A Django UI Desktop app, a là Docker Desktop, but for manage Django projects. Some people prefer UI apps instead of CLI, and it could be good for juniors and starters, to get familiarized with how Django works before jumping into the command line.
It is more an excuse to create a simlpe Electron app, though.
I'm creating an infinite canvas that has all your organization's code and documentation on it. If you zoom in, you can see the code, if you zoom out you see the big picture. By giving everything a place on the map, it becomes easier to figure out your way through the landscape and understand the systems. Different modes can you show you different things: code age, authorship (bus-factor, is the person still with the company etc), languages used, security issues. There's time-travel, think Gource for all software in your company, and maybe the most fun: a GeoGuessr for code. Select the repos for your team (or if you feel confident, of the entire org), you get a snippet and have to guess where it is. The plan is for LLMs + tree-sitter to analyze all the code and show relations to other systems, databases etc.
I had the idea 2 years ago, but starting building in earnest 2 months ago. Spending all my time on it now, minus 3 or 4 days per week of earning money. Currently looking for a GTM/sales-oriented cofounder in NL.
Thanks, that seems useful! Too bad my entire backend is in Rust and works directly on git repos instead of checked out code.
I want to build a local company in my city of Utrecht, primarily on-site. That gives me the most energy and fun and is something that I want to optimize for.
Went through your profile searching for a demo and discovered fractional CTO. Could you share a bit about how you evaluate new gigs and figure out how much time each one would need?
People ask if I'm available and if I find the work interesting and they can pay me I say yes. I have never looked for work since starting and have slightly more requests than I can fulfill (almost everything through my network). For efficiency I do full days of work + ad-hoc meetings when necessary and no more than 2 days per week per client.
Note that I'm not always a CTO in the strictest sense of the word, I like doing complex technical challenges with software companies and sometimes just lead a complex project like implementing ISO 27001 or re-packaging a software suite for on-prem deployment.
Sorry to off topic further but I also have a question - how do you deal with recruiters? As a consultant I get grilled and rejected if I ever have overlapping projects or anything that even remotely looks like more than 40h a week. They're very intimidated with implications of being "overemployed"
This isn't a problem for me. I mostly stopped getting interest from recruiters when I became CTO. Now I just get calls from CEOs or CPOs etc and they understand what I offer them. I have a rule for myself to never charge for hours when I'm not productive and never charge overlapping hours though.
This sounds lovely. I am a spatial thinker so this is right up my alley.
How do you deal with different kinds of groupings and connections? For example, some things could be connected because they are “integrations”, or because they deal with notifications, or because they’re available only in the enterprise plan. Not all related things are related in the same way.
Still a lot of thinking to be done here to be honest. I've built a very fast canvas with zoom-to-code, parsing the git history, code age overlays etc, but understanding the architecture and connections is the next big thing I have to figure out. Plenty of ideas though!
We use IcePanel for a similar functionality but like all diagramming solutions it suffers if you don’t constantly feed it. If you can solve that problem you’re definitely on to something.
I would pay for it as an individual. Just things like going into code and spending 3 weeks reverse engineering everything is not ideal. Especially if it's something where the entire team has quit or been laid off. And lately the solution for that is just rewriting the damn thing lol.
How much we're willing to pay is a whole other question. I feel like this is the kind of thing that Cursor already does by itself but it's just not releasing a user-readable output of it.
It won't likely be a subscription thing, but one off payments per repo makes sense, and there should be some kind of satisfaction guarantee or say, charge to have the output in a human readable format.
Monorepos are also a pain. On the front end, they sometimes share design. On BE they may share databases. It would be cool to break it down into DDD-style domains if applicable or propose things like anti corruption layers. More often it's like a "pacific ocean meets atlantic ocean" kind of thing, where you can tell there's a difference in the way things are done, but it's not entirely clear where the border is. This would probably be worth a lot more.
To a much lesser extent, an architectural copilot would also make sense. On the front end, we have a lot of redundant components. Say a button might be PrimaryButton, but the same thing is GreenButton or FilledNoOutlineButton by other devs. We tried documenting this which just ended up being a waste of 1 week because nobody read the doc. It's worse with complex components like TwoButtonModal vs TwoButtonModalWithClose. And what happens is code is always built in parallel; people don't realize that the designer's new style applies to both teams so you get two people building the same components at the same time. Not a major problem, but I think this is worth a few cents every PR.
Ultimately it's hard to gauge. Like Copilot underdelivered, Cursor overdelivers, and yet both essentially do the same thing. I guess the amount we're willing to pay is just vibe-based.
Demo yes, feel free to reach out if you'd be willing to pay as I'm slowly starting to look for beta customers. You can also ask me to be put on the waiting list. Downloadable: I think in about two months.
I not really working on anything bigger. All the stuff I am tinkering with are smaller tools I need to help with my other 'forever pending' projects, but it feels productive and I am seeing mild progress so I am happy.
I've been working on https://github.com/nickjj/plutus, it's a command line income and expense tracker. It's a zero dependency Python script that you can curl down.
It generates reports to show you your numbers in a bunch of customizable ways, it generates these reports in less than a second and uses a single CSV file as your data source.
I've gotten things to the point where I can do my books every quarter in about 5 minutes with complete accuracy since it supports importing arbitrary CSV files such as bank exports with a way to automate categorizing things in any way you see fit. I currently use it to track my income, business expenses and personal expenses.
Basically I ran into issues using different finance tracking tools over the last decade which always made me feel unhappy to use those tools so I built Plutus with intent to resolve all of those issues I had and make me happy while using it.
I live next to a school, so there's a low speed limit (30 km/h). Still, people drive like race drivers and the city hasn't ever responded to the residents' hopes of introducing a speed camera.
I wanted to have some data on how many people speed, the max speed recorded, that sort of thing. Things the city should be doing after many complaints of dangerous driving and people being almost killed on zebra crossings.
I have a doorbell camera, and by analysing the footage using OpenCV and some code, I can track how fast people drive if you see how fast they move between two known points.
The guy at Not Just Bikes will tell you that enforcement will never work nor happen and that the only way to get people to slow down is to design the road so it doesn't feel safe to drive fast.
The road next to my house has a speed limit of 20mph but most cars go 45mph because it's a straight road 4 lanes but space for 6. No bumps, no curves, wide. Effectively it feels like you should be driving fast. If I go the speed limit in the center lane because I'm going to turn left people will get angry and speed around at 60mph pissed off
Is that legal in your country? In mine (Netherlands) there are way too many people with doorbell camera aimed right at the street even though it's illegal to record a public space like that. Most folks are ignorant about it though, or think that surely the internet-connected gadget sold by some anonymous corporation won't be abused....
It is the "systemic/constant/permanent" recording, record-keeping. etc. a.k.a. "processing" (GDPR "processing" means "if it exists and you touch it, your are processing it").
Back in 2005 I remember working with some physical sec company that were setting up cameras in a factory, and they wanted the cameras to 'not record traffic, be activated on if THIS part of the screen has motion')(sidewalk vs sidewalk-right-on-our-doorbell vs road). Also, sudden changes in lighting would trigger it :)
Then you need to have retention period (good luck). Most people use those door-cams are violating GDPR. UNLESS when people complain and take you to court (very very very rare), you can prove that "I auto-delete records after 24h when there is no incident", "I have proximity scanner so it is only 0m-2m from my front door", etc.) (violating GDPR because "hey you pervert why do you record my kids EVERY DAY going in and out")
Privacy and Data protection is very very very difficult with GDPR (and thank you Facebook for messing up back in 2015ish!!!)
You can set up your cam but have the "AI" automatically pixelating all license-plates, and the video recording (if any) should be post-pixelating, and not the original feed. How about you put something with a speed-measuring-sensor (that is NOT a camera), so you only get 'anonymised' data, i.e. "20 moving items", and their speeds. But you will not be able to tell if the 300km/h was done by a bicycle or a Hayabusa ;)
It's a complex discussion in the Netherlands in which the data protection agency (AP) has a very strict view (they claim it's not allowed) while for example the associated press sees it very different.
There is a key difference between recording vs publishing. There are more restrictions on publishing and an objective assessment needs to be made between the interests of the person in the footage and the general public or publisher.
I would argue that recording the road to collect speed data, not keeping the recording longer than needed and not for example recording license plates, would pass in the Netherlands. Since you're making an assessment between different interests and the is limited privacy impact. Of course assuming this is happening on a public road and not someone's property.
Publishing the recordings instead of just the average speed data would be a very different story, especially if the cars or drivers can be identified.
I'm starting to think about a similar thing for noise. The noise of motor vehicles seems to be out of control and I am sure it is causing misery for the majority of the population who have to live near roads. I reckon a single loud motorcycle could disturb tens of thousands of people, potentially waking or startling them, raising blood pressure etc. in a single 10 minute trip. Unfortunately I think awareness of this problem is even worse than speed.
i think part of the problem is 30mph/48kmph doesnt feel fast - and to get people to drive slower manufacturers need to design cars so 20mph/32kmph feels faster
There is another way: make the road feel fast. Thankfully it doesn't need to be via bad road surfaces or horrible things like speed bumps that only encourage boy racers and reward large vehicles, making the road narrower with high kerbs or other physical obstacles force drivers to drive slowly and pay attention, otherwise they'll physically damage their vehicle. In a way it evens the playing field, currently cars can kill you, but they are untouchable, there are no consequences for speeding or being distracted. The main downside I can think of is the route becomes difficult for emergency vehicles to use, but with the saved space there could be a dedicated lane for public vehicles.
You sound like someone who doesn't have young children who cross a road where the road users should be respecting the speed limit set deliberately low because it's right in front of an elementary school, but instead a significant proportion of them are Michael Schumacher wannabes who need to drive everywhere at 60km/h.
I'm interested in uniform approximation with generalized polynomials -- these are linear combinations from families of parametrized continuous functions over some domain that satisfy some technical conditions, but its also fine to think of them as sums of regular monomials like 1, x, x^2, ..., x^N. This problem has been well understood for real intervals (classical case) for a long time, but I'm interested in this problem where we're approximating functions over complex domains.
There is a theoretically stable algorithm for the classical problem called the Remez exchange algorithm, and an extension to complex domains due to P.T.P. Tang in his 1987 PhD thesis at Berkeley. Theoretically Remez and its complex extension are very stable, but unfortunately implementations my advisor and I are aware of seem to struggle with large degree polynomials, where large is bigger than say n=45 -- errors begin to explode.
In any case, independently of this I've been learning more of the nitty gritty details of deep learning for a project at work (I'm a SWE in my day job, the math is more moonlighting), so to ground my efforts there I've been exploring deep learning approaches to this problem of complex uniform approximation, implementing results from various papers and tweaking things for my use case, and coming up with questions. That's much of what I'm thinking about this week!
Also, I'll be having a half-day long ADHD evaluation session on Friday -- so a bit apprehensive about that.
Formally I'm an undergraduate. Not in a hurry to graduate -- I take courses when they are interesting to me / relevant to my research / I happen to have the bandwidth.
I am already several years into my career and I have a spouse to support, so I'm ambivalent about formally attending graduate school -- at least anytime soon -- since that would introduce lots of time pressure and administrivia for little apparent benefit. My relationship with my supervisor is mostly informal
I've recently been prototyping a mobile application to track your food nutrition. The key feature lies in auto-detecting the food based on a given image, and breaking it down into it's ingredients and then into it's macros.
Existing apps such as MyFitnessPal and HealthifyMe fall into two ends of the spectrum where you either need to add ingredients one by one, or your food is logged with a standard macro count where you cannot change the ingredients used.
Weit ideally provides a seamless experience in taking a picture to retrieving ingredients to retrieving macros per ingredient. Once that's sorted, food tracking should be granular enough to build intelligence around it to improve one's diet based on their requirement.
Honestly, I used to constantly struggle with the realisation that none of my ideas are unique and whenever I see someone having built something similar, I feel like I'm wasting my time. I'm getting better at dealing with it now though.
Continued working with my team to grow my granddaughter who at 15 months handles a spoon and fork to feed herself at each meal; drinks from a cup without assistance; can clean her face and understand everything she is told or asked (though sometimes with a devious smile makes what an adult might consider a poor choice.... She is testing her boundaries like she is supposed to do).
I have learned how to and produced 6 different embroidery patterns on various pieces of infant clothing.
I combined multiple web based directions to create a Wi-Fi enabled USB (from a raspberry pi W 2) to enable a link from my computer to my embroidery machine.
I made cookies and shared them with others creating a lot of joy
I'm visiting with my grandson in another state, modeling good parenting and offering help where I can.
Probably the best way to develop your taste and understand the spectrum of different coffees available is to do comparative tasting aka try a small number of coffees in parallel to compare and contrast. I was having trouble finding tasting sets so I started freezing a little portion of every coffee bag I bought to create a collection for doing these tastings at home.
I needed something to keep track of them all (as well as my tasting notes in general) so instead of using a spreadsheet I built a full app for it. The app supports NFC-tagged containers which I've found to make my workflow a whole lot easier.
I also set up an online store to sell the NFC-equipped single-dosing tubes: https://store.coffeelibrary.app
Planning on adding more containers that work well with the app in the future.
I've recently been looking into running local LLMs for fun on my laptop (without any GPU) and this is the one thing I've never been able to find consistent information on. This is so helpful, thank you so much! Going to try and run Llama 3.2 3B FP8 soon.
Cool. What about giving the models for a given GPU? Also it could compare using vLLM, local_llama.c, etc. Links to docs maybe. Community build articles and rating. Along the lines of https://pcpartpicker.com/
And you can definitely add some ref links for a bit of revenue.
It doesn't work for all GPU/device in Simple tab: "Exception: Failed to calculate information for model. Error: Could not extract VRAM from: System Shared".
I'm working on a compiler for asynchronous circuits. Once I have modules, placement, and routing working, I'll have an MVP. Hopefully, this will allow people without any computer engineering expertise to make chips. For now it has a couple of useful tools.
Working on "wanting to live". It's hard to create desire within oneself when one has experienced intense sorrow.
Been trying the "do the thing, and desire comes after" for many things (baking, piano, skating, ..), but that hasn't really worked. What has seemed to work is connecting with people (crucial that they know how to connect back).
I was at a games exhibition a few months ago - and there was a game designed to help people deal with grief which i found interesting. I cant remember the name
I'm tinkering with the USB HID specification for power devices for all the wrong reasons.
Historically, UPSes had various proprietary communication protocols over serial ports. Nowadays they usually have a USB port, but I have a bunch of very old APC UPSes with just the serial port and/or the expansion card slot (which is usually just another serial link plus power on a edge connector).
A normal person would just use NUT or apcupsd over serial and call it a day. A bored person would write a USB HID power device stack and serial protocol acquisitors to give these UPSes USB ports. An insane person would add projectors from the USB HID power device stack to serial protocols so that they could use whatever communication card they want on any UPS they have (for example, a CyberPower RM205 card plugged into an APC Smart-UPS).
Why? Because apparently I'm insane and I needed a break from working on delinking executables back into object files, another heretical project I've worked on for the past couple years.
I've just started and I don't know if I'll finish that, but it's something I need to work on to exorcise that particular nagging thought out of my head.
Building a multi-modal llm app across multiple platforms and syncs. Doing this is both harder and easier than I expected. Can’t wait to ship it out into the real world soon.
In between figuring out what to do after a decade of work on Micro (https://github.com/micro), I started a new project called Reminder which tries to provide a single clean app and API for the Quran, Hadith and names of Allah. Maybe some of you would find it beneficial. It tries to put English first since most of us are non Arabic speaking and cultural from the west.
The name of your app reminds me of one I had started working on when I was out of employment: the app was going to send periodic reminders of stuff you've bookmarked/saved on various social media sites.
I was just about working on the Twitter api when Musk bought the company and restricted access. Real bummer. I got employment weeks later.
That's definitely the right name for periodic reminders right. Years ago I wrote an API called remindme which was supposed to provide pings for when you were in proximity to a location and it would remind you if you needed to pay someone, buy something, do something, etc. Never went anywhere but totally unrelated to this.
The Quran itself is referred to as the reminder. Because it's supposed to remind us of why we're here, our purpose, who made us, and all that.
I was wondering what happened to micro recently (loved the m3o domain). Sorry to hear it’s over. Have you written a post-mortem? I’d love to hear more about it — if you don’t feel too downbeat about it.
Haven't written a post-mortem but maybe at some point if it felt useful for others. Startups built around open source are generally very hard. About as bad as social consumer products. Both micro.dev and m3o.com are for sale yes.
I'm still working on DocSpring [1], originally launched on Hacker News in October 2017 under the name "FormAPI." It's a PDF generation API with a template editor UI for setting up fields on PDF forms. It makes it easy to turn complex tax and immigration forms into simple type-safe APIs with strong validations.
I've been having a lot of fun with AI agents lately. Have tried a lot of them - Cline, Roo Code, Windsurf, and finally settled on Cursor now with Claude 3.5 sonnet. It's been a big boost for my productivity.
AI helped me write a synchronous API proxy in Go that I'm almost ready launch. One of the main challenges with Ruby on Rails is that it's terrible at handling long-lived HTTP requests. Especially a lot of them at the same time. So our PDF generation API was forced to be asynchronous and our customers need to poll for status updates (or set up webhooks.)
This new synchronous subdomain will handle all the polling logic for you, so you can just make an HTTP request, wait a few seconds (or longer), and receive a link to a PDF that's ready to download. Even with AI, it was still very difficult and took many weeks to get it right. Challenges included security, load testing, data races, concurrency, and setting up reliable, secure infrastructure with an internal load balancer. I learned a huge amount about both Go and Kubernetes. But it's almost done and I should be launching in the next day or two.
After that, I'm finally launching support for template versioning. This will allow you to pin your API requests to a published version, so you can keep making changes to a draft version without affecting production. It's long overdue so I'm excited to get this launched as well.
Also working on a side project from time to time: VisualCI [2]. We have a lot of PDF integration tests that use image diffs, and some browser tests where I compare screenshots. So this is a tool I've wanted for a long time, and the paid services I've found can be a bit pricy. I'm going to try to build a very simple MVP that just does what we need, and maybe others will find it useful too.
I'm working on an educational game to try and replace or augment some security awareness training. To start with, the focus is phishing.
I'm also writing again. A story that's becoming more cyberpunk than I originally intended. It'll probably never be read by anyone but me, but getting it out of my head feels nice.
Also started going to the gym and working on my health.
I'm still working on Habitat. It's a free and open source, self-hosted social platform for local communities.
The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet.
I recently spoke with a Lemmy developer who gave me some advice on making it easy for anyone to host. I was struggling with the mess of supporting both docker and VM hosting. He told me that Lemmy uses ansible provisioning to install docker compose on the target VM so that the effort can be focused on docker support, so that's what I've been homing in on for the last few weeks.
I'm a fashion nerd. I've been working on an outfit tracking app for the last ~4 years (but only really pushed hard on it the last 3 months). I found I kept buying clothes that I never ended up wearing. Either because they didn't fit with what I had, I already had something like it, or it simply wasn't my actual style (although I thought it was). So, I built my own with the simple goal of buying less clothes, and throwing away fewer clothes.
There are plenty of apps that do outfit tracking, with some basic stats. But they all have a few or more of these shortcomings (from my perspective); unpleasant UI, no cross device syncing, lack of detailed usage statistics (e.g. cost spread over time by garment category), some categories just not supported, pushing a specific lifestyle such as Capsule Closets, or just plain focused on recommending what to wear using some mediocre algorithm that doesn't understand cuts and how different pieces fit together; basically only suitable for capsule collections.
These apps all have a lot of downsides too in common, which I haven't been able to solve either yet; ultimately you must start with an inventory of your clothes, and then work from there. It takes ages to catalog and import your clothes, and I haven't found many existing product that lets you export if you've even done it before. And on top of that, you have to be quite rigorous at tracking what you wear; the more data you have the more insight you can get from your choices.
I finally published on iOS a couple of months ago. No traction, and I don't expect there to be. I won't argue that my offering is better than any of the competition, but I've tried most of them (and wasted colossal amounts of time onboarding onto them) and found none fit my need properly. It's still very much work in progress, but I find myself reaching for it multiple times per week to inform my purchasing habits.
To me, vanity is only tangential to the purchasing of clothes, particularly fast fashion, where 'it looks good on the model' is often enough to part with money, not 'will it look good on me', or 'do I need it', which are often never even considered, surprisingly. The individual thinking they will look good is actually not always a factor; it can be a kind of addiction. Source comes from my previous employer (fast fashion related industry).
This app doesn't directly answer those questions, but it gives the data needed to stop and think about the answer (quickly). I don't consider myself a vain person, but I consider myself a person who makes poor decisions with their disposable income (fashion).
The main selling point would be this: You could avoid buying 2 shirts that will be unused then thrown away every year, for the cost of 1 shirt. Save money, and textile waste.
But also, why must everything be profitable? I most I could ever hope for is that the hosting costs are paid for.
I'm trying to apply the idea of microadventures [1] to the internet, allowing folks to have nice 5 minute breaks on the internet. I don't know if it will catch on - but it's something I need to be honest, so I mainly built it for myself!
Currently, it's set up as a daily (short) newsletter with a different link each day, but I'm trying to learn marketing to figure out how to get others interested. I've enjoyed creating it, but would like to see if others like it before moving on to a new project. Link to project: https://www.thedailydetour.co.uk/
After work hours I'm continuing work on my Saas for hairdressers.
There's some big players there but I feel like I can at least still try.
I'm honestly really surprised about how much I get stuck on business logic decisions. I went into this thinking making appointments, basic managing of employees and all that would be simple and relatively similar across salons.
Additionally I'm considering where I should move to. I wish to live in a place where owning substantial land for homesteading in a relatively climate safe area (relatively doing a lot of work there but imagine not already arid or with high storm risk) is not completely out of grasp. My region of Belgium is too densely populated for this.
Even if I'm not moving to a different country even next year I figured it's the kind of thing that takes a stupid amount of preplanning.
Finishing off the last bugs in my free puzzle game called Kombi, before it goes live on Steam.
Made in Love2D, mostly because it's limited in its simplicity (good for creativity) while still allowing me to make something usable. That, plus I love Lua, which is how the project event got started - just me wanting to mess around with the language. From then on it quickly spiraled out of control - 2 weeks to make the core logic of the game, 2 months to create a basic UI library from scratch, just because.
I made a Python library that can be used to simulate the combined effect of financial patterns (e.g. salary, inflation, investment gains, etc) over time so you can plan your finances better. It's currently on my GitHub and I'm looking for new things to add to it :) https://github.com/TimoKats/pylan
A web-native[1] protocol for secure[2], decentralised[3] access to files distributed across mirrors:
1. "Web-native" as in the protocol is designed with HTTP and modern web browsers in mind. Consequently, it can be implemented using Service Workers so that no additional software (nor even browser extensions) are needed to access files.
2. Files are addressed by their cryptographic hash of their content (a) to ensure the authenticity of the data received from mirrors and (b) to avoid hard-coding specific locations/servers (i.e. content addressing).
3. Files can be mirrored by anyone and users can retrieve files from any mirror; no party requires any permission from any authority. This is in contrast to traditional mirroring schemes, where mirrors have to "register" with the owner of the content (e.g. to mirror a Linux distro).
I’ve deleted all my social media apps (including YOU - LinkedIn).
I’m trying to really see and feel what’s actually missing in my life and trying to build it. Right now I just want to see what my friends are up to in a non-curated way.
Well done, LinkedIn is a cesspool.
Ironically the only thing I am using right now is Twitter, since a lot of interesting people are still on there. There's a lot of negative but balance as well. For every MAGA or ESR's comments, I balance it out with Miguel de Icaza's views on Gaza, etc.
I'm a long-time FreeCAD user, and one of my annoyances is that long-running operations lock up the entire UI and can't be aborted. This is particularly annoying if you realise you made a mistake, but have no way to go back and correct it without waiting for the operation to complete first. Or you kill FreeCAD but then you don't get to save your work.
So for my first contribution to FreeCAD I'm working on fixing this.
The underlying CAD operations are done by "OpenCascade", and at first I thought OpenCascade had no support for aborting operations part of the way through. So my first implementation was to move the operation into a child process and give the user a dialog box that would allow terminating the child process.
But it actually turns out OpenCascade does support aborting the operations! So now I'm working on doing it the OpenCascade way.
Always awesome to see new freecad devs chiming in. Thank you for your efforts, I bet a lot of people are reading your comments and nodding in approval, waiting for freecad to enter its heyday.
I’ve been improving the developer experience of the extremely janky Java Spring app that powers the most popular open source real time transit app, OneBusAway.
Last month I added Dockerfiles and a docker-compose.yml file to the project to make building and locally running it a breeze. Earlier today, I finally had a chance to figure out and document how to debug the app, which should greatly improve quality of life for anyone trying to fix bugs or add features to the backend. https://github.com/OneBusAway/onebusaway-application-modules...
I've been working on an iOS app that aggregates cinema showtimes across chains and independent theaters in the UK.
I moved to London some years back, and was pleasantly surprised by the vibrant cinema scene, that seems to be in a steep decline in so many places. On any day of the week, one can find independent films, old and new classics, Q&A's with filmmakers etc. playing in one of the many theaters across the city. Staying on top of it all is a chore though, and I found myself missing out on screenings regularly, because I didn't check that one cinema's website on time.
This is also my first time building and releasing an independent app. The journey from research, backend development and learning SwiftUI has been a trip. Released on TestFlight a couple of weeks ago.
I've been sharpening my axe by working on a few different projects in the shape of of an online shop[0][1]. Products are a bit of a mishmash as a result of the different projects - To date, I've been farming succulents, 3d modeling/printing (flower pots/hobby crafts/etc), and learning Rust/Next.js for the back/front ends!
Time investment has been _massive_ so far, but I just hit the first $100+ profit month, and despite the distance from my normal dev salary, the positive reviews/feedback have been an incredible reward that drives the motivation to continue. I will also say that it is quite the humbling experience to ship physical products and the experience has given me a whole new appreciation for the things we have in this world.
I’m working on a parser + dashboard for bank / cc / investment statements.
You feed in your docs and you get a dashboard that shows your categorized “flow” of money (think sankey, stacked bar), as well as some simple grouping tools (Show me all grocery spends on my credit card by month.
I initially wrote it in Haskell, but I don’t really know Haskell and I didn’t feel very productive with the stack, so I’m reworking it in something more familiar now.
Mostly just trying to get back into game development after a 15 year hiatus. Trying to task myself with recreated some portion of a game I've been playing recently. This month it's the fishing mini game from Dredge. Last month it was a simple inventory system. I've nothing to share really, I'd hoped to do a few blog posts on it, but having a 17 month old takes up most of your spare time
I've just published my first novel for adults, The Dark Sorcerer's Intern, my bid to bring back fun and comedy to a fantasy genre that has spent years in a grimdark rut.
The relevance to hackers is that unlike most fantasy where spells are cast with hand motions, magic words, or spell ingredients, there's actually an explanation for why that works and makes sense.
I’ve been working on https://veloa.com (think twitch meets peloton for open hardware) but probably for the last year I’ve found the last part (class builder) a bit overwhelming but I’ve been playing with ChatGPT and it’s helped get me back into things so could potentially launch soon. Would be great to get a cofounder to help so if you’re into cycling and programming let’s have a chat!
I'm building an interactive, web-based Python tutorial site intended to help with learning basic syntax. Originally it was for my kids who wanted to learn to code, but... might be useful to others.
The content needs some work, but I'm pretty happy with the framework / UX. I would love to get any feedback from folks who check it out!
(The first section is just multi-guess questions as part of the introductory content. Try any other section to get the full in-browser-code-execution experience, which uses client-side Pyodide under the hood.)
I've working on Colanode, an open-source & local-first Slack and Notion alternative that you can self host. You can use Colanode for real-time chat, as a knowledge center, project management or file storage. As a local-first application, Colanode offers full offline support, allowing you to work even when you’re not connected to the internet or the server is not available. You can host it in any environment (with minimal dependencies), giving you full ownership and control over your data.
I have been working full-time for about 15 months on a product to store real-world entity-relations in a graph (using AI/ML for extraction). The idea is to extract entities and relations deterministically from text (using AI/ML for clues about type and position of entities in text).
It is very much a work in progress with lots of commented out code which are just experiments.
Nice project! I built something extremely similar with a friend in 2022! Back when we only had the GPT-3 API. I built an ontological graph and relation extractor, mental model analysis engine, bunch of stuff, on top of an Elastic DB being filled with live incoming ephemeral data across the web, including messages, comments, posts, articles and more.
I would really love for you to reach out via the email in my bio so we can talk ontology!
This sounds lovely. This product has not reached to the point where ontology matters, that is still far away.
I am just going for the low hanging fruits - very basic stuff like location, person, event, activity, date (a few more things) and relations between them. One of the limitations is that I want to do deterministic extraction with suggestions from AI/ML, so there is much code to be written. I will email you, thanks a lot!
Bridging 3D editing with AI image/video-to-video. I have a lot of the disparate elements (timeline, video export, texture projection, etc) but I'm still playing around trying to find the killer use case.
> Instead of only working with a handful of colors, you can create a whole palette of swatches at the same time so you can see if they look good together.
> Precise control of every shades/tints in each swatch rather than being limited by autogenerated colors.
> See which color pairs contrast as you edit so you can create a palette with built-in WCAG accessibility. This way you can plan in advance which foreground colors (for headings, body text, form fields and so on) should contrast on which background colors, so you can avoid running into surprise low contrast issues later when designing.
Responding to some feedback I got: I need to add better UI feedback for this, but you can drag whole hue/saturation/lightness curves if you click/drag between points on the curves.
Feel free to message me if you've got any tricky or tedious problems to do with creating color palettes that extra tooling like this might help with! I have more feature ideas but I want to understand more what others need.
I'm planning to write some articles for giving a more intuitive sense about WCAG color contrast rules and picking accessible colors too. From working with designers, I find many give up here because it takes a while to get your head around and it's often not obvious how to fix designs with failing contrast.
Nothing big but I built a Discord bot using discord.py[0] that reads a game's presence. It notifies me when a dungeon run is about to end.
I didn't have any Python experience but it was surprisingly easy to pick up (MVP in an hour). Wrote it in notepad, which, imo, was a distraction-free experience. Prolly would be scrolling autocomplete than reading docs if I was in nvim. Took me back when I was used to completing coding exercises on paper.
If there is an implementation to read presences without using Discord client, let me know. Would be helpful to skip Discord altogether.
MMPs collect user data across apps to help apps run ads. This is needed because mobile apps are downloaded without the additional data you could get passed along an HTTP url like you'd see in a regular email marketing campaign or YouTube affiliate link.
My goal is to create a way for mobile apps to self host their advertising attribution, keeping their user data in house and not sharing it to a 3rd party like AppsFlyer/Adjust/Branch. There are only a few companies that do this in the world and NO open source non 3rd party option.
Working with clients I realized that many companies lack basic monitoring and observability. E-commerce shops go down and no one notices. DBs do thousands of useless queries per minute. Emails stop sending silently.
I’m building a tool to make monitoring setup a no-brainer. I’m talking about basic website monitoring setup in 5-seconds — literally.
The problem is not a lack of tools. The existing tools are not even that complicated, but they still require too much thinking to set up.
I have celiacs, so I'm making a database of every single labeled gluten-free product in grocery stores. (I have 8,858 products across 243 grocery categories).
GF products are expensive and hit or miss, I really wanted something where I could keep track of my favorite items. I also want to let people rank them, so maybe I can discover the best gluten free hamburger bun (Rudi's Brioche), or beer (Glutenberg Blonde).
I'm also making a user submitted recipe section, so say you want to recreate a Taco Bell Doritos Locos Taco, it's easy to link to the products you need.
I'm not sure where this project is headed but I couldn't find any jobs working in this space so decided to make something to help myself.
I've been working on https://nuenki.app, which selectively translates websites as you browse the web so that you can learn languages while you procrastinate.
I'm also doing some electronics - I'd like to make a tool that gives blind people without light perception light perception by putting a lightweight device on their forehead that delivers haptic feedback based on light intensity. I'm doing that with a friend, and we're planning on open sourcing the specs.
I’m currently developing a link-in-bio tool that requires no cookies, no trackers, and no signups—a true “privacy-first” approach. I’m building it with lovable, which has really helped me overcome the fine-tuning and bug-fixing procrastination that used to slow down my projects.
After spending a lot of time in an acquired startup and becoming more specialized in my role, I realized I needed to switch back to “build mode.” It’s been a rewarding exercise to try generating some organic traffic (no-ads by design) and a much needed escape from excel sheets.
I’m working on a cross-platform fast multithreaded HTTP / FTP downloader that will download much more quickly than other clients like FileZilla, hash check files, perform follow up operations (like extracting RARs or deleting files on the remote,) and have a nice graphical UI that runs in the browser and allows local/remote/cloud control. It’s early (started last week) so there’s not much done yet, but if you’re interested, would love a star or watch: https://github.com/lukevp/Speedful
Probably the most niche thing I have ever created, but I recently worked on taking the books and ratings from Patrick Collison's Bookshelf (https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf) and putting them in a spreadsheet with links to buy them.
Reading literature (academic and otherwise) on parsers, writing blog posts about what I learn, trying to implement the things I learnt. I've written about basic finite automata (for regular expressions), LL, LR (including the difference between SLR, LALR, and LR(1)), detoured into some optimisations for LR from the 80's, then generalised LR (RNGLR in particular). I'm now implementing these things, RNGLR is not easy to implement despite having understood it well enough conceptually to write a blog about it (https://blog.jeffsmits.net/generalised-lr-parsing/). I've read far more than I've written about, trying to keep that straight in my head as well / planning the next... probably year of writing ^^'
I'm working on RailsBilling - it's a Ruby gem for fast Stripe subscriptions integrations. It allows you to implement subscriptions in your app in hours, instead of months.
You see, Stripe is very powerful, but also very complex. Coding a straightforward subscriptions implementation will take you a couple weeks at best.
That is without handling all those edge cases like: prevent starting a paid subscription without a billing card on file (yes, you read that right)!
The gem is ready, I'm currently working on getting the website up. If you're working with Rails and need a solution for subscriptions get in touch at hacker.news@railsbilling.com - I'd love to chat!
I’m working on a code generation agent that lives and operates inside of GitHub instead of being tied to your IDE so that PMs and others can generate PRs.
I'm working on http://unwrangle.com solo, it's Ecommerce APIs for people building AI and BI apps for ecommerce stuff, it supports querying search results, product info and customer reviews from over 15 major e-commerce marketplaces
We bought a 50 year old house that has never been touched since the year it was build. With the costs of trades being through the roof, I'm trying to do as much as possible myself - currently demoing the house to the studs (if it had studs, it's actually all brick walls and concrete floors).
In my off-hours, I'm working on an old school pixel art RPG, but in 3D.
Oh, and finally I'm also working on finding a new job :-(
You’re not alone! I cleaned 100 square meter of wall in February from everything that was put there during last 70 years. From somehow modern plasterwork with probably asbestos to two inch thick dirt in other room. Waterproofing is brittle and does not function anymore, so it comes next and then replacing windows. All by myself, the costs of trades can’t be justified especially when quality isn’t there in most cases.
I am still working on Docgoblin (https://docgoblin.com) a Pdf search engine software based on Lucene, pdfium and JavaFX. The app is super fast and users are happy with it. I'm in the process of adding plain text files support and making the website look nicer.
Writing software, a reading website, coverage tracking, self-hosted pulumi/terraform backend, and a space trading API game (since very recently).
It’s a bit hard to spread efforts over all of them, but at least most of these projects have lasted several years now, so not constantly doing new things that never finish.
Scientific search engine/agent to surface papers with commercial potential (patent, moats, etc.) - eventually wanna expand to cover any search query. Imagine having someone reading 1000s of science papers
on your behalf, with your goals
in mind, and then telling which papers to pay attention to and why
Oh I'm trying to build something similar, let's chat! I've started with identifying potential project from ICLR2025, but it has an "entrepreneur" part in the response https://openreview-copilot.eamag.me/
In my country (Malaysia), most banks only export bank and credit card statements as PDFs, with no standard format for displaying the data. Since most of my transactions are cashless, I want a way to track my spending habits. I don't want to manually key in each transaction, so apps that require that won’t work for me.
Right now, I'm building a bank statement PDF converter to track my past spending. I’m about halfway there, with a semi-automated way to categorize transactions too. So far, it’s working great!
For individual transactions, it's not really reliable, unfortunately. But for monthly reporting, they do have it, so that could be the next step. There's an app here that does something similar, but it doesn’t seem to be actively developed anymore. It’s a free app, so I guess there’s no reason for them to keep investing in it. Fair enough. Looks like they’re shifting toward a B2B solution instead, so that might be my next direction too.
That said, my main goal for now is just to make it work for personal B2C use first. I do think there’s some potential here because major cities are pretty much cashless now, and there aren’t any good existing solutions for B2C.
There are some other decent options, but they mainly focus on B2B (that’s where the money is), so they’re quite expensive and overkill for what I need.
I'm working on a browser extension that aims to save time when navigating the internet. You can save and re-use links, instant search using different search engines, private history, sharing links, and much more. Initially build for myself, but once I noticed that everyone in my little family is using it every day and is frustrated when not installed, I decided to make it available publicly through: https://www.markbook.io
ATM I'm making some videos to show how it works and how it saves time for us. It's free, 100% private, local-first, and has E2E browser sync for subscribers.
I am working on a departure board [1] for your home or business. Currently only for Swiss Public transport but the plan is to support more countries. Next goal is to update the website which needs work.
The hardware is based around a ESP32. The server that gathers and prepares the data is running on Symfony php. The app to configure the device is written in vue and is using capacitor by ionic. More technical details are here: https://sschueller.github.io/posts/turning-a-project-into-a-...
Superpowers - Basically in-browser JavaScript without the restrictions. So CORS-less fetch(), accessing tabs, taking screenshots, Debugger access, webrequest, debugger access. all from normal JS via a Superpowers JS object
I'm working on a pure SWI-Prolog grammar to describe the modern music notation.
The end goal being to be able to do the last step of Optical Music Recognition and generate the final music score (in the MEI) from a set of graphical primitives: https://github.com/kwon-young/music
It's been months I've been stuck on the description of note groups because of the insanely complex 2D semantics.
While learning Japanese using a mix of comprehensible videos (I like cijapanese.com), podcasts, and shows, I've also been working on my own language learning podcast generator to smooth over plateaus and learn more specialized vocabulary. I'm getting more and more excited about it as a platform for experimentation with different teaching methods.
It's not available publicly yet, but works well for my purposes and I'm working on productionizing it. Sign-up page for updates:
https://letmeknow.jkoff.ca/infinite-ci
My ADD brain keeps jumping around between various projects. Some highlights:
- Last month I demonstrated the ability to build Nintendo 64 ROMs with Zig¹, making some headway on Zig-native APIs for interfacing with the N64's memory-mapped hardware. Taking a break for a moment; will probably resume when Zig 0.14 drops (within a couple months IIRC). Next planned milestone will be to implement interrupt handlers.
- Gradually migrating my code repos from Git to Fossil (with plans to continue to mirror to Git). Experimenting with bidirectional syncs in order to preserve the ability to handle merge/pull requests from the various Git repo hosts on which I syndicate my repos. The above Zig64 project will probably be the first real guinea pig.
- Migrating my personal website away from Jekyll has been an ongoing project (going on almost a year now) with multiple parallel efforts: using Fossil's wiki features², using Scroll, and (most recently) using Typst's newly-announced HTML export feature. All three approaches have their pros and cons.
- I've been tinkering with my PowerBook G4; recently swapped in an SSD (using an mSATA→PATA enclosure) and installed the latest OpenBSD (with all partitions except for '/' encrypted; working on documenting that process and the associated kinks - and possibly turning said documentation into installer and initscript patches so that hardware platforms like macppc that lack support for encrypting '/' can still enjoy not-quite-full-disk encryption). Next on the list is rebuilding the battery.
- That PowerBook is also the only working machine I have that has an optical drive, so as soon as it was consistently booting right, I took the opportunity to back up the stack of burned CDs/DVDs I'd accumulated throughout my lifetime.
- I have a bunch of my dad's old photos and schoolwork and such that I've been meaning to digitize and organize.
Ahh yes, I know the feeling. My current list of projects:
- There's no speciality grade coffee in Zambia, and all the coffee beans in Zambia are from Zambian coffee farms. I've bought a small roaster and will start sourcing speciality grade coffee beans from Malawi, Kenya and Ethiopia and roasting for a few of the small stores and cafes around us.
- Converting a beat up Suzuki Samurai into a capable 4x4 rock crawler/off road vehicle to enter my own team into the Elephant Charge 2025 https://elephantcharge.org/ec-charge-2025/.
- Growing and propogating cuttings of coffee plants in my backyard to start an outgrowers scheme in on the border of Zambia & Congo.
- An emotion recognition app that has animated fruits and animals that dance and respond to emotion. I'd like to create something a bit more responsive for my child than the YT videos that exist (Unity).
- Helping my wifes company prototype and spec out some lease management software.
- Sourcing the equipment and ingredients to process my own coffee cherries into green coffee. I'll likely buy coffee from nearby growers and start processing as my own plants still have a couple years before they produce any fruit.
- Migrating a Flow project to Typescript.
- Learning Haskell by building a back-office API for another project in it.
A no-frills X toolkit. Think Athena, add things like dialogs, file picker and make it completely vectored. No antialiasing, top goal is small size and fast execution. Can display vector and bitmap fonts, only external dependency is xcb. I just recently got my first digital storage oscilloscope and begun writing a companion software for it, as I couldn't find anything usable. This is one of the offshoots of that, the other being a somewhat Postscript-like language for scripting the thing.
Once I get this done, I get back to the actual project of a 2.11-BSD based handheld computing appliance.
I've been working on a little search wrapper. It allows using features like DuckDuckGo's bangs and Kagi's snaps with any engine you choose.
For example, you can search "cheese", and it'll show you results for cheese on Google. If you search "!b cheese", it'll search "cheese" but on Bing instead. "@yt !b cheese" will search "site:youtube.com cheese" on Bing.
I built it mainly so I wouldn't blow through my 100 Kagi trial searches quite so quickly.
I'm improving my webapp that helps you learn lanaguages through short stories: https://webbu.app/. I recently added the ability to play the sounds of words and sentences to improve listening and pronunciation. You can also practice different verb tenses, answer questions, track your vocab, etc.
I continue to spend most of my free energy learning Finnish. Only a few more years and I should be able to finally focus on my career again :')
Two new projects of note this month, one specific to Finnish language learners, and one that is probably useful for language learners in general:
* https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/tsk - A Finnish pocket dictionary with a TUI interface. This is the first nontrivial thing I've built in Go, by which I meant I had to implement and tweak a randomly pruning trie by hand to get the performance characteristics I wanted (it wasn't actually that bad). I chose Go mostly because of the fantastic cross-compilation story.
* https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/audio2anki - This Python program wraps around `yt-dlp` and `whisper` to create Anki decks for listening practice. This should work for any (monolingual) video in any language. There are many such projects on GitHub, I'm aware, but it was surprisingly hard to find any that actually wrapped around Whisper instead of needing an SRT, VTT, etc file to come from somewhere else. In that sense mine is a "one command" solution - just provide the YouTube link and go. It does not provide a translation for those subtitles yet; in keeping with the all-in-one approach, I'm thinking I might wrap around LLaMa 3 to let the user specify that we should also --translate-to {en,es,eo, etc} if desired. For now my reading skills are advanced enough that I don't need that.
I relocated permanently back in 2021, in fact, soon after finishing up undergrad at Northwestern. I'm a dual US/EU citizen and I moved to be with my Finnish wife. I'm here now!
I don't have a blog post to share. My experience here has been largely positive, modulo the obvious financial caveat: My take home salary really is about ~30% of what it would be had I stayed back in the United States and followed a similar career trajectory. In the long run I think this is an eminently fixable problem, however :)
I'm working to make private hosting easier. I've been running a software development agency in Melbourne for 10+ years and have been building this platform in the background to help automate and standardise the hosting needs for our clients.
We're now getting ready to launch a web portal for others to manage their own private hosting in a simpler way. The product also includes a directory of off-the-shelf applications which can be launched in a few clicks (eg. Deepseek chatbot).
If you're interested in being part of our closed-Beta in March, reach out! (e: james at below domain)
My family uses multiple messenger apps - WhatsApp, Slack, Discord etc. I get so many messages on these everyday. I am also member of multiple WhatsApp groups and slack channels. Needless to say, I miss out on a lot (actually every) important message in groups and channels and sometimes DMs.
I am working on ML solution to summarize the messages and info in these messengers for people whenever they access my service. The idea is to reduce the amount of info from 100:1 and give extremely succinct data without losing any important info.
I would be much more interested in a unified inbox on top of all those communication apps. An *actual* inbox, which lets me flag things, mark as (un)read, move to folders etc.
I'm working on a SaaS that will detect publicly shared AWS resources. Not by evaluating policies but by actually testing the availability. Some examples: can a KMS key be used from a 3rd party AWS account, are there any object in an S3 truly exposed publicly, and similar. The motivation is to find truly critical issues in AWS account setup by addressing the first priority items - public exposure.
Another project that is currently only happening in my head - I am thinking about security operations teams that I think often do the same things in different companies. Namely there is a lot of tinkering with detections and alerting, often for the same services. I think this could be cost optimized by being offered as a SaaS.
I recently started 3D printing rings and electro plate then with gold or silver. I'm also going to explore powder coating soon.
Once I feel comfortable, I'll probably open an Instagram account and hand out free personalised rings. For some time I've thought about how I should price them, and I've reached the conclusion that giving them out for free feels right.
1. I have a cloud platform for the movie industry (although in reality a lot of different industries use it for different things) that allows you to share files and get feedback from your team that I’ve been rewriting in Rust. Didn’t necessarily intend that but I started replacing Apache with Rust and liked it enough that I kept on replacing stuff.
2. I work with another company that uses a really rudimentary way of time-tracking employees. So I’m working on a system to use their device MAC addresses to count their hours when they’re connected to work Wi-Fi. I was surprised that such a thing appears to not exist. I’m still working on it so it’s not anywhere public right now.
Building Duty, a TypeScript workflow orchestration tool for durable async execution.
Unlike queues (SQS) needing state hacks or pricey orchestration tools, Duty uses your existing Postgres to ensure tasks survive (retry) failures, retain state between runs, and eventually finish.
Tangentially, I am glad to see this thread again, I was worried the idea was scrapped since I hadn't seen it in the last few months. For whatever it counts for, I like this idea and hope to see it continue.
Probably the one that's used by most words. English pronunciation and spelling seem to depend on the word's etymology. I'll try and derive a spelling system that results in least changes to the current vocabulary.
It's a hobby project, but one that I love working on because it unlocks some _really_ great hardware to be open to do anything I want it to be rather than be constrained by out-of-the-box client software that asks me to sign in with an account to get an extension installed.
I have been working with LLMs and VLMs to automate browser based workflows among other things for the last couple of years. Given how good the vision models have gotten lately, the perception problem is solved to level where it opens up a lot of possibilities. Manipulation is not generally solved yet but there is a lot of activity in the field and there are promising approaches to solve (OpenVLA, π0). Given these, I'm trying to build an affordable robot that can help around with household chores using language and vision models. Idea is to ship capable enough hardware that can do a few things really well with the currently available models and keep upgrading the AI stack as manipulation models get better over time.
I've been working on The Road to Next [0] for almost a year. In the end, it's more than just a course on Next.js. It's a deep dive into full-stack development, covering key third-party integrations that empower you to build your own products.
Oh hell yeah, your Road to React was exactly what the doctor ordered when I first waded my way into the full stack ocean years ago. I'm excited to see how this progresses!
Working on a self-hosted OSS AI Server with support for LLM APIs (OpenRouter/OpenAi/Anthropic/Google/etc), Ollama endpoints, ComfyUI and FFmpeg agents. It supports Synchronous, Queued and Reply to Web Callback APIs for each API Feature with typed APIs integrations for C#,TypeScript,JS,Python,Dart,PHP,Java,Kotlin,Swift,F# and VB.NET clients.
The website is a bit old, but lots of exciting changes are happening under the hood and I finally have the time to make big architectural and performance improvements.
I've been building https://canine.sh for the past year, which is an open source Render / Fly / Heroku, etc.
It's based on some learnings I've had in the past building where building on managed platforms like Heroku and Render, and watched our costs explode, with an annoying amount of vendor lockin.
It uses Kubernetes under the hood (which you can now get fully managed for $12 / month on linode), which lets you take advantage of a ton of things that Kubernetes does really well, like automatic healthchecks, zero downtime deployments, auto scaling, etc, while also making it easy to use for solo developers or small teams.
The additional benefit of Kubernetes is that it's also possible to host a bunch of other stuff in your cluster via Helm charts, that you’d normally have to pay for like: Sentry, Wordpress, Postgres, etc.
I’m building an AI-first startup for Latin America, kind of like TaskRabbit but simpler and more aligned with how people actually hire help here. We use WhatsApp for quick updates like ‘Provider is on the way,’ and we focus on getting verified professionals to people’s homes—without getting in the way of payments or how they handle the job.
To fund it, I’m building agentic workflows and automations for insurance, finance, and real estate companies. It’s a way to keep things moving while I get the startup off the ground.
Recently I've built a job site for UK contractors, Outside IR35 contracts only. Quite niche, but I needed it myself so now it exists: https://outsideir35.com/
Building self-ask NPCs and other game systems (crafting, harvesting, quests, automation) in a large open-world RPG that uses the latest generative AI tech to enable new kinds of game mechanics that weren't possible even just a few years ago.
I started using openrouter.ai to have unified api for different models, for HN Distilled I use gemini-2.0-flash-001 – it has huge context window and decent price (much cheaper for the same quality than others)
A (e)DSL to describe simple DSP graphs + a gccjit based AOT compiler. Basically a reimagination of the SuperCollider architecture with a JIT compiler instead of runtime plumbing. The idea is to have auto-vectorisation and loop unrolling kick in. Want to see how much of a difference that would make.
An iphone todo app that's tailored for my needs and motivates me to commit to completing some amount of small tasks every day (even if it's just a single "rest and relax" task). Currently I'm building a prototype with SwiftUI and SwiftData and I'm struggling to comprehend why Apple is ditching Objective-C. Compared to my previous experience writing and publishing an iphone app, everything now feels much worse with Swift's ridiculous compile times and non-descriptive compile errors.
I’ve been mostly struggling with really bad creative burnout.
I pushed myself to do a couple of game jams cuz I thought it would make the burnout go away, but it’s basically only made it worse.
It’s the first time in my life where i haven’t had a billion ideas in my brain and im not sure what to do with myself. Been trying to listen to history podcasts and read manga to inspire myself again but it’s not working…
I'm making AI more fun to talk with. The new updates just keep making it blander and blander. What I want to do is inject more personality into bots. It's not natural, it's dramatized.
Quillbot makes it sound better for essays and presentation. I want to do the opposite and make it sound elliptical, turn a rant into a jab, that kind of thing. You don't say, "You're an idiot," you say, "Thanks, I thought I was the dumbest person in the room."
Working on a Carnatic Raga Detector. Longtime pet project of mine and I'm currently unemployed so no time constraints. Still, progress has been pretty slow due to various reasons but I haven't given up this time so I guess that's a plus.
A cross-platform clipboard manager / search-and-filter tool / launcher built with Flutter that has a simple Python plugin interface.
Plugins can be used to add new "result actions" and new sources of entries to filter and select. Eg. recent Jira tickets, email inbox, shell history, Notion pages, etc.
The result actions are a way to easily perform common transformations on selected entries (eg. wrap in triple backticks, find and parse json, trim whitespace, ...) or kickoff some script with a selected entry as an argument.
Project started as a result of having to do a lot of work using Ubuntu and sorely missing Alfred and all the workflows I'd built with it. I wanted something for which I could build workflows once and have those workflows available on whatever system I'm on. Plus to be able to build some plugins that would be usable by coworkers regardless of what operating system they're using and with minimal runtime resource usage. There are some existing cross-platform solutions which could serve this purpose, like Cerebro, Ueli, Script Kit, some others.., but I wanted something lighter weight than is possible with an Electron app. Granted the current state of Epte is that it's built with Flutter + Go + Python so the final distributable and runtime memory usage are higher than is ideal.
Basic Windows support is almost there but there doesn't seem to be a great solution to switching to existing windows of an application instead of just re-launching it. The tool isn't intended to be as good or better than any given OS's built-in launcher so I'll probably just leave that as-is and upload the current state of the Windows build.
I've been working on language for a little over a year now. There's no documentation at all, just some examples if you can figure out how to run them. I thought building a compiler would take less time than it has, but it's been feeling like a good investment in my future of making things. It's a project I can just keep moving with forever.
Finishing the feeder "hack" to my pick and place machine [1] so that I can begin full retail production in house of the V2 Smoothieboard CNC controller [2].
As well as finishing shipping the remaining boards to the kickstarter backers (many years late, but significantly better).
Been a long struggle overall...learned a lifetime's worth during the last couple years. Every single day has been spent doing something new it seems. Looking forward to what the next broken machine will teach me :)
I'm working on Gorby [0], a text analyzer app I've been building for almost 2 years now. Think of it as a mix between Hemingway editor, Prowritingaid and Readable, but with focus on features I care about more. Lately I've just been polishing existing features, like adding some subtle animations to the sidebar icons last week. I'm thinking of adding an integration with local LLMs to it too.
I'm also building a customer support app when I'm taking a break from Gorby. The idea is to make it easier to organize and quickly find/copy useful replies, discounts, screenshots etc. It's similar in concept to text expander apps, but those never worked great for me, I either forget the triggers or don't bother storing things I don't use daily. You could probably use Notion for this too, but to me it's too clunky and slow.
Thanks! I built the editor using Tiptap (https://tiptap.dev/) which doesn't support Markdown out of the box. However, since it can detect Markdown shortcuts (#, ##, >, etc.), it should be possible to convert a markdown file into rich text, and then when done writing and editing convert it back into markdown, while limiting formatting options only to ones that are available for both. I think Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/) does something similar.
I'll think about this for sure, especially since I've been thinking of making it possible to save and read local files. If you'd like to try Gorby, send me an email and I'll be happy to give you a free license code :)
Building a melee combat system in UE5 which feels between Sekiro and DeadCells.
Dynamic, explosive, satisfying and with both the ability to smash attack button and i-framing actions. Low barrier to entry, high skill cap.
https://screenmemory.app is my current project as of a year or so. Records your screen continuously and lets you look back at it through a GUI. I use it myself to recap days or weeks at work, mostly.
Not sure to be honest, I know a lot of these tools popped up and swiftly disappeared. It wouldn't surprise me if there is a Linux version still alive though, try searching for "Rewind.ai alternative Linux".
Was looking for an iOS app to always see my age in days on the lock screen. Didn‘t find one, so I first created a shortcut which would change my lock screen background image each night and overlay the number of days on it.
This didn’t feel integrated enough and could fail if the phone was off, so I started looking into Swift and created my first app [1] with added features like contact import and notifications for other people‘s ages in days.
It‘s still very much a work in progress but the core functionality of the lock screen widget is something I use almost every day to quickly get the current number and use it for notes etc. I just like having an incrementing unique-to-me number to reference stuff.
nice job , I think I can do something like that on with my linux desktop. Great idea , it can give a sense of how many days how many hours I have lived on this earth and maybe even by a average time , show how much time is left (yes it won't be predictable , but I also don't want to procastinate thinking there is a tomorrow , I think I like steve jobs quote in the manner that he said live your life as if its the last hour or something like that.
I've been inspired to build my own browser mmo game after seeing hordes.io, which is made by a single person. Launched a prototype with, for now, only basic movement over at http://everwilds.io. Instead of working in a silo I've decided to develop in public and launched as soon as possible to slowly gather an audience. So far the Everwilds.io Discord server already gained 1 member ;) I'll share the link incase others want to follow the development: https://discord.gg/HWZSpkvz
VSCode, TypeScript, Three.js. But I am about to remove Three.js and use WebGPU instead, I don't like the 800kb+ size of Three.js. Also will do some experimenting with C++ and WebAssembly and see how that goes.
I've been working on a webapp to scrape links users enter from Zillow/Apartments.com/Trulia/etc to build tables of listings you are interested in. It can show your commute time to work or queries for amenities nearby like "Trader Joe's".
It’s built on a custom C++ engine (using SDL2) and uses WebRTC for networking, so a browser version is coming very soon. It’s a 2-6 player couch/online party game with Bomberman-like mechanics, plus wacky items and power-ups across nine stages.
Radar-based device for measuring athlete sprint & agility tests.
A lot of professional sports clubs, S&C coaches, etc.. use timing gates for measuring sprints, but those are a pain to set up, only capture split times, and are expensive. I think radar (+ optional video overlay) provides a far superior solution.
A parser combinator library. I'm writing a tool that will do static analysis of SQL (in a very limited fashion, it's a build tool and not a static analyzer, but I need to understand dependency relationships between statements). I started out using `nom`, but found it imperfectly matched to my needs (underpowered in areas I desired and overpowered in areas I didn't need for my project). `nom 8` came out with some interesting simplifications, but it happened to break my code in a way that would be awkward to fix. So I bit the bullet and started writing my own library.
My library is specialized for parsing text. That had enabled some cool capabilities.
It comes with a `Span` primitive, which tracks where in a file a token came from, for implementing error messages. A `Span` can be the input or the output of a parser. At the front end a `Span` is an entire file, and as you slice and dice it, it tracks the metadata of where it came from.
Along with the standard `Sequence` (combining parsers in a set order) and `Choice` operations (branching between many parsers) that parser combinators are built around, I have come up two operations that are very handy. I suspect that others have made them before, they are both patterns I used in `nom`. (I've also only skimmed the original paper, they could be in there and I didn't see them.)
One of them is called `Compose`. As an alternative to a `Sequence`, instead of a group of parsers consuming the input in order, the first parser consumes the input, and the subsequent parsers consume the return of the previous parser. This is useful for instance when implementing escapable strings; the first parser grabs the entire string, the second one transforms escape sequences. (There is a mechanism for transforming the content of a `Span` while retaining it's metadata.)
The other is called `Fuse`. This is a small twist on `Sequence`, where after matching the parsers in order, the result is all concatenated together into a single token. This is useful for a "pattern matching" primitive, where you want to find a series of tokens in order, but you don't want to split them into different tokens, you want them all together.
It's been a wild ride, there's been a lot of thorny issues. I often think I should've just stuck with `nom 7` instead of shaving this yak. But I've learned a whole lot about writing especially abstract/DSL-yy Rust by combining tuples, traits, and declarative macros. There are also other programming language projects I'd like to pursue, and it will be nice to have a tailor fit tool for parsing text.
Special thanks to dtolnay's `paste,` the real MVP.
Cool. I got interested in this subject recently. Have been checking out some text articles and videos about it. Unfortunately there is not much info available (and some of it is advanced stuff), or at least I couldn't find much, so far.
I am working on a library, which is not exactly a parser combinator one, but borrows some of those ideas, for use in other projects.
>One of them is called `Compose`.
About the escapable strings example: can you not just rescan the string for the escape sequences, after grabbing the full string?
> Unfortunately there is not much info available [.]
Parser combinators are a bit hard to get into, the most helpful resource for me was `nom`'s "Choosing a Combinator" document [1], which is dense but gives you an overview of all the Lego bricks which you can then start imagining how to fit together.
I've not really read it, but there's also the original paper on the subject [2] (as linked to by the `parsec` documentation [3]) which describes the nuts and bolts theory behind it.
> [Can] you not just rescan the string for the escape sequences, after grabbing the full string?
Absolutely, this is just a convenience around that pattern that allows you to express that like:
let string = quoted_string.then(escaped(json_string_escapes)).parse(&input)?;
Where `escaped` does the rescanning using the parser `json_string_escapes` (which consumes all the input up to the next escape, if it doesn't start with an escape sequence, or else consumes an escape sequence and returns the transformed text - this API is a little awkward, it may change).
And also more generally for any parsers `foo`, `bar`, and `baz` as:
I have yet to start a pet project that would entail using deep reinforcement learning to make a computer learn to beat this game: https://danielben.itch.io/dragonsweeper
Personality protocol for a chatbots platform. How to share personalities among different layers and components. At the end of the day is customization and parametrization of LLM instructions, however an interesting topic to explore.
I quit my job last December to start an AI x AdTech startup which didn't work out: we discovered a similar piece of tech was about to get released by Google AdX. So now it's back to finding ideas, I'm sure there are niche problems that can be addressed using AI agents, one idea we have is developing an AI agent enabling content creators to better connect with their community.
Working on letting users upload their own transparent fashion images to a web app that let's you use your camera to apply the world to characters clothing. I made it for an exhibition in Kyoto and it was a lot of fun. Hoping to expand on it a bit more.
I'm still working on development of a native Windows application for data analysis of SQLite databases. It's geared towards non-technical (or only slightly technical) users and allows queries to be easily made without knowing SQL. Additionally, it easily lets the user quickly create charts from the queried data (bar, column, histogram, line, pie, scatter). Development is nearly complete and hoping to put in the hands of testers within the next couple of weeks. Also trying to decide on name for the product so that I can start development of website for it.
We’re building a new git collaboration platform on top of atproto! Here’s a sneak preview (best viewed on desktop for now; the UI is mostly WIP): https://tangled.sh/@tangled.sh/core
It’s going to be fully decentralised from day 1—we borrowed the PDS model from Bluesky to allow users to run their own “knots” to self-host their git repositories.
Yes! This architecture allows you to host your git repos on your own server, while allowing contributions from others with a unified identity (unlike say, Gitea or GitLab, where you’d have to make yet another account).
Building two things ATM - first is an interactive fiction engine (almost done) and game with it (halfway there). Just wrapped pre-production on music and art, going into the studio to record final tracks later in the year. Launching end of the year hopefully.
I'm also building an application and training materials to help people with annual strategy. I've spent 20 years in marketing and ops putting up with people doing it badly so this is an attempt to help people running businesses actually come up with a strategy likely to result in something valuable.
Working on a new Java logging tool. I'm basically yak shaving, really. Was unhappy with the existing solutions for a new project I'm working on. Depending on how it goes and how the customer feels about it, I'll try to open source it.
Reworking my CSS library for turning semantic HTML into looking like authentic RFC documents. Current version (https://vladde.net/blog/rfc-css) is not quite there yet.
I am making a simple tool to make playlists on spotify with AI... still there is a lot to be done like making the flow a lot more conversational, integrating with YouTube, replicating the same thing there, then writing a frontend (planning on using ShadCN for that); https://github.com/anshumankmr/sporky
Cross platform desktop app using tauri v2 which allows you to define shortcuts and bind them to prompts. You can then copy text, press the shortcut and paste result from gpt.
I'm still working on Shepherd, a book discovery platform aimed at feeding readers' curiosity. Later this year, I am developing a tool to bring your to-be-read pile to life in some cool ways and improve the accuracy of our topic/genre system (plus adding themes, tropes, and moods).
Optimizing our rendering algorithms for Apple Vision Pro. Trying to render a 300-million atom cell model at 90fps stereo. It's trivial on a 4090, it's pretty hard on a ~30W mobile GPU (W correct??). I'm thinking about a bunch of immersive mesoscale biology stuff next.
I have been working in my spare time on Japanese vocabulary learning app and just yesterday finally convinced myself to publish the sources: https://github.com/d3nzil/gaku
Be warned it's in early stages, difficult to use and code is big ball of mud. But the basic functionality works, so maybe it will be already useful for someone. And I have been using it and working on it consistently, so hopefully it'll only get better.
It’s a curated directory of personal blogs and a blog search engine. I started to build a simple RSS-reader for myself, just wanted a HN-like list of links. Slowly it grew, and now it has full-text search across tens of thousands of blog posts from 700+ blogs (adding new ones every day), related blogs and posts recommendations, lists, link blogs. Now I’m working on adding email newsletters, curated collections, and text-to-speech generation.
Continuing bootstrapping my software+service company Alzo (https://alzo.archi/), an Elixir modular monolith.
The first clients are here and I am working on "darker tech" now, a single codebase injecting their data in both MS Office and Adobe's software suites. That's quite a change from Elixir.
Also working on the reverse feature, reading/writing MS Office files inside Alzo. For that, I'm writing a Java app behaving as an Erlang node, connected to my main app via Erlang distribution, to leverage existing rich Java libraries for office tech.
I've been dabbling with local ML projects, and trying to get them to run with ROCm on my Radeon 7900 XTX card. All the solutions to run for example Llama.cpp or Automatic1111 are a bit hacky, so I made a repo where I document how to run them in containers.
Working on my mobile semi-idle MMORPG for parents like myself. With the artstyle of 1980s/syntwave/cassette-futurism. Just finished the website over the weekend: https://afterglow-game.com/
I am working on the second version of WhatDinner [0]. Initially marketed it as 'Tinder to decide what to eat’ and focussed on couples and families, but then only a fraction use it in family mode.
So, now I am changing the concept and helping users generally decide what to eat (documenting it here [1])
Not precisely, but I think my roommate in high school played that game quite a bit! If you sign up for my newsletter you'll get some info about the games that directly influenced Botnet of Ares.
secrets management that's easier to use than whatever you currently do.
just started it this week (won a bunch of things at a hackathon with it)
this is going to be free (there's a different product for enterprise this will feed into - but this is going to always be free). join the discord for announcements.
I'm building a tool for uni students to study more effectively and have less stress for their exams. This is done with the study techniques retrieval practice(practising remembering to make recall easier, spaced repetition(schedule reviews for long term memorization, concrete examples. Most of this is done with ai generated flashcards and simple ai explanations. This week I will finish the exam generation feature. http://www.mimair.com
A reactive notebook that can handle side effects. I've had to go back to the drawing board, but making good progress. The latest is work on the core reactive and effect system and not yet integrated back into the notebook, but will get there. I've been logging my progress so far:
Working on oryx: TUI for sniffing network traffic using eBPF on Linux
The next enhancement is to add tcpdump like filters.
Github: https://github.com/pythops/oryx
I'm building tools for my own community on WhatsApp, from a simple bot to summarize texts and give some simple statistics to full on subscriptions through WhatsApp itself.
Yes, I'm aware I relying on WhatsApp and that it is a risk.
Sure, as a community manager of a technical group I want to:
* Track most active users in a period (day/week/month)
* Track which users post/react the most
* Know (and now it is possible, but not implemented) who is 'lurking' just reading messages
* Summarize content and frequently asked questions to help users in the future
* Check which channels (groups inside a WhatsApp community) are most active and how many messages were posted in each channel in a specific period (day/week/month)
* Track (external) links posted to communities, how common they were, which users posted these links
--
The tools:
- A WhatsApp bot capturing all events in the group (reactions, messages, etc)
- A (same) WhatsApp bot to onboard new users in the community, check your membership, talk to
- A web application where the community member can check their membership + admin panel for me to check the stats mentioned above, think of it like a circle.so but built for my specific case.
--
The tech stack:
1/ a WhatsApp instance running on web, I'm doing this because WhatsApp oficial APIs do not support the "communities" -> I use Z-api [1] but you can use something like Baileys and self host [2]
2/ Elixir running on a simple machine
3/ OpenAI/Claude for summarization and topic extraction
Trying to scratch my own itch by creating (yet another) todo list site. It's more for me than anyone else. I typically use a simple text file to track my tasks in a day but I wanted something just a little bit more. Still minimal but maybe 1 - 2 steps above editing a file.
Still working on https://mockoon.com, an open-source API mocking desktop tool, after 7 years.
My focus is now on the cloud version which is key to guarantee a future where the tool is still actively maintained and independent (read: free from high growth/high profits pressure).
I built this small website to retrieve personalized quotes/poems and questions also some habit tracking https://www.checkindaily.ai/
Also I have built a chrome plugin that can filter twitter by feeding your feed to gemini returning only tweets that match a criteria (E.g. no politics, only Ai or something more elaborate).
I started to learn how to play the drums. I have a e-drum set and I’m building this website where I can put my scores and connect my drums, so it can tell me how on time I’m playing.
Almost like a guitar hero thing but with just a metronome
thank you, i appreciate it! yes, the software is api first, and much of it’s utility comes from working in other environments like google docs, ios shortcuts, etc..
in essence, the core of the project is a vector database that works for end users who want no fuss quick capture, semantic and fts search, the ability to create new relationships with marginalia.
im not trying to replace tools like obsidian or notion, i think ycb works better with them doing what they do best! i also plan to make the stack self hostable in the near future :)
django-simple-deploy, a tool for making your initial Django deployment easier across a variety of platforms. It's plugin-based, so it should cover a growing set of platforms and deployment approaches. I just made the 1.0 release this month.
Building the best hardware product design firm in SF (www.iancollmceachern.com) and also building an injection molding and 3d printing company based right here in SF (www.goldengatemolders.com)
While looking for a job, I encountered the trouble that is called ATS. Nobody sees your resume if it is not 'approved' by an automated system.
So I decided to build a tool to optimize my generic resume for a vacancy, ATS and company culture.
I have been working on this tool to create lead magnets.
Magnetron researches the web for your topic and creates a well crafted ebook as your lead magnet.
I wanted a minimal tool to easily track, organize, and reflect on my reading—so I built one: https://bookstates.app. I'm familiar with StoryGraph, but aimed for something even simpler. (and with a sprinkle of AI)
Thank you :) The Idea Viability Score is a metric that evaluates an idea's likelihood of success based on four key factors: *Market Demand, Competition, User Need, and Feasibility*. It helps assess the market potential, feasibility, and competitive landscape of an idea.
I'm working full time on growing my app https://lookaway.app. I've been working on it for more than a year now and it's been growing organically since.
working on cursor for desktop. why rely on AI agent that’s self-contained when it’s limited, can’t access the browser, can’t open apps or click around.
i simply want mine to be able to fill in forms in preview with a passport image as context. also to be able to do recurring tasks as if i was the desktop user. e.g., i’m going to bed keep working on this spreadsheet.
it’s working and built but very slow and buggy atm. uses multimodal LLMS and OCR but lots more optimizations needed. need to make it a lot faster. can demo it and need help if anyone is interested.
I'm working on adding floats to the RCL configuration language (https://rcl-lang.org/) to finally deliver on the json superset promise. Blog post coming soon!
A cloud agnostic platform to run your compute workloads across cloud providers. Currently supports Vultr and DigitalOcean. More cloud providers coming soon. Will also release support for on-prem.
A merge conflict resolution tool for git/github. It is very alpha at the moment (https://codeinput.com) but my timeline is to go live on the next 3 months. Feel free to reach out if this of interest.
I am building a game called The kill every mosquito Project (tkemp) inspired on The Kill everyone Project (tkep) from around 2006-2007.
Mostly as an experiment to learn some new tools, unsure if it will ever be released.
Working on hal9.ai -- Long term, a Roblox for AI; short term, a Python customizable ChatGPT that is enterprise ready. Think of ChatGPT without the LLM and support for writing your own RAG.
I'd be curious to hear more. I presume you're using some kind of semantic search? Any other kinds of semantic technology? What kinds of insights into your journaling has it offered you/users?
The work thus far has mostly been on a seamless mobile UI, & to make engaging with the LLM like less of a chat and more like browsing an interesting dynamic wiki about your own life. But also, yes, a highlight for me re: having your journal in context can be to search and find commonalities, patterns.
I would say the insights frontier models have given me, at a high level, match some of those offered by professionals in a theraputic context--which is one reason I'd be curious to make an affordable/accessible app. Although I tread lightly into depersonalizing such a human area with techno utopian naivete...
I suppose "the Internet will interpret censorship as damage and route around it" was utopian naivete that got us pretty far, and "the LLM understands me and can help me understand myself" might be naivete it's useful to disprove/explore the truth of. I think utopianism is important even if it's Sisiphean, it's good to have a north star even if it can't be reached.
I made a small and light CRUD web thing in FastAPI to organize my personal library. Mostly it focuses on physical books, but handles ebooks too. I published it as FOSS and some people requested features, so I expanded it a little. It's nothing fancy: https://github.com/seanboyce/ubiblio
...absolutely no one requested an RISC V port, but I did that too for laughs. Neat to see the whole thing run on a system the size of a postage stamp.
Not sure what to do with it next. Will probably just let it be what it is, and fix any bugs that people report. Maybe move on to a new little weekend project.
Basic functionality has been implemented, and I am working now on polishing the UI and workflow. Big features like art strokes, path offsetting, colorizing, etc. are also in the making and will be added later. I hope there is still a commercial market for products like this.
Currently integrating hardwares on card chip scripting application on C++. I hope I can start blogging on it soon. Easily the most interesting thing I have been involved in.
We're a French team of engineers/designers working on the first Repairable and Fireproof e-bike battery! (compatible with 90% of e-bike controllers, Bosch included), check it out on https://get.gouach.com
Another movie recommendation web app. Long ago, I used Jinni, and I liked their labelling method a lot, categorising movies by mood, plot type, character types, etc. Then, Jinni was sold, disappeared and I wanted to create something similar. The Christmas days off I had the time and I started making it.
Past two years, i've been working on sales platform for digital content creators where they can sell digital content(files), online courses or memberships to access content. I'll be going online next month, hopefully. Right now I am refactoring front-end into production design. Front-end eats always the most time, and i still have things to do in relation to servers/infra and testing. It took this long because i manage the finances(i do not use stripe or any other 3rd party service) and it uses event sourcing, which has large overhead. But i am almost there. Hope to go online next month, beta-test in production for Q2 with small amount of users, and come Q3 go into full production.
Still working on https://nocommandline.com which started out as a GUI for Google App Engine & Datastore Emulator.
I recently added support for Cloud Run and am now building it out. Support for Cloud Function is also on the road map.
I’m also still maintaining the patch [2] I created which allows you run App Engine Python 3 Apps with dev_appserver.py on Windows. To test App Engine bundled API/services, you need dev_appserver.py
I'm building a full event sourcing framework for the IDE to help software creators (myself included) create educational software courses and lessons 100x faster! Hoping to launch the full product by summer:
It is more an excuse to create a simlpe Electron app, though.
reply