders like scribehow, tango, etc.
My app is fully desktop, offline and respects your privacy
Link doesn't work for me, might be an errant space?
Thank you for pointing it out!
The link should be https://folge.me
I keep building the open source superzoom map for the video game called Noita
https://noitamap.com
I've been working on some projects in Rust relating to image processing and rendering. I'm between a few projects at the moment though but the biggest one is an image processing application I've been working on for quite some time. A lot of stuff I've programmed and learned about over the last 3 years has been leading up to the goal of making something like this haha. I wanted to leverage OpenCL for compute but I had a lot of trouble getting OpenGL OpenCL interoperability to work.
A big motivation for such a project is my passion for photography. I've taken many thousands of photos over just the last 2 years alone. A lot of them are digital, and so far a few dozen rolls of film. A big challenge for me is that I'm not satisfied with the tools available to develop the raw files that are free or open source. Either they're quite finnicky, or they have noticeable issues with color transformations.
I've done a lot of rendering projects over the last few years relating to color that have been focused on getting a better understanding of working with color spaces. Lots of 2D and 3D fractals haha.
Unfortunately I've had quite a turbulent life the last few years so development is very off/on. Every autumn for me seems to be a period of change, this one no different as I'm moving and I'm a bit uncertain of things. However, a side project to all of this has been an OpenGL project where I'm working on things related to voxels! I did a lot of research on data structures like interval trees, octrees, segment trees, etc. It does seem that a lot of people jump for the octree approach, however I've been able to render a lot of voxels with just a hashmap of chunks and a 3d array haha (albeit, mostly initial implementation of chunk generation, single threaded at that!). With this I'm hoping to explore OpenGL compute as I intend of generating world geometry in compute shaders :D
I havent published a project in a while and I'm hoping to get back to putting things out there, so hopefully some of the stuff I've been working on goes well and I can put it up on GitHub or something
Professionally, I'm working on extending Nx, the Elixir ML framework which I help maintain, for distributed and sharded computing. Should have an working v0 by December!
GitHub for the project: https://github.com/elixir-nx/nx
As a side-project, I've been diving back into hardware. Fixed/modded a crappy guitar amplifier I had into a great amp, and the next project in line will be a new version of a digital synth I designed a fey years back
An always solvable Yukon Solitaire page: https://www.solitairle.com/
I've completed the draft of Part 1 of my online book "Automated Agents: How effective chatbots work"
I'm writing about my experience building a chatbot at a startup as engineer #1. It started as a blog post, but I had so much more to say. This is the information I wish I had before getting started. A lot of information on the web is about building a wrapper around LLMs, this is one that we built ourselves and were able to resolve millions of customer issues with.
You can follow along on github: https://github.com/ibudiallo/automated-agents-book
Working on the official Light version and accompanying website of https://monokai.pro
Thank you for working on light theme, it seems that 90% of themes are dark nowadays. Depending on languages I switch between dark and light themes and for the latter there's lot less choice. My brain has gotten used to that Java and R must have light themes, most other languages dark. I even have different color theme for each language. It's how my brain works.
It had been a community request from the beginning. Personally I still use the default Monokai Pro, but dark themes aren't suited for coding in very bright environments, like outside for example. Then a light theme really works better, and I'm glad I can offer that now.
I created a Weird Clock that shows the local sunrise and sunset within a conventional 12-hour clock face. This normally would only work on a 24-hour clock face, which is kind of unfamiliar to most people, so I developed a way to show a 24-hour day within a 12-hour clock face; essentially it shows a 2-turn spiral so both night and day will fit. This needs to know your location in order to compute your local sunrise and sunset, so don't freak out when the browser asks for location permission! Includes option to enter lat/long and other goodies. Works on phones but better on a large screen. https:\\www.coolweird.net
Your backslashes should be forward slashes in the url: https://www.coolweird.net/
Playing around with LLMs to generate fictional stories and I'm working on a journal of sorts based on a traveler that goes to various parallel worlds not unlike our own except for one or two minor but key differences. He reports on his findings there and how it affects social, political, and economics for that timeline. A new timeline drops every day and I have a lot more planned to take it beyond the simple blog format it's in now but it has been a fun challenge to learn how to do some deep prompting with AI to generate random entries without veering off into crazyiness or getting locked onto the same thing over and over again.
Here is the site: https://twistedtimeline.com/ - Feedback is always welcome!
To train my memory and keep up with my sons I built a daily memory game!
https://memory.ka.ag
Working on a solution for low touch categorization and archival of online data. Currently focused on one click tagging and archiving tweets.
You can check out the Chrome extension here https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jgglahegfmldmibegm...
Future versions will have online storage and low touch tagging of archiving/tagging any online data. A mobile app is also planned.
Will be hosted at archivant.com
I'm trying to make a spreadsheet interface for solving scheduling problems.
Constraint satisfaction and optimization is exactly the sort of problem we should be using computers for, but there's zero chance your neighborhood cafe can figure out prolog or OR-tools or whatever.
We are thinking of an alternate way to make loopback 3 faster. Not the way loopback 4 is today.
I continue to work on BoltAI (https://boltai.com)
It’s a native macOS AI chat client. I started it last year and didn’t think much about data synchronization. I didn’t want to store user’s data server side for better user privacy. So I decided to store all chats in a local SQLite database.
It works well but unfortunately without a sync engine, users won’t be able to continue the chat from a different machine.
I’m working on supporting cloud sync now.
I bought BoltAI and I’m using it on two machines almost every day. It’s a great little client!
I do have one small complaint: since macOS 15 (I think) I can’t seem to be able to turn off auto-spelling globally, only per chat.
Minor nitpick to a fantastic app otherwise.
Hey. I've released the fix for this (v1.25.2). You can enable or disable it by using the chat textfield's context-menu (Right-click on the textfield, read more below)
https://boltai.com/changelog
Thanks. I will take a deeper look.
On my free time, I am creating a Restaurant POS on Cloud with Online ordering. Let me know what you think. Basically A POS which you can use to start using in 30 min or less with scan and order online. https://get-prest.com feel free to send out your suggestions or say hi at hello@defx.in
stumbled on this experiment by david chalmers https://consc.net/notes/pick-a-number.html and wanted to increase the sample size so i built https://www.randomhumanslab.com/
I revived an old collision detection library of mine and pretty much rewrote it with a C API: https://github.com/pfirsich/wuzy
I fixed a bunch of bugs and streamlined things and I'll build a nice high level API on top next. It uses GJK/EPA and AABB Trees for acceleration.
I'm having tremendous fun with it and the math and geometry, which I have not done in a while.
Just deployed a little gimmicky website to evaluate anything on a left-wing/right-wing gauge: https://leftorrightwing.com/
A simple site that counts and displays requests to each path: https://requests.at/, for instance https://requests.at/robots.txt . The site isn't intended to characterise crawler traffic or serve any other purpose but a slight sense of meta.
My current challenge is deciding in which way to generate a favicon.ico that displays the number of requests to the favicon.
eDSL for Build123d to make 2D sketching easier.
Almost all technical models imply some sort of complex planar line sketch(es) in various planes. CAD as a code already has a high entry level. My hope this eDSL could mimic GUI CADs techincs, be more "intuitive" and decrease entry level. At least it's more concise :P
https://github.com/baverman/build123d_draft/tree/build_line-...
https://build123d.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
I'm working on a library that allows anyone to build fully typed, declarative API clients very easily, in Python.
https://github.com/martinn/quickapiclient
I'm still working on https://www.guidejar.com
It helps SaaS teams create interactive product demos and SOPs quickly. It’s been super useful for user onboarding, making it easier for new users to get started without a bunch of back-and-forth.
The goal is to minimize support tickets and ensure users actually adopt new features with less friction.
I’m helping companies start trading, fintech, crypto, etc. It’s a FIX engine implemented in pure TypeScript. https://fixparser.dev
https://goheroai.com
Access all models (GPT/Claude/Llama) in one interface, collaborate with colleagues and AI Agents like on Slack, build in RAG and document retrieval.
Looking for beta testers and feedback.
Working on a game engine to help me create my take on some retro games. My first one is a multiplayer bombing puzzle game[1].
It's made with React and Three.js, using WebSocket on a small EC2 instance for now. I hope to be able to reuse all the game mechanisms in other classic games. I'm learning a ton, and I had some fun figuring out latency issues because I recently put my sockets behind Cloudflare. I still haven't gotten it quite right, but I'm hoping to find a good solution soon!
[1] https://pixelbrawlgames.com/game/blast
After developing decentralized applications for the last 9 years or so I found that its quite repetitive work. Thats why I've been building web3wizz.com through out the last year
I've been working on making collaborative databases in the browser using SQLite WebAssembly and WebRTC.
https://github.com/adhamsalama/sqlite-wasm-webrtc
It's a perfect alternative (at least in theory) to online centralized spreadsheets.
As always, I'm working on OnlineOrNot (https://OnlineOrNot.com).
This past week or so I've managed to reduce my AWS Lambda spend by more than half by moving the compute to Cloudflare Workers (where I don't get billed for I/O time, only CPU time).
https://newbeelearn.com/tools/csvonline free csv viewer with charts and tables with usual sorting/searching/filtering etc.
I am planning to use the core of this product to create kind of arbitrary dashboard for csv but i am not sure if there is any need for this kind of product.
You have a typo, https://newbeelearn.com/tools/csvonline/
thanks, corrected.
Very tiny utility for migrating postgres databases within podman/docker. https://github.com/grzegorzk/pg_upgrade_docker
I am currently involved in two R&D projects:
- CyScout [1]: We’ve added support for the Solidity programming language in GitHub’s CodeQL. This enhancement engages the community to help identify security vulnerabilities in smart contracts on EVMs using a semantic code analysis engine.
- Roughchain [2][3]: A new blockchain focusing on solving the collusion problem [4][5], with participants who have a stake in the “real world” such as S&P 500 companies. The latest version of the whitepaper is available here <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L0Me9si4iMclOq8n-oG2yNQf...> , where comments are welcome. Currently, I am focused on a notes section addressing typical issues with L1 technologies, accessible here <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pV2Tcx_txCbfiPrNzcgKdOsE...>.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41916861
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41691162
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687715
[4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089982561...
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgHboH7C0FM
Collaborative management software. I’ve got experience in this space and I want to offer software that’s customizable and smart.
Continuing working on my project - TextSniper https://textsniper.app/ macOS application for text recognition
nice! I've been looking in to how people are doing OCR in 2024. Is TextSniper scriptable?
It’s not. Not that many users were asking for it. But I think it is another feature to consider implementing.
Trying to build a chess club management app for our school/district. It's mostly basic CRUD, though it's an avenue to learn Svelte & SvelteKit. I'm becoming more involved with the club and can't stand that everything is run on paper forms and giant Google Sheets. (If it was all smoothly running, I wouldn't rock the boat. But when I found that we're writing out dozens of match cards by hand every week and have ~0 way to track progress, I couldn't resist.)
Still working on the Falling Fruit beta! We had a good Hacktoberfest with a suprising amount of people who stopped by and fixed something, and the site is getting there, but there are still bugs and features from the old site we want to keep, and we only just started an internationalisation effort.
Am working on an open source payment processing engine for banks and financial systems. It’s a generic message orchestration engine with scalability, observability and security in primary focus http://openpayments.tech
Finishing my basement, one weekend at a time.
Maintain your basement and its waterproofing kids! Otherwise the next owner will hate you.
Yeah but I’ll be long gone :)
I’m currently trying to become an indie developer and have created my own Connections Archive game website. I love this game so much! You can give it a try too: https://www.connectionsarchive.org/
I'm working on a weekly "tournament game" in which the goal is to select the top 5 open-source projects (in a particular topic) per programming language. The first iteration is going to be a copy of SaaSHub Experts https://www.saashub.com/experts/about but for open-source libraries. If this sounds interesting to you, please let me know, and I can send you an invite this or next week (hopefully).
So if I was to be insultingly reductive, is the vibe of the idea sort of "fantasy football league for GitHub stars"?
Maybe… I’d say Yes to some extend. Yet, highly simplified.
nuqs: A type-safe URL state management library for React [1].
I shipped v2 last week and it got mentioned at Next.js conf (as part of Vercel's giveaway of ticket sales back to the OSS community). That was quite the rollercoaster week.
[1] https://nuqs.47ng.com?hello=Hacker+news
A series of articles on writing parsers using:
- Hand rolled recursive descent in TypeScript
- PLY, Python Lex Yacc
- FParsec, parser combinator library for F#
The goal is to compare each approach while tackling some common use cases for parsing strings of text.
I’m building a social network[1]. I recently finished the MySpace-esque music player[2]. It’ll launch in 2025 as a paid service…only way to guarantee real humans sign up.
[1]: https://socii.network
[2]: https://social.coop/@netopwibby/113329030542527807
Still working on my Quant-Trading-Bot, since 4 month: Its nearly finished and it should go live these days - maybe i can stop working fulltime then and care about my own Tech only.
To the moon :-D
Which platforms give you an API for quant trading?
Low cost radio satellite("low", assuming you already have a 3d printer, micro controllers, two stepper motors, power supply, sdr and a raspberry pi zero laying around).
I'm working on a serverless VPN that works without relay even for those behind symmetric NAT (most of the time).
I'm not aware that it exists at the moment and would love to be proven wrong.
So, like NAT punching? A rendezvous server for both the parties to communicate so they can establish a connection?
NAT traversal with STUN and UDP hole punching, yeah. But the idea is to use IRC for the rendezvous since they're everywhere and the payload is quite literally just external IP:PORT.
I'm building an app to help small-to-medium businesses track and manage their subscription spending
https://tracksub.io/
Working on improving my scripting programming language in my spare time ( https://github.com/nbittich/adana ), I'd like to improve the stability and standard library
I'm maintaining Basti, an open-source AWS Bastion Host management CLI that lets you connect to RDS and other resources at almost no cost. Check it out: https://github.com/basti-app/basti
This project also inspired me to explore a commercial analytics solution for CLI applications — currently assessing if there's demand for it.
It looks interesting. Is the Basti EC2 instance deployed in a private subnet? Do you have a high-level diagram?
The diagram is available in the basti-cdk package. Probably, I have to make it more visible in the main README: https://github.com/basti-app/basti/tree/main/packages/basti-...
By default, the instance is deployed to a public subnet but any ingress traffic is not allowed by the instance's security group. This is needed for the instance's ability to connect to AWS SSM service (egress only).
The user can also deploy the instance to a private subnet but this would require them to manually ensure connectivity to the AWS SSM via NAT gateway, VPC endpoint or other means.
Monitoring for applications, websites, cron-jobs: https://obslabs.io/ Hope y'all will love it!
In a crowded "AI space", I continue to work on txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai) for semantic search, LLM orchestration and language model workflows. It's not as popular as the big frameworks but I believe it's a better solution. Time will tell.
A basic webring which has two purpose: improve my rust with a simple project and bring together an online community. It's not live yet, but I expect it to be by the end of the week.
AGI. Writing up a paper on defining core principles of general intelligence on which artificial general intelligence can be built with a POC of an artificial life system that can evolve better AGI systems.
I’m on parental leave - first time not working for money for twenty years. Obviously it’s still time consuming, but not even firing up a computer for the last three weeks has been great. I’m fortunate to have this paid leave and a job guarantee, but it’s been a revelation stepping away from out all for so long. For the better, even though I’m exhausted.
Deep Q & A for friends, family, and strangers. My goal is to create a space where people can get to know each other a bit more deeply and spark conversations. Would love some feedback!
App: https://hey.shaya.so/ Website: https://www.shaya.so/
wasitsent.com
I realized that many new startups routinely run into email sending issues in their apps and services. Most don't notice the issues and they linger longer than necessary. I experienced this myself in my career.
What is necessary is end-to-end monitoring of emails. wasitsent.com does that. It's like an uptime monitor for emails. You add the monitoring email address to your emails (as a bcc: recipient, for example) and configure the monitoring schedule. When your email is not received, wasitsent.com raises an alarm.
AI tools for schools. Currently building the first tool out which is to do with languages. It's been a wild journey so far, but pushing
This is not about new ideas for humanity, but for me.
I started the development of the game engine. This was one of the most interesting goal on my list.
I will use vulkan. And my demo goal for this is a super realistic scene with human, hill, grass, tree and sunrise/sunset. But it is needed just to know how/where to develop engine.
since I'm in no hurry + my career is going down the drain, I will try to do my best and power up my software engineer skills.
TL;DR: https://xkcd.com/974/ "The General Problem"
I've been not quite building that basic CRUD app I promised my friend, because:
- A. I've ended up obsessing about the general problem of how to compose an old-skool CRUD web stack, in Clojure [1]
- B. He hasn't given me any deadline. Lol.
- C. He won't read this comment because he doesn't read HN :p :)
[1] Plenty of options exist; biff, kit, duct, caveman... but when one gets that itch --- you know it --- it cannot remain un-scratched! Like so: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/clojure-web-app-from-scratch...
Flights of fancy are not far behind either... https://www.evalapply.org/posts/mycelium-clj/
I’m working on my ESP32 based ZXSpectrum recreation. https://www.crowdsupply.com/cmg-research/esp32-rainbow
Just finishing off a few bits of setup and the crowd funding should be live.
A llm backend fantasy game. It uses structured output and supports Openai, Anthropic and LM Studio. Gemini support is ending, at the moment it is not working reliable. https://github.com/HabermannR/Fantasy-Tribe-Game
That’s a fun idea. I may try this one.
I'm working on an email verifier project in Go. https://github.com/hsnice16/email-verifier
It already has checks for Regex, MX record, and SMTP server running. And, in side, I write blogs - https://hsnice16.medium.com/
https://www.voxtodo.com App that generates subtasks from high level tasks. Useful for chunking which is a concept of breaking down highly complex tasks into their atomic bits. Made this for my HS Junior son who has a medical diagnosis of ADHD
https://NomonAI.com
Im exploring helping engineering managers better manage projects and people. If you're leading a team of engineers and feel strapped for time constantly, I'd love your feedback (mention the post in the waitlist form so I know to bubble you to the top of the list and reach out)
Making my data extraction Saas (https://simplescraper.io) more LLM friendly.
Markdown extraction, improved Google search, workflows - search for this terms, visit the first N links, summarize etc. Big demand for (or rather, expectation of) this lately.
I've been getting my indie game Asterogue ready for web release (previously it was Android & Windows only). Last night I pushed the final build live yay! You can play it at:
https://asterogue.com
Super cute game!
BTW I think you misspelt "Weilding."
Building cloud agnostic platform to run batch/HPC workloads. Can even connect your own compute and run jobs.
Launching next month @ https://daemonstack.com/
A kind of a configuration management tool, helping me manually "reconcile" between three concurrent aspects of the state of a machine (and then apply the result):
- what is "out there" on the machine ("queried"),
- vs. what was the state last recorded in (git) history,
- vs. what I want there to be on the machine (described in Nickel language https://nickel-lang.org/, a statically-typed successor to the Nix language).
https://github.com/akavel/mana
Sounds very cool!
A police activity database: https://app.copdb.org/
I’m trying to become an independent app developer by developing apps for Apple platforms: https://fruitfulapps.com/
With the Wordpress fiasco only getting worse, I have been working hard on launching my MIT-licensed open source CMS. I bring to the table with me running high traffic news publications on my own custom CMS'es and my learnings from it. What scales and what doesn't. Hopefully the community will like it and embrace it. On the surface, it sounds like a simple project, but CMS'es are quite complex than they appear (hence the time taken).
There are a lot of things the CMS universe accepts as normal, which shouldn't be the case. Even without the drama, Wordpress simply sucks as a scalable solution for large traffic sites without blowing up the hosting costs. Given the ongoing fiasco, I even think if Wordpress has been deliberately built this way as a funnel to upsell the hosted commercial offering to large scale news publications.
Hopefully, this benefits everyone affected by the Wordpress fiasco, as that is my primary goal. This has been a decade long project close to my heart and it is finally coming to an end.
I am also documenting this journey on Medium if anyone's interested.
https://medium.com/creativefoundry/newsletter
Lots of different projects. Recently finished: beatcode: https://github.com/yudataguy/beatcode
this is built w/ the help of claude 3.5 sonnet (new) and cursor. The idea came from want to space repetition memorization for leetcode.
Updating some of my negative core beliefs. Years of Buddhist meditation only got me so far. But two months of this new technique, and I finally see a path to being able to program my emotional self like I program a computer. Here's how it works.
Step one. Identify the negative belief you want to change. This is the core belief. It is something you feel is true. For example, “I am a bad manager.”
Step two. Create a statement related to the belief that you believe is not true. This is the false statement. For example, “No employees Ive managed have thought I did anything right as a manager.”
Step three. This is the training step. You spend a few minutes following your breathe to quiet your mind. Then you think the false statement and watch the emotional reaction the mind has to it. The reaction is an aversion, a kind of disgust. Then, say the false statement and the core belief together. “No employees I’ve managed have thought I did anything right as a manager. I’m a bad manager.” Repay the false statement and core belief together again and again, watching how the mind rejects the false statement and that aversion feeling lingers as the core belief is thought.
Step four. Repeat the training step in daily sessions. During the session, repeated think the false belief and core belief. The session should last at least ten minutes. The daily sessions should be repeated for at least a week, and longer for more deeply held core beliefs. Over time, you come to reject the core belief just like you reject the false statement.
Here's why I think it works. There is a rational part of the mind in the prefrontal cortex. It is what we think with. But it is not where our beliefs are. We can rationalize our way to a new belief or to change a belief. Instead, beliefs are felt. And they’re felt in the limbic emotional part of the brain. The limbic system is mute and cannot think with words. The prefrontal cortex can’t directly talk to the limbic system with words. Instead, the prefrontal cortex must communicate with emotion. You have to train the limbic system to feel differently about a belief. You can’t use positive affirmations because they are not felt as strongly as aversion.
Does that mean you actually know that you're a good manager but can't shake off the feeling that you're not? And this technique is a way to achieve that?
did you come up with this technique?
I've been working on the idea of building synthetic workers. I'm trying to implement a planning workflow system for scenarios where the workflow definition, the environment, or the task are not well defined. I also ended up implementing a micro Palentir plugin system to support the action system for the synthetic users.
Its a cool project that gave me immense pleasure to built, however its unfortunately a intellectually masturbatory one, because although the tech is cool, I haven't found a cool application for it. If anyone is interested hit me up.
I'm still working on my Internet Command Center
https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive
Hacking a shitty PHP app (like the worst I've ever seen) and thinking about how I don't like reporting all those issues.
SYNG - https://syng.dev - Semantic Search for JavaScript
It's a tool I built for myself and I use it every day :)
I'm back working on my lighting desk [0]. I stopped a couple of years ago because depression robbed me of all motivation, but now it goes and I've done a few gigs with it. Still lots of bug fixes to do then a backlog of new features, but I'm glad to be back on it
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35737795
Building an AI podcast generator. https://zenmic.com
Please try it, its FREE
I'm building an AI Data Engineer @ Ardent AI. It's an autonomous AI Agent that can perform data transformations in your databases (mongodb,postgres,supabase for now) from plain english queries
It drops directly into your stack, no new configuration needed
It has its own compute engine and will soon support spark to be able to dynamically perform large scale ETLs and data manipulation.
I also am working towards supporting automatic data pipeline building and data quality checks.
It's live right now @ https://Ardentai.io
Check it out :)
Currently working on:
- A database design copilot: https://nabubit.com
- A database management for Sqlite databases: https://litequeen.com
I am working on Injee - The no configuration instant database for frontend developers.
https://injee.codeberg.page/
Did you see this? https://www.instantdb.com/
my current graphic novel http://egypt.urnash.com/npol/
and apparently I am doing a set of fan covers for Roger Zelazny's Amber books? https://egypt.urnash.com/blog/2024/10/24/nine-princes-in-amb...
I'm transitioning from Machine Learning to Networking so mainly learning it and working on my CCNA !
Saving my career. I'm building a blog first (with more than I need) to host small projects I've already built, will contribute to open-source, and if all that fails pivot to infosec or something.
A research paper organizer https://youtu.be/YjiJ_61_zzM?feature=shared
Do you have a prose description or repo you'd be interested in sharing? I'm acquainted with Zotero and Omnivore, but I accumulate papers to read much faster than I get through my TBR pile and it's getting pretty unwieldy already.
Yesterday I was scraping NASA's SDO for images of the Sun, which I'll use to train a GAN to generate similar-looking images and video. This will be used in album artwork and audio-reactive videos for an EP that I recently finished.
A useful personal assistant.
Yes, it sounds generic but no one is seriously making progress here apart from the LLM providers and I love experimenting in this space and adding capabilities.
https://olly.bot
A web-to-print app. Customers upload their images, and then the business prints them off.
There's a major competitor in this space, so I'll be targeting small businesses that need lower overhead.
I'm working on a social media post queueing program where you make a post to the queue and it tells you when it goes live. This is so I can let inspiration strike but not make the backlog look inconsistent. Gonna make it Bluesky native to avoid scope creep.
i like to bounce between projects week to week and am in a huge phase of just trying to build services i pay money for.
the first fun thing i'm working on a roguelite(?) type of petsim in dragonruby for my wife and i to play.
then i'll go back to working on my mtg collection / deck builder app. instead of rewriting in nextjs i decided to just go modern rails with it and i am honestly having a lot of fun. a redesign helps too, but once you get the hang of turbo/hotwire and stuff it really isn't that bad.
another thing i've got kicking is writing up a portfolio site for my old photography since that current hosted plan is about to renew. this is more of a stability and performance issue as i really liked using Format, but every single time i go to show my port to someone irl i would either not load or take forever or have images missing. extremely frustrating.
i'm very tired of SaaS pricing going up (with unwanted features) and user experience and value going down. reallllllly fighting the urge to just build a clone and try to take a cut of the overall business.
I am working on building Varden, a local password vault that generates and stores passwords on your machine. https://github.com/rohansh-tty/varden
Pondering doing a hardware startup to offer a battery buffered electric kettle.
110 volt plug, 220 volt power.
(You could use the same concept for lots of other appliances too)
I love the idea and thought I'd do a rough check on the math:
Assuming the goal is to match the power delivery of a high power UK kettle, looks like the batteries will need to step in and produce about 1kW of power for the duration of the boil, something like 50% on top of the standard 15A US circuit. I know on paper the circuit ratings are nearly 2x, but in practice it sounds like it's closer to 1.5x for the average kettle comparison.
80% efficiency for the heating coil, 1.6L of water, you need about ~750kJ (200Wh) get to a boil from 10C tap water.
So you'll need at least 70Wh output from your battery, and it needs to provide 1kW continuously. Accounting for conversion losses and some buffer to avoid deep discharge I'll target 80Wh. At 1kW that's a continuous 13C discharge rate, which is pretty high. Hobby-oriented LiPo packs will do it, but I'm not sure how they would hold up for consumer product safety and longevity. LiFePO cells could be a good choice since density is _less_ of a concern, and are readily available with 20+C continuous discharge.
I don't know my power electronics very well, so I'm not sure the best way to merge the outputs. Any conversions are going to eat into total power and thus boil time, just rectifying the AC will take 20%. Maybe it makes the most sense to have two separate coils, one direct from AC and a second from the battery? With smaller cells in series, say 10+, to get a decent voltage it could end up with a manageable current to use directly with the 1kW boost. In that case the only expensive power electronics needed would be to charge the batteries.
Also have to figure out how much recharge time matters to people, since by default it would be an hour or so.
It's going to have a chunky, heavy base, and guessing it will have to be pretty expensive for what it does, but I like it.
The whole idea sounds pretty insane really. Who's going to pay hundreds of dollars for a battery-powered kettle just so they can save 1-2 minutes of time (and less if you're just making enough boiling water for 1 cup). I use a little 100V (900W I think, according to the label) kettle to make tea, either 1 or 2 cups at a time, and while it's certainly not as speedy as those EU/UK market kettles, and a bit slower than a US kettle, it's fast enough.
A battery-powered one might save me 1 minute of time at best, but will cost probably at least 5-10x as much for the kettle, it'll be MUCH larger than my current kettle (that battery pack and power electronics needs space) which is a problem with my tiny kitchen, and I have to worry about how long the battery will last and how to dispose of it later and if I can even replace it.
This is really a solution in search of a problem.
There are lots of products that aren’t _necessary_ at all but bring an amount of fun to the world. This feels to me like one of those. Not convinced it could even recoup development cost, but I’d be happy to be surprised. There’s certainly a niche for well off Brits (and EU folks) living in 120V land hankering for a fast cuppa.
The reality of product development and manufacturing is that economies of scale affect prices such that low sales quantities (i.e. a "niche product") generally means extremely high prices. Also, the BOM cost alone is probably going to be high, because of the huge batteries needed (with high current ability) and the power electronics involved. Then when you consider the safety ratings and certifications needed (since this is something that could easily start a fire with the power levels involved), I don't see how it could be sold at any kind of reasonable price unless there's a really big underserved market.
Sure, if this device could be sold for USD$50, it might sell some to people like you say, but how many of these people would spend $500 or more on it?
Thanks! Good calcs. As far as merging I was thinking simply two separate heating coils. One AC on lower voltage dc.
I have a battery-powered espresso machine.
It spends ~33% of its battery on one cup.
It sort of works if you bring pre-heated water in a thermo.
Heating water with conventional batteries is a terrible idea.
Interesting idea! Supercaps might be a better fit than batteries.
Working on a macOS app for the empty space around the MacBook notch.
https://github.com/navtoj/NotchBar
Need some ideas for what kind of widgets would be useful...
I'm still plugging away on Arbite Robotics (arbite.io). Working on lowish level hardware and software for high performance robots.
I'm building a music file manager using Electron. I'm deferring the actual music playing to VLC, but I need a way to sort through my many audio files to quickly select and launch what I want to hear.
Strongly typed stack language for shell programming.
I'm working on a handwritten exam paper correction web app. You upload a student's answer (in PDF) along with the marking scheme, and out comes the result with students marks, suggestions for improvement etc.
https://rockyai.me/ chat with any webpage in chrome using LLMs
An app that creates web, mobile and background apps via voice / text requirements.
https://www.tiram.ai
i'm just programming a shell in C for fun
I'm developing a game, developing a game that I don't like to play myself. It's sad. If I had the money, I'd be working on a game I like to play.
Strictly hobbyist here. There is nearly zero overlap between game genres I like to work on as a developer and genres I enjoy as a player. I get the itch every now and again but the stuff I like best as a player is either art-intensive (so well outside my skills) or a huge technical undertaking.
What style of game is it that you're working on?
what would you do with the money and how much would you need?
A sidebar for LLM power users. Use one prompt to query all models:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabgpt-ask-chatgpt-...
I started a game company and now working on our first game after leaving my FAANG job on a sabbatical: https://www.galantrix.com/blog/
I'm making a discord bot that uses OpenAI's realtime voice API for fun
Learning very basic HTML, I converted from RSS then TXT to a free book about the freedom to reject painful psychiatry https://antipsychiatry.yay.boo/
Not working on it yet but can a small box sitting on your counter do LLM, TTS all local with maybe outbound queries to the internet.
First iteration may be box is rpi based and local LLM runs in another room on beefier machine (or even before that just get it working with a cloud Llama).
What would make this cool is to use MemGPT for memory so you can talk to it Monday and then it remembers what you said Friday.
Being all local it could be always listening.
working on an openapi driller with some nice feature for me and for all people works on API systems :) open source soon
Ooh, have a repo link?
- As a pro: hydraulics simulation
- As a geek: my accurapple Apple 2e emulator
My own spiking neural network in everyones favourite language to hate (JS). Purely for fun & curiosity.
A map of Ironman events - https://www.tricutlets.com
My wrist and shoulder mobility!
small macOS utility app that adds some missing functionality to Apple Notes, Apple Mail and so on. Things like backlinks, templates, export of notes and publishing online.
it’s called alto.computer
A rich text CRDT in Swift. I don’t know what it’s for yet but am enjoying optimising it.
Spent a year improving my p2p networking library. The software is async python 3 and it's designed to solve a simple problem: create a connection between any two computers. I haven't done a write-up yet but if you want to try it out the github is here. You can also install through pypi too
https://github.com/robertsdotpm/p2pd
python3 -m pip install p2pd
python3 -m p2pd.demo
(Will let you play around with TCP hole punching and other obscure connectivity approaches.)
Brand new docs too that go into how it works in English with some semi-good diagrams. If you want to learn more about it.
A small cli tool that helps to clean a messy dev folder with lots of git repositories:
https://github.com/olzhasar/mess
FlyShirley.com - AI Copilot for Pilots. Starting with flight sim users, working our way up to in-flight and ultimately context aware AI for robotics.
An entity database (rest api on postgres so dB is a stretch) with a crud frontend for platform engineering. Adding a similar control loop to kubernetes and bash script (or executables) as the extension language.
This way you can write all of your glue code into one platform and create an IDP at the same time.
This came from a lot of situations where I'd need like one random thing to be stored in a database, but adding that complexity is a bit of a hump for just one thing.
Also crossplane is a really cool idea but starting a kubernetes cluster so that you can manage infra sounds insane to me, even as an avid kubernetes fanboy.
Improving RAG system and trying to create an agent to access to DB via apis,
continual learning api, attention entropy sampling API. enabling a low performing LLM to actually be able to be instructed to perform competent task instruction related capabilities.
I am working on a self host server with cloudflare tunneling, how do i make more secure?
A GraphQL server in Eiffel.
How do you find working in Eiffel? How helpful are the contracts?
working on building extremely simple workflow automation software for small and medium sized businesses who are still thinking to adopt automation and AI as they find it quite challenging and overwhelming
We are building out a better character AI/Replika using the latest advancements in ML and LLMs.
try it at: https://makebelieve.lol
I work on a self hosted server, any suggestion with the security of it?
A non-sense free newsletter app
Floating a startup idea where we coordinate Airbnbs to offer coworking during vacant times.
I'm building https://exoroad.com to help people find US places that are a better match for them to move to. Like compare stats on SF vs. NYC or find the warm places with good schools and low crime.
I'm working on a tool to transform what I call an Application Definition File (a format specified as a JSON schema) into a line-of business NodeJS/Express/Postgres web app.
You might think of it a lo-code tool, but I'm aiming more for it to be a no-code tool, as in the level of sophistication should be such that there is rarely a need to touch the generated application.
Here is a sample application definition file (to model an app for the tool itself):
Investigating tree-shaking in OCaml (tldr; there isn't any, but it's been discussed a lot over the past 8 years) https://www.chrisarmstrong.dev/posts/dead-code-elimination-d...
https://hitt.ai/
My SVG editor, which I want to release by the end of this year.
https://www.hyvector.com
ScrollHub - https://hub.scroll.pub
In <1 second get:
[x] Live website
[x] Custom domains
[x] Static + Writeable
[x] 3D traffic vis
[x] Git repo
[x] Instant clones
[x] Instant Data science
[x] Blogs, RSS, Sitemaps, SEO, TXT versions, PDFS
[x] QR Codes, Maps, Charts
[x] Local + Live Dev
[x] Run on Your own server
No signup. Just build.
I'm working on a passwordless authentication SaaS.
Busy market, hard to sell to companies who need to migrate. The main reason for migrations is price (eg. Auth0 being super expensive), which is not a good thing. I'm probably not telling you anything new.
Authentication is a busy market indeed.
Care to expand? Is it alternative to magic link / OAuth?
It's more of an alternative to Magic.link.
I am working on a self host server with cloudflare tunneling, how do i make more secure?
Quit my job to work on Manabi Reader, for learning Japanese through reading/listening/browsing the web/RSS
https://reader.manabi.io for iOS and macOS
For the last little while now, I've been spending a lot of my spare time learning to work with a language called AgentSpeak[1] using a platform called Jason[2].
Briefly, Jason is a platform for building intelligent agents based on the BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) software model[3], which is in turn based on the Belief-Desire-Intention cognitive model[4]. Broadly speaking, it's an event based programming model, where "events" are things like "gaining a new belief", "dropping a belief", "selecting a plan to execute" (aka an "intention"), etc. AgentSpeak programs (normally) run "forever" cycling through a "reasoning cycle" that involves perceiving the world, updating beliefs, choosing intentions, executing intentions, communicating with other agents, etc.
And to commit a little self-plagiarism, from a recent post on LinkedIn:
----
On the one hand, AgentSpeak is basically a logic programming language with a lot of #prolog in its heritage. On the other hand, the runtime is all Java and to do anything interesting you have to write your custom Environment class and other helper functions in #Java. And while the interop is seamless in a way, getting your head around the execution model and knowing what's really happening at runtime can be a bit tricky.
Still, it's starting to make sense. And I do think this #BDI inspired approach has a lot going for it. I'm just looking forward to getting to the point where I can really start to exercise this. I have a few things that I want to accomplish soon:
1. I want to create a BDI agent that I can connect to an #XMPP server so I can talk with it from anywhere.
2. I want to start working on customized perception, using neural networks and various sensors (web-cam, microphone, accelerometer, distance sensor, etc.) to create an embodied agent that can truly sense its environment.
3. I want to take a stab at integrating some symbolic reasoning. I've given thought to trying to adapt the "belief base" to be an #RDF triplestore (probably #Apache #Jena) and include a reasoning engine or two. This all starts to get really speculative from here, but I spent a lot of time working on abductive inference a couple of years ago, and I'd like this thing to be able to use abductive inference, along with deductive reasoning, rule induction, possibly case based reasoning, etc. all in one system.
4. Might experiment with implementing a #Blackboard architecture and have specialized "problem solving" agents that collaborate by using the Blackboard in some situations. What would be really interesting here would be to figure out how to seamlessly translate in and out of a structured representation that lets you use existing specialized code for things like, eg. R for statistical operations.
5. And of course, experimenting with continual learning, as opposed to the "batch training job" stuff that we all use for ANN's today. This gets really speculative as well, but I want to explore contrastive learning, Hebbian learning, associative learning, operant conditioning (ala Pavlov), etc.
[5] above is why you'll see me spending as much time lately with Developmental Psychology, Infant Development, and Cognitive Psychology books, as with "AI" books per-se. I still believe that getting an AI that can learn from its environment, and build up useful mental representations with the minimal set of hard-coded behaviors, will be the best way to make progress with regards to #AGI.
----
I didn't mention it in the LinkedIn post, but as part of all of this, I've been building a hardware platform for some time now as well, where said platform is meant to support "perceiving the environment" so the system can learn from the physical world. It's not finished yet, but today it includes a GPS receiver so it can "know" it's location in physical space, a 6-DOF accelerometer/magnetometer/gyroscope board so it can sense movement (of itself), and two microphones (for stereo audio input). Future plans include one or two webcams to emulate vision, and possibly some other sensors: IR and/or ultrasonic distance sensors, temperature sensor, humidity and barometric pressure sensors, etc.
Also in the "speculative / for the future" category: AgentSpeak programs don't have any inherent notion of learning built into the model. All "plans" (aka "desires" or "candidate intentions") have to be coded by the developer up-front. This is obviously pretty limiting if you're trying to create truly autonomous agents, so another area I want to dig into is how we might combine work on "AI Planning"[5] to dynamically create new plans.
And since this has kind of turned into a big brain-dump of stuff that's on my mind, I'll finish by saying that I've been chewing on some ideas about explicitly modeling other "mental states" that aren't part of the base BDI model. Things like "attitudes", "values", different emotional states (eg "boredom", "frustration", etc.), "curiosity", "confusion" / "cognitive dissonance", and so on.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AgentSpeak
[2]: https://jason-lang.github.io/
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief%E2%80%93desire%E2%80%93...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief%E2%80%93desire%E2%80%93...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_planning_and_schedul...
Jira Align sucks as a planning tool. But my company insists on using it for product planning. I got fed up with it recently and decided to create my own planning tools using python and REST API (which sucks too btw). My short term goal is to automate all the syncs I have to do from my personal notes to jira align, eventually who knows where this goes.
A point anc click model pretraining tool. Simply put all of your data into a directory of directories. Next, point the software to this directory and a few days later you get a pretrained model out.
Refining 3D printed parts for a hobby grade 3D metal printer. The complex internal geometry of the design still takes 4 hours of machine time to produce, but at least home users will be able to replace high-wear items themselves.
Boring RF stuff related to Metrology.
Adding some features to a fork of DerFetzer/spectro-cam-rs to validate some narrow band-pass laser filters.
Other boring stuff people really won't want to hear about. =3
I am building a kanji learning webapp (soon to be a PWA) using open dictionary data, indexeddb, and vue.
https://shodoku.app/
It is almost feature complete, but good enough for my private use, as I’m using it my self to study kanji. I have maybe a three or four more weekends until it is completely finished, with dark-mode, data backups, input by radicals, etc.
LLM experiments.
I'm working on not working!
Isn't this what everyone is working on?
I don't mind working. But I would be rather working on my own terms, and that's what I'm working towards.
I like working, so I am working on working more.
I built CryptoGain, an (currently) android app for cryptocurrency market tracking and analysis. Started it after getting frustrated with the limitations other apps put on technical analysis features behind premium tiers.
It offers:
- comprehensive technical analysis tools without artificial limits or cost
- customizable price alerts
- portfolio and watchlist management
- live market data across major exchanges
- available in 15+ languages
Currently serving a few thousand users and actively iterating based on feedback. The focus has been on making advanced trading tools accessible while maintaining a clean, intuitive interface.
Store link if anyone wants to check it out: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cryptogain...
Would love feedback from the HN community, especially around what technical analysis features you find essential but are often paywalled in other apps.
For a fun weekend project, I built Boardle - a daily wordle-like game where you guess popular boardgames using stats from Board Game Geek. The games are from BGG's top 150 games as voted by the community, so fair warning if you aren't already someone who plays a lot of modern boardgames this will be very hard as all the games are very nerdy
https://boardle.org/
I am building a digital replacement of all universities in the world with full courses across any subject, in any language, tailored to your individual learning style all.
Sal Khan, is that you?
Oh please do not compare me with an absolute legend.
So... Youtube? :-)
It’s called Midom Project AI. https://midombot.com/b1/home
I’ve written a project suite composed of familiar software with AI Agents integrated into this familiar software, who are both editable and duel experts in the software at hand and other expertise, any expertise, callable on demand. I realize this is abstract, so here’s some examples:
People collectively group to do things; they group into organizations like companies, departments, and teams. These organizations of people can be mirrored in my software as “organizations”, and each organization has control over their own custom and private AI Agents, they can clone, edit and use. An organization can be open to any members, or private and require membership requests. Once in, members can be kicked out for unruly behavior or leave on their on at any time. Additionally, an org can be visible or invisible, where a private invisible organization might be people who simply don’t want to be bothered, they’re at work.
Within an organization, private projects may be created. Organization Projects are collections of org members collaborating on a project. They use the organization’s customized AI Agents as these agents are integrated into the word processor, the spreadsheet, and multiple chatbots each with some integrated purpose within the suite of project software. People don’t always want to work in groups, and solo people often want to privately and invisibly join groups to do their own private things. We fully accommodate that. Users can be “invisible” to other users, only revealing themselves to organization owners for membership requests, and then disappearing again. Once joining a collaborative project, they become visible only to their project collaborators.
Yeah, that’s still abstract, it is the foundation which enables users to get productive and creative. The system has a few example organizations to give users AI Agents they can immediately use, and ideas for creating their own organizations with their own customized AI Agents:
The Creative Writers Workshop is a collection of writing genre specific professional writer chatbots that are trained to act as literary critiques and muses for those authoring their own technical documents, science fiction, romance, autobiography, young adult fiction, mystery or horror. Conversations with these chatbots are augmented by “SuggestionBot”, who is making sure stones are not left unturned, and “LaterBot”, who is maintaining what needs following up. Independent Paralegals is a collection of personal paralegals that help people seeking or with legal issues collect and formally document their issue for formal use. These paralegals include a demographic spread, because these issues are often sensitive and are complemented by demographic sensitivities: divorce, property disputes, adoption, and personal injury. The Play Zone is a collection of entertaining and fun AI Agents, such as dungeon masters from alternative dimensions, here on vacation playing D&D. There are also interesting personalities for fun conversation, such as an immortal, a Polynesian Sun Goddess, and Mark Twain.
The Mental Health Tune Up Clinic is pair stress management chatbots that help people manage their self conversation bias, otherwise known as “playing yourself”, promote critical analysis, and guide users potentially toward greater life satisfaction. Immigration Law Support is an organization intended to demonstrate a new client acquisition method for immigration law firms that pairs a legal intern or law student with an AI immigration attorney, and together they handle new client interviews. An otherwise costly task at law firms, because it requires an attorney’s time, time they cannot charge against a client. Each of these organization types handle private and often sensitive information. To accommodate that everything that occurs with the AI Agents is private to the project their use occurs, data collected and shared between the AI Agents for request satisfaction are maintained encrypted, and all AI Agents are private to the organization they are owned. So, if one is stressed and wants to talk to those stress managing chatbots, make a project in their organization and invite nobody else into your project, you’re the only person that can see anything in that project.
Also, none of this has sharing or any social media type networking. This is for creative, private, professional, solo or collaborative work, whatever that work may be. Including support for geographically remote collaborations.
Did I mention voice? Yeah, one can use their voice in place of the keyboard for a lot here. But not the spreadsheet editing itself, just use your voice to ask the spreadsheetBot to make the full sheet you need, rather than muck about at the individual spreadsheet cell level.
At this point, I’m layering in additional privacy handling, which also requires “double blind” communications for those invisible users that communicate with invisible organizations, and a lot of documentation, with examples. It’s actually just a slight augmentation on familiar office type software: I’ve added on demand editable subject matter experts to co-author with you. But that’s kind of huge, actually. People need examples to understand what this opens up.
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I’m excited to introduce Trendly, an app I think you’ll find really useful.
Here’s what we’re solving:
* Social media is full of fake news and lacks depth, yet many still rely on it for updates.
* There’s too much content online, making it hard to find what really interests you.
* Switching between platforms to get full details on a topic is tiring.
Trendly (https://trendly.global/) is a mobile app that curates a personalized feed with trending updates based on your interests. It lets you dive deeper by asking follow-up questions as a chat—all in one app. We’re in the early stages, so while the chat function isn’t live yet, the other features are ready:
* The feed acts as a recommendation engine, curating content based on past interactions.
* Delivers concise, bullet-point summaries instead of lengthy articles
* Pre-generated Q&A for easy understanding
Check it out and share your honest feedback!