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I recently launched a daily word puzzle!

https://tiledwords.com

It’s inspired by tile placement board games like Patchwork and crosswords. You rotate and move tiles to rebuild a broken crossword.

It’s free, web based, and responsive.

I currently have several hundred daily players and growing. My wife and I create the puzzles and I’m continuing to fix bugs and add new features.

I just launched a ”community puzzle” feature to let players help build new puzzles.

I’d love to know what you think!

With all my heart, I want to cheer you on. Making stuff is damn hard, and shipping is even harder. You did that, and I applaud you for it.

I do a lot of NYT puzzle stuff every day and some other random puzzle sites before I get out of bed. That said, I'm over 40, love puzzles, love complicated board games, went through your brief explainer, and could not get a sensible handle on how to even start this thing. A new player has to really care about how to even try to begin to figure out whatever this is. I gave it about 20 seconds after the "how does it work?" Honestly, I gave up. I'm really not trying to rain on your parade. You might find a niche audience, and it'll be what you're going for, but I think you need a much, much better rules explainer if you want to be even remotely in the vicinity of a Wordle-level banger.

This thing might be really awesome, but not being able to figure out how to use it is a hard out for me.

Hey, thanks for the candid feedback! It’s super helpful.

I’m curious if there were specific aspects you struggled with or if the whole thing was confusing?

Did you try the Practice Puzzle or jump right into the daily?

Practice puzzle: https://tiledwords.com/puzzles/practice

It sounds like you read the instructions but they weren’t enough. Maybe a video explainer would be better? Does the gameplay recording on this Reddit post help at all?

https://www.reddit.com/r/DestroyMyGame/comments/1osxb2q/i_re...

People really seem to like it once it clicks (Over 1100 people have finished the daily puzzle so far today) but there is a steep learning curve and I’d love to learn how to help people get past that initial hump.

IMO I shouldn't change the onboarding much. The game is very intuitive. Everyone I showed it to has picked it up in about 30 seconds.

It's very much a learn-by-doing game.

PS - This game is so fun. I don't usually do word games, but I can't stop playing this one.

Thanks, that’s good to hear!

My ideas are:

- Add an optional video explainer on the How To Play screen

- Redesign How to Play to push you towards the practice puzzle more strongly

- Add more practice puzzles that ramp up in difficulty

That was a fun little game! The hinting felt appropriate, only thing I didn't really like was that it got a bit "cramped" towards the end moving things around. Will try it again tomorrow. :)

Thanks! Yeah it’s tricky since I wanted to make it work the same on small phone screens as large computer screens, so the place is limited.

I want to explore a future feature where dropping a tile “pushes” other tiles out of the way that will hopefully make it feel less cramped

There are not many sites I whitelist for javascript, or even bookmark these day. Really glad I tried your game, it's fun and nicely executed. Well done to you both.

Thanks!

Good fun. I discovered a big though. I could not yet reproduce it, but I managed to somehow have letters glitch out of the Tetris shapes they are in. When I move the tiles or rotate them, the letters are back where they should be. So it's not game breaking, but seems to happen in some case. At first I suspected, that it was because my phone was locked in between, but I tried that and when locking it manually, that bug did not happen. So no idea, sorry!

Ahh dang I’ve had a few people report this but I haven’t been able to reproduce it. I think it does have something to do with locking your screen and coming back but I haven’t figured it out yet

I received a call during the game and it happened too. Twice actually :)

Interesting, I’ll have to try that to see if I can reproduce it, thanks!

This is really fun — have you played with making the tile position opinionated (not agnostic)?

i wonder if have the clues point to a starting square (e.g., "E5") would be better than the current "reveal" aid. The spatial information would become more helpful toward the end when the player is dealing with the words they need help on.

Could you expand on what you mean about opinionated vs agnostic? It sounds interesting but I’m not sure I follow.

I like that clue idea! I want to change how the reveals work. I’ll play with that!

Really great! One of the things that Wordle did that I thought was very clever was having a copy and paste social media preview of how you did. It might be worth adding that for vitality... you could even add an image preview with Open Graph meta tags if you were clever.

Thanks, yeah I’d like to improve this. There is a “share” option when you complete a level but I don’t think it works as well as Wordle’s in terms of storytelling.

Generating a custom sharing image is interesting!

This is something I've gone and forth on for https://threeemojis.com/ as well. I think it's pretty hard to generate a story of a complicated puzzle, in part because the person you are sending it to doesn't have an idea of the terrain you were playing on and so kind of doesn't care. I do see some people doing custom share images with their puzzles, but it doesn't seem to have caught on so much.

* virality :-/

Nice! Some feedback from my wife, who is into all manner of word games: she found it a little bit brute-forcey: needing to try all different combinations in order to get the right configuration of the word. In contrast to a crossword where there is already a layout, which gives her a hint for how to proceed with the rest.

(She finished today's puzzle, and I gave up.) From a UI perspective it is very slick - very smooth, and I like how it kind of "gets" what you were trying to do when providing corrections/hints.

>In contrast to a crossword

there's a type of crossword called "diagramless" where you have the numbered clues and an empty grid

there was one in NYTimes Magazine Sunday puzzle page this past weekend

Thats great feedback, thank you!

Man, this is absolutely awesome. This has the feeling of being the next wordle or a similar quick hit type game. Really impressive.

Thanks!

This is really well made! As someone who has built daily puzzle games (ex. sidewords.ca, kickoffleague.com, and just today fivefold.ca), I appreciate the effort it takes to make something that polished! It plays really well on mobile, which is tricky, especially when you’ve got a grid as big as yours.

Thanks, I’ll have to try out your games! Any tips or recommendations you’ve learned from your puzzles?

Hah well one tip would be do NOT make a complex framing/structure for your daily puzzle game like we did with Kickoff League. It was a fun experiment but it mostly just confused people.

A more meta tip is if you make multiple games, try to have some genre or theme overlap so you can build a community among players of your games. I wish I had done this more with my more successful games (which are mobile games, not web games, but the same idea applies).

That makes sense, thanks!

I saw your Show HN post a few weeks ago! Really appreciate the smoothness of your UI and the simplicity of your onboarding, I see how much you have dialed in. I've been working on a daily puzzle game too (it's getting there...), maybe you'd enjoy it https://slab17.com/

Slab 17 is a really interesting and unique puzzle! I love the act of slab creation. It’s very satisfying and the aesthetics are great.

I found the instruction about double tapping a little confusing at first but figured it out as I played.

Nice work!

Thanks for the note and the feedback about the instructions! Got me to rework the wording.

Very cool!

I solved the first puzzle: -Congratulations! -You solved Paprika with 18 slabs

But this was unclear: -You've solved 0 puzzles! -Reveal Rule -Next Puzzle -View Archive -You still have 2 guesses left. Finish guessing before revealing the rule if you're feeling brave!

I have to do 2 more guesses before I can reveal the rule that I already figured out?

Thanks for the note! This part needs work and I really appreciate the call out. I'll try to explain here to share, and maybe clarify my own thinking.

Getting any of the guesses right counts as a win, and you get different guessing slabs for each guess (this latter part isn't made at all clear upfront).

If you have a rule in your head like "no red", but the true rule is "no red or orange", it's possible that on the guessing slabs those two rules evaluate to the same things (e.g. there weren't any oranges present in the guessing slabs). You could then try the rest of the guessing slabs, which might have an example where you get it wrong, giving more gameplay.

I wanted to give a victory on any subset of 5 slabs guessed successfully since trying to get all the guesses is very hard (especially the first guess on many puzzles), and you can get new information from guesses which fail, which offers some progression. Hence getting "you won" and the ability to reveal the rule (I've also thought about keeping the reveal unavailable until you do all guesses) and the invitation to keep playing.

If you have a minute I'd love to hear from you if that makes sense and if you have thoughts about what might make more sense. I've also tried to consider ways of restructuring the gameplay, e.g. automatically progressing to the next set of guessing slabs, such that the flow here is less confusing.

Thanks for playing, and for sharing!

That makes sense.

Maybe just simply state it?

E.g, instead of “you solved paprika”:

“You got 5 slabs right; 10 more to prove you really solved the rule”

(Being better versed in making games than I am, you can likely come up with more enticing prose)

Appreciate the reply, this is simpler than my thinking and I like it!

The animations in the interface make it feel more "jelly" and not "wooden" like a number of other such interfaces.

Thanks! I spent a long time trying to make the core controls feel intuitive and natural to use

The amount of care you put into it must be massive; a noticed so many nice subtle details that make interacting with the pieces easy and fun. Kudos!

This is a lovely game!

This game was Show HNed two times in ten days, [1][2], but unfortunately, it didn't get as much attention as it should! Ironically, this current thread has already gained almost double the comments from both submissions combined!

I whish you best of luck to succeed in your journey.

___________________

1.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45750789

2.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45634525

Thanks!

Yeah I felt odd reposting the Show HN but I thought that the HN crowd would enjoy the game if a post got traction

You can email mods and ask to bump up a Show HN post if it has merit. Even if it's your own.

I’m enjoying this a lot and even got my partner playing. We did one together and now they are off working through puzzles because they liked it so much.

The game design is really good too. It has just the right amount of juice.

Thanks for the kind words and sharing it with your partner!

This puzzle is genius.The interface is minimal and user-friendly, everything feels smooth and intuitive.

Nice! What might be a nice lesser 'clue' to simply revealing a word is highlighting letter(s) on the board that are part of it? Favouring maybe highlighting letters that are contiguous with a blue bit?

Yeah that’s a good idea!

This is really great. Played this for quite a long time, nicely done!

Thanks! Hopefully you enjoy the upcoming daily puzzles!

I really enjoyed this! wondering about a possible "scratch" section or larger area - found myself spending a lot of time moving pieces around to get enough space

Yeah I’ve gone back and forth on this.

On large screens adding more space would be a big quality of life improvement.

But it doesn’t really work on smaller screens.

So far I’ve tried to keep the experience as similar as possible across devices but maybe that’s silly

Yeah, I think you should be actively encouraging the sales of laptops/desktops.

You had me at Patchwork. This is super fun. Thanks for making it!

I love Patchwork! One of my wife and I's favorite, easy, go-to games.

Nicely done! Played two puzzles and had a blast! Works awesome on mobile

Your website grew to several thousand UVs per month in just two months — that’s impressive!

Beautiful UI and a genuinely fun game

Thanks!

That's awesome!! It took 15 min and I gave up on some words.

As a non native it feels awesome to finish a puzzle like this haha

Nice job! I’m glad you enjoyed it!

It was super fun! Would love a little more space to move pieces around but otherwise fantastic job!

I shared with people. They loved it.

Thank you!

And those people have shared it to their friends. At least in my part of the woods, you have a hit.

Thanks, that’s lovely to hear!

Did you do a Show HN thread on this? Do it so I can 'favorite' it please

You can favourite comments. But yes, there was a Show HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45750789

This is really good. I like the idea of the game and your execution of it is superb.

Nice job, I enjoyed it, I’ll play again tomorrow!

Very neat and clean UX, kudos to that!

How do you market it – now or planning to, if I may ask?

Great question… marketing is not my strong suit.

I showcased at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo with the Portland Indie Game squad and that got me some players. I also shared it on my various personal social medias. The neighborhood board game store let me put up a poster!

I’m also hoping that organic sharing will drive growth.

This HN comment has been some of my most successful marketing so far. Around 2400 people from HN have visited since I posted!

The game deserves it. As a non-native some of the things are tough without "cheating" but its still fun. Didn't check but do you also support other languages besides English? (In Estonian for example we have some tricky vovels: üöäõ, which might throw some code haywire)

I _think_ the code would support it fine but I’d have to check. For now all of the clues are in English

I love it. I struggle more than I want to admit, but super fun nonetheless.

It definitely has a bit of a learning curve! In playtesting it sometimes took a bit for the rotation to “click” for people.

Yeah that was it for me, the rotation really threw me off.

Wow that is a clean and responsive interface! It feels great on mobile.

Awesome game! I've been looking for something like this.

Thanks, I’m glad you like it!

That was quite fun. Will be back.

Super fin idea, very nicely executed, thanks!

That was wonderful, I'll be back tomorrow.

Thanks, I’m glad you like it!

Just played it, really super. Great job.

this is very cool, noticed vue and nuxt nice.

Thanks! Yeah I love Vue and Nuxt. They worked great for this project

Just solved a puzzle, nice project!

Fun game! Shared with some friends :)

Thanks!

I also enjoyed this, great work!

Amazing game, perfect for me.

Very nice game, good job!

This is a really fantastic game. I’m a big fan of word games, especially crosswords and scrabble/words with friends so this is exactly “in my q zone”.

I hope you make a success of this and sell it to the NYT for a disgusting amount of money.

That was fun, I’m in!

Awesome!

very addictive and original puzzle game, like it!

This is bloody good

Great game! The effort you put into animations and interactivity really pays off, especially when first learning how the game works.

This is a classic HN comment but I’d love a Thursday/Friday crossword difficulty equivalent in addition to the dailies which are a ~Monday.

Thanks! I would like to explore different difficulty puzzles in the future!

Really nice

Awesome work

I love it!

this is great man

Continuing with my retro productivity software blog, Stone Tools: https://stonetools.ghost.io

I was getting a little bored of retrocomputing discourse being so centered on gaming, so I'm exploring the productivity software of the 8/16-bit era. I put real effort into learning and using the programs, giving my light-hearted but heartfelt assessment of its form and function for both its time and today.

Using the software inevitably gets me thinking about other things, and I explore those threads as well. For example, "Superbase on the C64" also discusses the legacy and promise of "the paperless office." A couple of other posts got some nice traction here on HN, notably "Deluxe Paint on the Amiga" and "VisiCalc on the Apple 2".

I'm hoping to build a strong monthly readership, so I'm putting in the work. It's been up for two months and five posts now, with a new one coming at the end of this week.

I think this software archaeology / history-keeping is really important. Keep up the good work. These paragraphs resonate with me:

> There is utility in those old tools and interesting ideas to be mined. Recently I stumbled across something that by all accounts should have set the world on fire, but whose ideas needed more time to germinate before blossoming much later. Discoveries like this are not just nostalgic “what ifs” to opine wistfully upon, they can be dormant seeds of the future.

> Computing moves at such an unrelenting pace, those seeds may lie dormant for any number of reasons: bad marketing, released on a dying platform, too expensive, or even too large a mental leap for the public to “get” at the time. I see this blog as a way to explore the history of the work tools we use every day. I don’t do this out of misty-eyed sentimentality, but rather pragmatic curiosity. The past isn’t sacred, but it is still useful.

What's your research process? Do you use lots of Internet Archive material? Do you reference any personal artifacts i.e. old hardware or documentation laying around? Any interviewing?

Thanks for the kind feedback, and I'm happy you felt resonance with those words. I use tons of Internet Archive material, but also stuff from various retro enthusiast sites which focus on specific hardware platforms. Lots of books, I look through YouTube for interviews, and include my own personal history with the machines and genres (I don't want the blog to read like a passionless how-to manual). If I had the physical space for a hardware collection I'd do that, but alas. No interviewing of my own, just research into existing interviews up to present day. The main point is really to let the software speak for itself and see if it and I can be friends.

That's interesting. I agree that outside of gaming you really don't see much being done with the old systems.

My first job out of college was with a tiny, now-defunct company that built simple I/O hardware for 8-bit systems. One of the "side products" was a MacPaint clone for the Radio Shack Color Computer II called CoCoMax. We didn't write it: AFAIK, the programmer for the original version contacted the company and asked if they wanted to buy it and pay him royalties. He later went off and built an even more successful product used in TV stations called the Video Toaster. Side product or not, CoCoMax was a cash cow!

On the heels of that success, another programmer who'd written a more advanced version for the Color Computer 3 offered the same deal. From what I recall, they both made buttloads of money from their royalties.

Sometimes I wish I had kept some of that old hardware & software, but it's long gone.

Your website is amazing! I've being complaining recently to some coworkers that current software is often bloated, full of things that are only distractions and due to all the accidental complexity, full of bugs and slow. One day, at work, Gnome stopped working due to some javascript issue and KDE at home due to something similar (I guess) and as I had to get some stuff done, I just installed WindowMaker and started using it. I forgot how amazing it was and how much it just work. Some customisations I do such as changing Caps to Control and other similar things were easy - just dealing with xinput/setxkbmap, etc.

So, my impression is that, for a while, things started getting simpler by having WYSIWYG editors and multiple things running at the same time in windows, but as the processing power and memory started improving, instead of making things easier and better, we (as people) started just adding more features and other things that they just made things more complicated than they should be.

Well, with all that, I wish success for you!

PS: It would be great if you had RSS support on your website.

This is a neat project! I read the last post and I’ll work my way back through them.

Thanks, I hope you enjoy the series!

This is super cool. If it was RSS enabled I'd immediately add it to my feed!

Thanks! I don't actually know anything about how Ghost blogging platform interacts with RSS feeds, but I get a small amount of traffic from personal aggregation services. I guess I kind of thought RSS is enabled, but I don't use it so I honestly don't know. I'll look into it and see if there's some setting or toggle switch somewhere I need to flip.

https://stonetools.ghost.io/rss/

That worked for you? I was having a devil of a time getting Feedreader to bring in that feed. I also had never touched Feedreader until last night and might have done something dumb. Inoreader did bring in the feed, but only after I "tricked it" (?) by doing a search for the feed; it wouldn't accept the rss URL. It all felt very mysterious and opaque.

I got word in the Ghost forums that there may also be an RSS feed bug, which I'll look into and see if that applies to this case.

It worked in NetNewsWire, a macOS feedreader.

RSS is a bit of a pain as most feed readers will accept malformed XML (unlike Atom feeds). Hence you end up with a lot of malformed XML.

Having said that it mostly looks valid:

https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fst...

Great to know, thank you for the investigation.

That sounds fascinating, thank you for this research.

My pleasure!

A tool for creating custom Tailwind-style color palettes for web and UI design that pass WCAG contrast requirements:

https://www.inclusivecolors.com/

The interface is optimized to let you quickly explore and tweak multiple tints/shades at once so you can customize all colors exactly how you want e.g. try dragging vertically through the saturation curve in one motion to edit all the tints/shades at once, or shift whole curves horizontally by dragging between the dots on a curve.

It uses the HSLuv color space, where (unlike say HSL) the WCAG contrast stays the same when you change the hue and saturation sliders. This makes it much easier to explore accessible colors choices as you know only changes to the lightness slider will impact the contrast. You can also switch from the WCAG2 contrast checker to using APCA, which is meant to correct for inaccuracies in WCAG2, such as it being too forgiving for dark mode color combos.

Note the mobile version is more of a preview and the desktop version has more features.

I probably need to add something like a tutorial as there's a lot going on, but I've added more hints and tooltips recently. Open to feedback on what's initially confusing and what changes might help!

I passed this on to some accessibility folks at a couple conferences in the last month - everyone was impressed :)

That's awesome, thanks!

I'd also keen to hear from people who are interested in accessibility but don't know much about it too. I've tried to explain the WCAG contrast rules in the simplest way I can (interactively, via the live mockup example on the right and contrast indicator icons that appear on the left) but there's quite a lot to cover.

bookmarked! Cool work!

Currently working on a take on Pokémon GO + Pokémon Snap but for birding. The goal is to explore your neighborhood, find birds, take good photos of them all. Next month, I'll be doing an event to find a rare bird, excited to see how it goes!

It's still a small closed alpha, if anyone is interested: https://testers.birdlego.com

Here is a rough trailer of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVpR8aafFjI

I got super excited thinking this was for real birds. I would love someone to gamify birding.

Not sure if this meets your criteria, yet iNaturalist [1] is kind of "gamified". Has a rather large "bird" taxon observation amount. 38,393,861 observations, 11,165 species, 1,130,700 observers, 188,988 identifiers (people who identify species from your pictures)

When Romania announced that the Lesser Kestrel had returned after 100 years iNaturalist actually had several of the observations in the nearby area. [2]

[1] https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?subview=map&taxon_i...

[2] https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?subview=map&taxon_i...

I guess it's not intensely gamified, but I have a couple friends at like 80-90% on Merlin. It's their excuse to travel and live abroad

This is actually exactly what I’ve been working on as a passion project for the last year and a half: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wings-whistles/id6503321263

It’s basically a gamified version of Merlin. Would love any and all feedback!

Birdle Go seems really cool, very impressed and would love to test that!

Any chance you'll release an android version?

Yes! I’m aiming to release it by January at the latest. I’m using tflite rather than coreml so that the transition is easier.

What’s missing from eBird?

Certainly gamified a bit as I learned from:

LISTERS: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zl-wAqplQAo

1.9m view | 2mo ago | 2hr long (buckle in, documentary by a couple young goofball brothers)

I want something more gamified. I want to go on missions or complete challenges or something. Not just identity and log stuff.

I'll think of ways to bridge the virtual world with the real world birding one. Let me know if you have any ideas for that :)

Oh I was hoping for this but with real birds in my neighborhood. Still neat!

Do you have any plans to provide this data to ornithological research groups? I know there's an annual event where people across the nation are encouraged to count the birds in their back yards and report it, so it seems like this kind of amateur birdspotting is valued in the scientific community.

I'd be careful with the name and the way you're describing it, as Nintendo are notoriously litigious. Best of luck with the project, though!

I would pay for this. 100%.

OK, I would pay for this. Definitely following!

What a good idea, sounds fun!

I’m working on a free and open-source invoice generator: https://easyinvoicepdf.com/?template=stripe

- No sign-up, works entirely in-browser

- Live PDF preview + instant download

- VAT EU support

- Shareable invoice links

- Multi-language (10+) & multi-currency

- Multiple templates (incl. Stripe-style)

- Mobile-friendly

GitHub: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf

Would love feedback, contributions, or ideas for other templates/features.

PS: e-invoice support coming soon

Ha! I built a similar service for quote generation a couple of month ago: https://quotemachine.cc

No signups, free for all, browser-only, live pdfs, etc

Built it for a friend and decided to share with all, it's just a react app (no backend) running on GCP and costs almost nothing to run.

Didn't think about opensourcing it and I will, why not.

Looking good =)

Nice work. I liked the instant pdf viewer. Kudos for your efforts.

Only thing I would suggest is, to support different tax formats (or provide an ability to fill custom tax format name that applies to the whole invoice). Right now, it is largely VAT. In some countries, it may not be relevant.

(Having said that, as a work around, currently anyone can use Notes field to fill custom tax details and hide all VAT related fields.)

Thanks for the feedback, will take a look into supporting custom tax formats

UPD: Created an issue to investigate

https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf/issues/149

Hey, that's actually really useful! That's so cool!

Thank you

https://katarineko.com

I think by this point everyone that is learning a language knows that immersion is very important, however a problem I've had myself is that the content that interests me is beyond my reach, and the content that is within reach doesn't interest me.

This is my attempt at doing something to remediate that. You select the content you want, and I create a personalized study plan to learn the most important words to achieve a target % of understanding. Then I generate a short story each week for your particular level containing the new words in the context of your content.

The idea is to bring the content you want to learn to your level so you can watch what you want to watch.

That's a great idea, and I live the UI! I wish I have some time now to learn Japanese now...

https://easel.games

I'm making Easel, a 2D game programming language designed to match how humans, not computers, think about game logic. It also has automatic multiplayer. I've been working on it for 3 years!

Easel feels like a declarative programming language even though it is imperative, because lots of useful game-oriented features are first class. Like behaviours - you just say `on Pointer { ... }` and you have a concurrently-executing coroutine that's lifetime is managed. But you don't think about any of that complexity, you just think of your entity as having a behaviour and go forth and make your game.

It also happens to have automatic multiplayer. Normally with multiplayer you have to worry about doing everything in a "multiplayer safe" way (i.e. be deterministic and only modify the things your side has authority over). My idea was to put all the multiplayer stuff in the programming language itself, underneath all your lines of code. This way, anything you write in that programming language can just be made multiplayer, automatically. So you can just pretend all your players are in one shared world, like a singleplayer game, and the engine does all the multiplayer for you. It was really difficult to make but it makes multiplayer so easy for you now.

Easel is my idea of how games should be made, or at least as close to the idea as I can achieve with 3 years of work, and I would love for more people to try it out.

> you can just pretend all your players are in one shared world, like a singleplayer game, and the engine does all the multiplayer for you

But how does this really work? The website also says it's just baked into the language but there are many different approaches to networking games that have their own pros and cons.

It uses rollback netcode. The inputs are relayed to the other players and executed on all clients, and they end up in the same state because all Easel programs are guaranteed deterministic. To hide latency, the clients simulate forward even before they have received all inputs, and once inputs have been received it rolls back to the point of divergence to correct the prediction error. This works because the prediction is correct most of the time.

To be able to roll back, Easel incrementally snapshots the game state every tick. It only snapshots (and restores) what has changed, which makes it a lot more efficient than most rollback netcode implementations.

It also uses a peer-to-peer relay and adapts the latency asymmetrically, so the player who introduces latency feels their own latency.

I know there are other models and pros and cons, this is the right choice for Easel because I wanted to make the multiplayer fully automatic. One shared world, coded like a singleplayer game. There are certainly games which suit a client/server model better but I think the developer would then need to understand where their code is running and when to do remote procedure calls, and my goal was to make multiplayer so easy that even a teenager on their first day of coding could do it.

That's great stuff! IIRC Factorio takes the same approach but relies on extensive testing to avoid running into desync issues with non-deterministic code. Would be very cool to be able to build games like that without needing to worry about desyncs!

It might be a good idea to highlight some of the limitations to this approach somewhere so users aren't caught off guard later in the development process. For example, it wouldn't be great to build a competitive FPS or MOBA with this because the game state is replicated to all players which is a cheaters dream. The latency characteristics would also not be ideal for games with a larger number of players. I also assume there are no escape hatches for doing any non-deterministic things like I/O so there would be limited to no persistence possible. It won't be an issue for most games but worth highlighting just in case IMO.

Yes, I should have a "who is this not for" section somewhere, that's fair enough.

Persistence is actually handled by the server, and then the server inserts an input back into the game state with the result when it's done. So, no issue with I/O.

I see Factorio is doing deterministic lockstep, which like rollback netcode but without the rollback. That makes sense seeing as it is a game with a lot of state and so it would be too expensive to snapshot and rollback all the time. But yes, I think having a game engine which guarantees determinism in all cases could be a useful base for other multiplayer architectures too. Right now Easel only does rollback but maybe it could do more in the future.

This is really cool. Nice project!

I tried doing something much more rudimentary before. Will be following

Oh, thank you!

I would love to hear more about what you were trying to do with your project before. Was it more similar to the declarative coding part, the automatic multiplayer part, or something else? Part of why I'm doing this is to explore the design space of how games should be made and I'm interested to hear what problems, issues, pet peeves, "bugbears" etc that other people think are worth solving.

It's been a while. But I believe what caused me the most headache while trying to build something like this was handling the interactions between different elements. Declaring which objects were affected by "attacks" or could be "player interactive" or "affected by player but not by NPC". Really this boiled down to proper inheritance. But I found myself so deep and tangled a fresh reset would have been better. Then determining if the object itself or an "objective manager" should perform the calculation each cycle.. etc

It was messy. I ended up having NPC, Item, Attack classes and for each a NPC Manager, Item Manager, and Attack Manager to calculate all their interactions and states.

That's why your project seems interesting because it seems to handle the heavy lifting of behaviors and "behind the scenes".

Oh yes, handling interactions and dependencies and what is affected by what. I did a lot of React development (as in the frontend web framework) before making Easel and was quite inspired by how it hooks to change. The way you give it a little routine, it says what it depends on, and then it just fully re-executes that whole routine when the dependencies change. So in Easel when you say `with Health { ... }` it makes a behaviour that re-executes every time the Health changes. But, if it just reran the behaviour, then you'd end up with it adding a new sprite (for example) every time it re-executes, until you've got hundreds of them. So the other trick is the Easel compiler assigns an implicit ID to things like sprites so that it will replace rather than add the second time around. It's built into the programming language so you don't see it (most of the time). It actually took me 2 years to come up with that, which is both cool and depressing when I can explain it in one paragraph.

> So the other trick is the Easel compiler assigns an implicit ID to things like sprites so that it will replace rather than add the second time around

Is the ID computed based on the shape of the expression at runtime or on something else?

I found https://easel.games/docs/learn/language/functions/ids#implic... which suggests they are structure-based, at least, though loops aren't mentioned.

Great documentation, by the by!

The implicit ID is just an auto-incremented number actually, it's not anything too special. That means, if you have a loop, the component has the same ID each time and gets replaced. That is a feature, not a bug. So this code snippet will keep replacing the text sprite with a new one, counting from 1 to 10:

for i in RangeInclusive(1, 10) { TextSprite(i) }

Yes, you found the right place in the documentation. Thanks, yes I worked very hard on the documentation!

Ah, so you don't do parallel with implicit IDs right now, I'm guessing. Or you do, but it has some interesting bugs as the IDs shift around? Or the scope of the auto-incrementing number is lower than "the entire program" so parallel works?

It sounds like you are asking, if auto-incrementing IDs are assigned in parallel at runtime, then order of execution of the threads must affect which ID gets assigned to what, and that must make some interesting bugs?

The IDs are assigned at compile time by the Easel compiler. So they don’t change in any way at runtime. Does that answer your question?

Mostly - if the IDs are assigned at compile time, how do you deal with _runtime_ locations like "the fifth iteration of a For loop"?

Actually, all iterations of the for loop have the same ID. This is the design. So the second iteration has the same ID as the first iteration, which means it replaces the sprite created by the first. The fifth iteration has the same ID as the fourth iteration, so it replaces the sprite. So all the iterations keep replacing the same sprite. And that is how you animate sprites!

If you are actually trying to make multiple sprites and not keep replacing them, what you do is you spawn a new entity to hold your extra sprite:

for i in Range(0,10) { Subspawn { TextSprite(i) } }

That code creates 10 sprites and achieves what I think you are thinking of.

I've actually just recently been through this myself. I'm also building something for kids to build games in. But much more opinionated than Easel. It's interesting to me that Easel looks declarative but is imperative.

I've actually gone with a 100% declarative approach. Basically you define effects, which are executed in response to certain interactions. There's a comprehensive targeting system. But the best part is this is all type-safe using TypeScript, the declarative structure is enforced. That means even when you chain effects, nested effects are able to access (incl. autocomplete) the targets of parent effects etc. Whilst this provides a super nice experience to consume, it's definitely non-trivial to build this system.

https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids

Wow, impressive project! I like how you’ve focused on tooling and workflow, it makes sense that is where your most important problems are. Cool QR code drawing template idea too :)

I've been working on a 3D voxel-based game engine for like 10 years in my spare time. At this point it's getting pretty close to being shadertoy for voxels.

https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai

I recently ported the terrain generators to the GPU, and increased the visible volume to 1 billion voxels cubed. I did a short YouTube video about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLfgjWsM1PI

I also wrote a metaprogramming language which generates a lot of the editor UI for the engine. It's a bespoke C parser that supports a small subset of C++, which is exposed to the user through a 'scripting-like' language you embed directly in your source files. I wrote it as a replacement for C++ templates and in my completely unbiased opinion it is WAY better.

https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

Awesome, looking forward to use this. What was the hardest part of this project? What motivated you to attempt creating this?

> Awesome, looking forward to use this

Stoked to have another user!

> What was the hardest part of this project?

Fuck.. that's a hard question. I'm almost always trying to push at least one of three boundaries; voxel engine techniques, engine performance, my mechanical programming skill. Trying to push those boundaries, often in tandem or tridem, is always hard. Different jobs are often hard for different reasons, but overall it's been a difficult project for most of it's existence. That said, doing hard projects is what I enjoy, and it's a great feeling when you sit down to, for example, optimize something, and end up making it 20x faster!

> What motivated you to attempt creating this?

It started out as a learning exercise; a safe space where I could just 'fuck around and find out'. When I started, I never expected to spend nearly as much time on it as I have.

FreeBSD 15.0. Rather depressingly, almost everything I said two months ago is still true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45419134

But I'm hoping to have it out by the first week of December.

Thank you for your hard work. I don’t have a lot of time right now but would love to try to contribute to FreeBSD early next year

Thanks for all your hard work!

https://whenever.world/

It's an explorable database of films, TV shows, books and board games based around their historical setting: where and when the thing is set. It's been incredibly complex and interesting getting the (messy) data, making sense of it and trying to design a UI to explore it.

https://stevebennett.me/2025/08/26/whenever-exploring-times-...

This is totally cool!

I will note that there are some Norfolk England things showing in Norfolk Virginia.

Thanks, yeah, it's a hard problem.

It would be interesting to see for movies and tv series where it’s set vs where it’s actually shot

This reminded me instantly of Every Frame a Painting's video "Vancouver never plays itself"[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojm74VGsZBU

Yeah, that's a whole different thing. I saw this map once that showed places in California and how they were used to film various locations around the world. Turns out LA is very well situated.

Great job! I just went down a rabbit-hole exploring some historical events

I’ve been working on https://canine.sh which is a free, open source Heroku alternative for 2 years now.

It’s exactly the product I wish I had when I started my previous company. Running on PaaS is incredible for devex but the pricing is bonkers, and the vendor lock in makes it really hard to deal with annual price increases. We spent close to 400k / year for just 128GB combined fleet in our last startup on Heroku.

Canine tries to get the best of both worlds: developer friendly PaaS with no lockin or price gouging.

Just added build packs as a build option recently.

Also got a sponsorship from the portainer folks which lets me work on this close to full time

Hoping this saves someone the headache I had two years ago.

Hey Chris, would love to chat about this - could you email me? Cheers

This looks really cool, will try it out!

Let me know how it works out! theres a discord link for any help, etc.

We have been building https://finbodhi.com/ a local-first browser app (PWA) for personal finance, based on double-entry accounting.

FinBodhi uses double entry so complicated set of transactions and accounts can be modeled (which happen often enough in users financial journey). We wrote about double-entry here: https://finbodhi.com/docs/understanding-double-entry

We do use online services like firebase for auth, and some service to fetch commodity prices etc. But all your financial data is on your system (we use sqlite over opfs, in browser). For synching across devices, that data is encrypted with your key before it leaves your device. You can backup the data locally (if you are using chrome) and/or to your dropbox. It's designed so that we (the people building it) can't access your data.

There are many more features, like multi-currency, visualizations, a sheet to use your data to do complex calculations like taxes, planning for your future etc.

Feel free to try it out with the demo account (no sign-in required). Note: app doesn't work in Firefox private mode.

Cool stuff, happy to see that you focus on local storage. How do you handle uploaded financial statements? Are they sent to 3p?

Import is done locally. No 3rd party is involved. We have build custom importer. e.g you can import a csv and map it's columns to what we need internally. We also allow some logic in importer. E.g. to figure if a row is credit or debit. etc. It should be feasible to import most csv statements. PDFs and Excels should also work, except for some complicated cases where a transaction is spread across multiple rows.

There are a few custom importers also, for indian context.

I'm seeing a lot more Firebase spoof spam emails recently in general, keep that in mind as a service if you rely on it for outbound comms

I've been enjoying the breadth of projects made possible with AI, I've cataloged over 200 of them created in 2025 here: https://jonathanclark.com/posts/ai-coding-million-lines-2025...

A few of my recent favorites: - swim lap counter in html/JS that uses the camera to watch you swim and count laps/timing - video recorder that records your window/desktop and uploads a file to S3 - video conferencing app that allows a 2 year to click on a family member face and initiates a video conference using webRTC, STUN, and browser audio/video capture with automatic bandwidth adjustments (works on all platforms with pure HTML/JS). - CUDA based ray tracer with HTML UI that can trace over 2m rays per second on my laptop for scientific study, allowing real-time display of optical parts. - chat front-end for image models like gemini-pro and openai that take other images and text as references and generate a big library of options to chose from in seconds, I've been using photoshop for decades but I tend to use this more now.

> CUDA based ray tracer with HTML UI

I'm curious if you mean they're running a raytracer on the back end, and you interact with an HTML UI, or if it runs browserside, maybe via WASM. AFAIK CUDA isn't directly compilable to WASM (yet?)

I have a node middleman that proxies request from an HTML/JS front end to a native cuda process using web sockets. To support multiple windows, the node process process provides communication between two browser windows. This lets me have render a model using 3JS in one window and a ray traced version in another window.

Woah that's a lot of projects. Would be cool if you could open-source some of them.

+1 to this, not all of them of course, but there's some very useful ones in there I could make use of.

Thanks for the encouragement. I do plan to make more of them open source, in the past it's been a bit of burden to document, test, and fix bugs before publishing but for some projects AI can do that for you now.

One project I did publish: https://github.com/jclarkcom/ble_proxy This turns your cell phone into a network proxy, but using BLE so the phone can be connected to a Wifi network (hotel, plane, etc). It's pretty slow, but in some cases you just need a little bit of data to work. I made it on a plane ride where my cellphone had data but my laptop didn't.

100% completely understood, making something you only intend yourself to see compared to something other people will see is very different.

Very cool! Love little things like this.

AI powered financial data PDF extractor sounds interesting

Porting Ruby to Fil-C

It's very interesting because the Ruby codebase uses a `typedef uintptr_t VALUE` type to mean any of the following:

- A pointer to the heap

- A Ruby tagged value (which may be a pointer to the heap)

- Any integer value that fits in `uintptr_t`

Fil-C doesn't allow you to carry around pointers using integers, in the sense that when you do that, the pointers lose their capabilities.

But in Ruby's case, it's not as simple as changing the typedef to a pointer type, since `VALUE` variables often end up being used for integer math (including bit math, shifts, etc).

So, it's going to take a nontrivial patch to Ruby to get it to work in Fil-C. I think I'm about 70% of the way through (I started Friday afternoon).

Working on some fun/silly projects.

My favorite so far is: "The Anti-AI UI Test".

After ChatGPT Atlas came out I thought it would be fun to find UI patterns that AI browsers couldn't figure out like multiple download buttons, hidden unsubscribe buttons, etc. So I created 7 levels of web dark patterns for AI browsers. You can try it yourself if you want:

https://codinhood.com/anti-ai-ui

I found Atlas can get through most patterns, so I created an even more unhinged one (job application form) that shifts the interface and flashes content.

Don't take it too seriously as actually testing AI browsers, it just a fun side project. I documented the patterns here: https://codinhood.com/anti-ai-ui/about

Pretty funny. I had to disable my ad blocker to be able to play it at all.

This is hilarious. Well done!

It was fun. xD

I'm working on a local multiplayer party game platform, a lovechild of Jackbox Games and Mario Party: https://gamingcouch.com. We just won silver at the Big Indie Pitch competition!

- Currently in free Early Access with 18 competitive mini-games.

- Players use their mobile phones as controllers (you can use game pads as well!)

- Everything is completely web-based, no downloads or installs necessary to play

- The games are all action based, with quick ~one minute rounds to keep a good pace. This means there are no language based trivia games!

- In the future we plan to open up the platform for 3rd party developers as well. We take care of the network connectivity, controllers etc.. 3rd party devs can focus on developing cool multiplayer mini-games without spending an eternity with networking coded and infrastructure.

Would love any feedback you might have!

I wish you luck!!!

I tried this in 2014 with happyfuntimes

https://docs.happyfuntimes.net/

My conclusion was, past a certain number of people no one wants to game

Around the same time was AirConsole and still available

https://www.airconsole.com/

Thank you! Very interesting, maybe 2014 was too early for this kind of gaming, as now the concept really seems to resonate with people and we have been enjoying quite many months of doubling user amounts. But of course time will only tell...

I know AirConsole also struggled quite a lot in the beginning and now in the end they ended up in car entertainment as KPIT bought the whole company. So they don't focus on web/living-room gaming any more

This is awsome! Exactly what I was looking for. I will try it with my friends tomorrow evening. I have multiple failed attempts of building something similar.

Thanks! Let me know how it goes :) There's also a Discord link at the bottom of our page where you can send in feedback or ask any questions you might have. Would you be interested in developing for a platform like this?

How does this compare to AirConsole? (https://www.airconsole.com)

The underlying technology is largely the same, but our focus is specifically on the action party game niche, whereas AirConsole tries to cover a bit of every gaming genre and position itself as more of a replacement for traditional game consoles.

They were also very recently acquired by an Indian car software manufacturer (KPIT) and no longer focus on web or living-room gaming.

Discovered in-door bouldering / rock climbing and now go 3x a week, am absolutely loving it! Because of that, I haven't really worked on any side projects in a while. Perhaps I don't need to? My job advances me plenty in my field, but it is a bit of a bitter-sweet feeling in a sense, like maybe I should try to squeeze more out of my free time somehow.

I climb a lot! (Actually currently sitting on Big Sur ledge on el cap posting this). It cuts into my free time programming for sure, but imo super worth it! Enjoy it, it’s a wonderful hobby.

I’m replying from the cold east coast (from the edge of a wood chair in a lovely iykyk type of restaurant) to a human posting from el cap on hn; We have achieved peak technology. Oh yeah, I’m working on urban logistics, powered by AI.

I’ve been hesitant for fear of injury harming the ability to type, but might give it a go in the spring. Thanks for mentioning this I’m inspired to try it finally.

I struggled with hand and wrist pain for years from spending too much time at a computer. I did physiotherapy for years and while it helped me manage pain, I was never able to truly build enough strength to get ahead of it until I started bouldering. I took it very slowly—I spent months on very easy problems—but because it was so much fun, I kept going back. Initially, I would only go on Saturday mornings, so I had the full weekend to recover before jumping back into the work week on Monday. After a two or three months of that, I was able to climb anytime I wished. I'm still not a particularly advanced climber, and I typically only go once per week, but I am still slowly progressing, and I absolutely love it.

Couple things to avoid finger injuries: go easy on one- and two-finger pockets, use an open crimp whenever possible (all finger joints are bent the normal direction, and your palm/thumb aren't really involved), and don't bother with the hangboard or campus board for the first ~year.

I wouldn't worry about it too much though - almost all of the people I know with finger injuries were trying to push into really being competitive climbers, not just doing it casually for fun/fitness.

Oh also to keep from tearing your skin don't climb tired. (That won't keep you from typing, it's just painful.)

I'd like to add to this that do not make any food with chilli peppers like habanero or such if you just came from the gym with torn skin. I found out the hard way.

I’ve been climbing for 20 years and it’s the thing that prevents RSI for me and makes it possible to use a computer too much :). Certainly possible to injure fingers but would be a very rare climbing injury that would threaten coding.

Climbing easy routes in a gym is pretty low impact. It’s only when you start to move into really hard crimps or slopers where you’ll hurt yourself. I was a climber bum for years and have climbed crazy stuff around the world and never hurt myself to where I couldn’t type. A lot of bloody tape, but still able to type.

Try top rope climbing! Bouldering is injury prone because every fall is a ground fall. With top rope climbing you should never hit the ground so way less injury prone.

I love the intense concentration for martial arts, but I had to stop because of this.

I never had a serious injury. Instead it would be minor injuries, that would make my ring finger 20% less responsive, that would totally mess up my typing cadence.

I tried capoeira, a non-contact martial art, for a while. This wasn’t as good for me as Taekwondo.

I'm building CommitKit, a tool that turns your git history into résumé bullet points and STAR-based talking points for interviews.

After being downsized twice in two years from senior engineering roles, I realized how painful it is to reconstruct what you actually accomplished at a job once you’ve lost access to your repos.

Each time, I had to dig through memory and scraps of old PRs to remember what I’d built. The first time, I lost GitHub access immediately after the layoff notice. This time, at least we got 90 days of paid transition work. But even with just 5 months in the role, I’d already made hundreds of commits. For engineers who’ve been around for years, that’s an impossible amount of history to summarize manually.

So I’m building CommitKit, a command-line tool that scans your repo for your commits, groups them by feature or theme using embeddings, and generates professional CV bullet points or behavioral interview summaries. It runs locally using Ollama, so your commit messages and diffs never leave your machine. The goal is to help people quickly turn real engineering work into clear narratives of impact, especially when time or access is limited.

It’s still early: the clustering isn’t grouping commits quite as I’d hoped, possibly due to sparse commit messages or embedding quirks. But it’s been a great learning project: my first CLI tool, my first deployment on Render, and my first serious use of Ollama for local LLM inference.

Nice! When I was leaving a company after 4 years there, I went through jira + my git commits to write a log of everything I'd done. Really great look back.

Yeah I really want to add a JIRA integration as well, that would likely improve the output a lot.

Great to hear Render worked for you!

I’m terrible at maintaining my resume/cv so I think this is awesome!

Me too! Such a chore!

A 68030 based computer - https://github.com/jeffsponaugle/roscoe

It has been a super fun experience so far - I'm using CPLDs instead of an FPGA which makes the logic a bit more era period. I have a working system now with the math coprocessor, SRAM, DRAM, and other device support.

I am just about ready to get the VGA card I designed produced so I can work on debugging the design.

While this is fundamentally a system that ss less powerful than my apple watch, it is just fun to work on. Going back to very first principles debugging, building tools, and of course getting to exercise an old logic analyzer!

The software engineer in me wanted a break, but the philosopher and systems thinker wanted to speak.

So I've been building something with no imported libraries or dependencies: a card game that gamifies Maslow's hierarchy of needs: https://gamefound.com/en/projects/nicomar/actualize-this

Each player drafts cards that represent ways you can spend your limited time on earth to gather resources (wisdom, gold, and virtue) to complete your own personal player board (your hierarchy of needs) with the goal of reaching self-actualization before other players. However, you can still win without becoming self-actualized, if you complete more hidden quests (which can only be discarded by the "therapy session" card).

I have to say, i love this. The name is fantastic and the whole concept. It's got a very Game of Life or Monopoly feel where you've just taken the fundamentals of something in society and turned it into a game instead of adding an additional story on top. I really like it.

My one comment would be, I think you need to change the branding a little bit. It's a bit too close to Magic the Gathering, and this feels like its own IP and can stand on its own legs. So I think you need to just adjust the cards enough so they don't instantly read as a Magic the Gathering card.

It looks really cool! I subscribed to the gamefound website specifically to follow this. Hope you have a great time building! :)

Building https://floxtop.com/, a Mac app that organizes your files and images.

It looks inside each file to see what it’s about, then moves it to the right folder with a single click. Everything happens on your Mac, so nothing leaves your computer. No clouds, no servers.

It already works with images, Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) PDFs, ePubs, text, Markdown, and many other file types (30+) in English. Next I’m adding multi-language support.

If you have messy folders anywhere on your Mac, Floxtop can help.

Try it for free - requires macOS 14+ with Apple Silicon: https://github.com/taranntell/fallinorg/releases/download/1....

Looks very useful.

Just for clarity, it looks like image content itself isn't addressed, but rather just any text that might be in an image, correct?

Also: "Your sensitive data never leaves your Mac." Does anything leave the mac? Any metrics? I don't want this to have network capabilities at all.

Correct — right now Floxtop classifies images based on text only. It does not yet classify based on visual objects. If automatic object-based sorting (e.g. detecting pets, buildings, etc.) would be useful for you, I’d be interested to hear your use case.

Regarding privacy: everything runs locally on your Mac. No files or metadata are uploaded anywhere. The only network request is from Sparkle to check for updates. If you prefer, you can disable update checks and Floxtop will have zero network activity.

If you have questions or want to share feedback, you can reach me anytime at floxtop@proton.me.

Fantastic, thank you.

This is already useful. If you do wind up adding image classification, first, I'd like it distinguish photos, screenshots, and graphics. Then, I'd like broad categories, like people, places, animals, memes, etc. Base case is I want sort out my downloads since I generally download something and then not bother putting it where it belongs or deleting it.

It would also be handy if, in addition to moving the items, it could tag them via Finder tags/xattrs.

This is cool! I’ve added these to the backlog—I also think tagging with Finder tags/xattrs is a great feature. Thanks a lot for sharing your ideas!

If you want to stay updated when these features are ready, feel free to subscribe to the newsletter.

It's cool to see this. I once saw an X thread on this and hacked a dirty tool for it: https://x.com/priyankc/status/1893112673434222985

You know what would be a godsend would be marrying this app up with the Johnny Decimal filing system

btw I think your profile lists a different url for the same product

Started work on a project to put local history on a map. If I go somewhere I would ideally want to just open this webapp and immediately get presented with cool or interesting history that happened close by.

Maybe it's a story about named local fishermen from the early 1900s, with pictures, the history of a statue and videos of the process, or the state of a graffiti wall over time.

Currently in a phase of UI development and testing, and historical societies outreach for collaboration. It might stall and just fizzle into nothing, or it might be something cool.

Also still doing https://wheretodrink.beer, but haven't added anything of note since playing on this other project.

Ever since I discovered Gypspy nearly a decade ago (now Guidealong https://guidealong.com/) - I've been dreaming of an open source app that'd pull local history from sources like Wikipedia, those roadside historical signs, etc., and narrate as you drive.

https://autio.com/ is similar - but obviously not open source, and more limited.

It seems like it could even tailor itself to what an individual user is interested in, and with AI - could turn more "dry" encyclopedia-type information into more compelling narratives. With some kind of route planning software, you could even pre-plan your trips ahead of time and select the things you're interested in.

Obviously not what you're building, but something related that's been clunking around in the back of my head for a while.

Yeah, that's cool. Currently tangential, but conceptually not something that would be completely out of scope in the end. I'm planning to use machine translations, text-to-speech, and multi modal generative models for accessibility already. There's also an idea for baking in GPS audio tours. Obviously depends on sourcing some quality content first

When you say open source is it so you could self host it, use your "own" models, and curate your own datasets? or some other reasons? I could see a future where a lot of the project could potentially be open sourced and work with any defined geojson API.

Open source was the wrong term (though that would be fine).

I meant community-sourced. Some kind of community where local "experts" or history enthusiasts could contribute info.

AKA - invite a local or regional historical society to contribute data for their region, with the benefit that they could then easily generate a regional tour map/route/recommendation.

Aha.. yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think that's probably the best way to catch the more niche and special interest history.

Unfortunately only web based: https://www.hmdb.org

Built something similar almost a year ago during the holidays [1]. Open-source if you want to check it out [2]. I use the mobile app version from time to time when I'm going on walking adventures around the city.

[1] https://smartmap.ai [2] https://github.com/space0blaster/smartmap

Related to wheretodrink.beer, I just launched a rough version of: https://www.nomnominees.com/. A site focused on finding award-winning breweries/restaurants to check out.

Raptor - a new (Free software) way to build things like:

* Disk images

* Liveboot isos

* Container images (docker/podman)

Many build products are supported, with more on the way:

https://chrivers.github.io/raptor/builders/index.html#compat...

It uses a syntax that is inspired by Docker, but significantly enhanced.

Take a look at:

* The project: https://github.com/chrivers/raptor/

* The book: https://chrivers.github.io/raptor/

I recreated a little tool to simultaneously mount all the commits in a git repository as directories at the same time (but re-use the same inodes for the same content).

The code is at https://github.com/matthiasgoergens/git-snap-fs

The original was in Python and actually had a decent excuse for existing for a very specific problem at work a few years ago. The new version is in Rust and exists just for fun.

This was also a small experiment in coding with OpenAI's codex. I wrote the Python original by hand---like a caveman. Codex was mostly ok at the actual code, especially once I told it to make `cargo clippy` happy, but it needed lots of help with the design. It kept insisting on extra complications and state.

But perhaps I'm a bit unfair here, because I only figured out the nice and simple design after reflecting on the connection between Linux's fuse and git's design for a while when writing the original. So it's only fair that the computer would also need some help to see how to match them up nicely.

Could you expand on what problem the tool was originally built to solve?

We had a bunch of quants who were writing Python and Matlab code.

Previously they just saved it in a (Windows) Shared Folder and it automatically showed up in the test cluster. No version control, no nothing.

The test cluster had actually grown to a few thousand machines or so. Running Shared Folders over that was crazy, and no version control was crazy, too.

In addition, they expected to be able to write output files next to the source files, and expected them to show up to be used by the other machines.

We were trying to help them migrate to something saner. We could convince them to not intermix source code and output files, but as part of that bargain otherwise they wanted everything to look as similar as possible to before, but still support some git-goodness we have promised.

To make matters worse, they had checked in some rather large files into their repository. Like Gigabytes, and lots of them.

As before, we wanted to support running multiple processes at the same time, but this time on different versions. As a joke I suggested to 'just mount' the git repository directly (that we constantly pull to every computer in the cluster), but my boss thought it was a grand idea, thus the tool.

An additional nicety: under the hood 'git stash' consists of two phases, the first phase make something like a commit from what you have lying around in your repo, the second phase cleans up what you have lying around. If you use libgit2 (or a similar library) you can use just the first phase to get something like a commit, and send that to the server to execute, while changing nothing on the quant's machine, and not forcing them to explicitly make a commit nor polluting their git history.

One saner alternative would have been to just make a checkout for each run. But naively that would have taken more storage space than we had, thanks to those big files. Alternatively, we could have done some sharing for running the same version. But that would have involved some reference counting etc and cleaning up.

So my suggestion was to 'just let the kernel caches handle it'.

In the end, the prototype was useful to get the quants to get along with what we did. And luckily for our sanity, we could soon convince the quants to store those large files somewhere else, and not in the repository along with the code. That restored our sanity, and we could move to a more conventional scheme.

The working life of the tool was blessedly short, but it played an important role in getting the quants to move along in their journey to using version control. Though even though on paper it might have looked like an abortive and wasted effort, in terms of business value it was very successful.

I love the quants. They are very technical and very smart and effectively write software all day every day, but they don't see themselves as software engineers, and they aren't.

I recreated it just for fun, because I like the connection between git and how filesystems work. You can really tell that Linus Torvalds, the original author and designer of git is an operating systems guy.

Built a local-first Kanban board with Tauri (Rust + Svelte) after getting frustrated with SaaS tools and basic offline options. Stores data in JSON files you control, full keyboard-first UX, parent/child tasks, release management, and it's blazingly fast with localStorage + background sync. No telemetry, purely local. Curious what others prioritize in personal task tools. Seems like there's a gap between "todo.txt" simplicity and Jira complexity.

Cool. Love Tauri. So the whole board dataset is stored in localStorage? If you get to a point where the size limitations or synchronous blocking operations are an issue might consider using IndexedDB. There is a nice higher level wrapper around it called Dexie that has full TS typing support and a nice async API. https://dexie.org/

I’m still using redmine. It allows me to create a project, break it down in to tasks, assign time estimates for the tasks, assign % complete, log time against tasks, which then allows for burn down charts so I can see if I am on track or behind. With time logged against projects I can generate timesheets and invoices. It also has Gantt chart which is handy for initial project planning meetings.

I wanted to build something like that. It would be great if I didn’t have to. Any link to follow?

I’d love even a screenshot! Neat.

Working on a programming language for webapps!

https://www.firefly-lang.org/

Speed is not an optional feature on the web. The site above is written in Firefly, uses hydration, and scores 100% on PageSpeed Insights.

The language is largely complete, and we're now working on DX: Got a language server, a devserver, and some essential libraries.

This looks good! It feels a little bit similiar to ReScript. I like the idea to have nodeMain, browserMain and buildMain. The Roc language had something similiar with platforms and I love that idea!

In general I prefer a better language over an involved javascript framework that does not look like js anymore.

Thank you! Yeah, I think some of the newer frameworks really complicate dataflow. We're trying to keep dataflow clear, though it's a big design space given the distributed nature of webapps.

In any case, if you take it for a spin, I'd love some feedback.

After taking a break from frontend development from a large corporate client. I wanted to get into iOS development to see how mature SwiftUI has become and finally get a chance to build my first iOS app. The result of that: PeekCard - https://peekcard.app

A simple iOS app for scanning (almost any) barcode and storing in the app, or adding it to your home via a widget. No tracking, no subscriptions, just a simple free app that is pretty simple to use and does the one thing I want it to do.

Building my own software has been super refreshing compared to working within a large organization. I really enjoy the path of just developing and it is fun to get into something different than React/TypeScript and Java. It was also really interesting to go through the process of publishing the app in the Apple App Store. Heard so many bad stories, but it was OK. Definitely not great, but not as bad as I was expecting.

Two learnings from this so far:

1. I do not think that I would want to do any Swift development in a large organization. Super fun to build indie style, but I can't imagine having to support 5+ years of old iOS versions. 2. I ditched most social media a long time ago and if you do not have any personal promotion channel, you are super limited into reaching any potential users for your software. I still do not know how to deal with this; I do not have any ambition to go back into building a social following. I just like building the "thing", but just building it is definitely not enough to get any traction.

For the current project I am building another iOS app, a bit more complex, also something I want to use myself. I was considering building with React Native, but ditched that plan because when I am building for myself, there would (I think) be a lot of overhead in testing Android.

For now I really like what I am doing, but financially I think I should consider going back to Java/Scala or React dev for a corporate client :-|.

https://digital-storybooks.github.io/multilingual/#/testbook...

My friend had a cute baby boy and mentioned difficulty in finding children's storybooks in Spanish.

Challenge accepted:

I built an AI generated multilingual storybook, just to see if it would work.

Tap or click the little monster to have it read to you.

Local LLM generated the story, stable-diffusion generated the images, AI converted text to speech in two languages: English and Spanish ( could easily do many more languages ).

I "filled the app out" by adding a simple landing page placeholder, login page and "library" page.

    Not very phone friendly, was made for her iPad.

Only the second book currently has a story, the others are placeholder templates.

Cool. This concept is useful for adult language learners also. Depending on the language you are learning it can be very difficult to find reading material in the age 5 - 10 range to practice with.

Still very focused on making light healthier. 3 new products:

Bedtime Bulb v2[0]: A massive improvement over our original Bedtime Bulb, a light bulb meant for use in the evening to reduce blue light. The headline feature is the re-introduction of infrared, which was removed from lighting to make it more efficient, but emerging research suggest it's beneficial for health. After a long wait, this is shipping in 2 weeks!

Atmos Bedside Lamp[1]: A fully automated circadian lamp that automatically shifts in color and brightness throughout the day, helping you prepare for sleep and wake up more naturally. Working on some machine learning features that mimic the functionality of the Nest Learning Thermostat, but for lighting. The first units are shipping by Christmas.

Circadian Mode for Philips Hue[2]: A web app that gives your Philips Hue lights circadian powers, so that they gradually shift from bright light during the day to dim, low-blue light at night. It's way more powerful and easier to use than first- and third-party options from Hue, Apple, and Home Assistant. Just launched this week; looking for beta testers to give feedback!

[0] https://restfullighting.com/products/bedtime-bulb-v2-preorde...

[1] https://restfullighting.com/products/restful-atmos-preorder

[2] https://restfullighting.com/pages/circadian-mode-for-philips...

Over the years, I've read countless books. I started documenting one idea that shaped my thinking from each of these books. This idea may or may not be the core theme of the book.

Hope to document 100 ideas. Wish me luck.

https://www.jjude.com/100-ideas-from-books/

looks cool!

I was hitting Claude Code's rate limit pretty often while paying for their max subscription. Started thinking – I've got a decent GPU sitting at home doing nothing most of the day.

So I'm building a distributed AI inference platform where you can run models on your own hardware and access it from anywhere privately. Keep your data on infrastructure you control, but also leverage a credit system to tap into more powerful compute when you need it. Your idle GPU time can earn credits for accessing bigger models. The goal is making it dead simple to use your home hardware from wherever you're working.

It's for anyone who wants infrastructure optionality: developers who don't want vendor lock-in, businesses with compliance requirements, or just people who don't want their data sent to third parties.

Get notified when we launch: https://sporeintel.com

I don't want to get into blockchain-shenanigans but I did love the Folding@home model for democratized compute. Could spare cycles on GPUs at home be used for a P2P network of inferencing?

Yeah! not building a blockchain but we are building a system similar to folding at home (also a fan of that) where if you choose to have your node process others peoples requests you will get credits that you can then use to spend on other people nodes on the network. This is so you can still be able to use models that may be too big for your own hardware when you need them. Overall goal being to prevent people getting priced out of AI and providing and alternative way of accessing these larger models.

Couldn't you do that with Ollama + Tailscale? Minus some of the fancy bells and whistles?

Yea that would be the best current solution out there and would work ok for one person with one computer but the average person isn't going to set that up and it isn't easy to use from any device just by logging into a website or app. And if you had multiple machines you'd have to manually load balance by switching between them. Spore will allow you to easily set up as many nodes running models as you want and manage what models they are serving from anywhere, this allows for simple servicing of an organization or your family for example.

lol. I keep on hitting my usage limits but I haven't upgraded my Claude Code CLI... so I just continue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jmWnPfgtik

  [End] --- for the visuals, reflect on the lyrics... think about AI learning more about how its thinking interacts with manifolds...
  ⎿  Claude usage limit reached. Your limit will reset at 3pm.
     /upgrade to increase your usage limit.

Running OpenStreetMap off the grid (self-hosted to say the least) on a Raspberry Pi 500 (and to some extent a Pi Zero 2W) for Internet In a Box:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielkrol_openstreetmap-acti...

All of the street and satellite tiles are thanks to maps.black. The search uses Nominatim's sqlite3 mode. I was told that it's experimental only because it hasn't been tried in production yet, so I'm sort of testing it in the process. So far I'm only doing administrative boundaries and natural features, but so far so good! I'm going to slowly add a few more types of POIs, I just don't want the database file to get too big.

Note that Internet in a Box has an OSM offering already, but the data is five years old and the tech makes it harder to update. As of today, there are much easier options on the table, and we get cool stuff like 3d buildings. Also, the search was much more limited.

* https://internet-in-a-box.org/

* https://maps.black/

* https://nominatim.org/release-docs/latest/customize/SQLite/

When someone dies, you don't get even one extra second to access the documents and information they meant to share it with you.

Trying to fix this problem with Eternal Vault.

Link: https://eternalvault.app

Another thing thats in early alpha right now is CapKit, AI professional captions for short form videos

https://capkit.app

Eternal Vault is interesting. I would for sure use something like this. However, only if there is a strong story how the vault will survive 20+ years, even if your company is defunct. I do see the pieces scattered around the website (backup to Dropbox, etc), but this story needs to be front and center.

Hi Luke, thanks for the feedback. Will be working on improving the marketing site to share the story in better way, any other feedbacks are also appreciated. Lastly, would love for you to give the platform a try at https://dash.eternalvault.app/register

A few months ago, I saw a tweet from @awilkinson: “I just found out how much we pay for DocuSign and my jaw dropped. What's the best alternative?” Me being naive, I thought “how hard could would it actually be to build a free e-sign tool?”

Turns out not that hard.

In about a weekend, I built a UETA and ESIGN compliant tool. And it was free. And it cost me less than $50. Unlimited free e-sign. https://useinkless.com/

Just to play a bit of shark tank, why would I use your tool instead of Docuseal, which is FOSS and self host able?

Building the world’s first “Travel Confidence Engine.”

I’ve been obsessed with how people actually make travel decisions — not how platforms think they do. From a consumer’s standpoint, travel isn’t just “search → compare → book.” It’s emotional, contextual, and full of FOMO.

You open 20 tabs across Booking, Google Maps, Reddit, and Instagram trying to answer simple questions like: Is this the right area? Is this hotel actually good? Am I missing a better deal somewhere else?

Most existing tools either oversimplify (like ChatGPT giving three confident but unverifiable answers) or hide information behind algorithms and commissions (like OTAs). Both remove choice — and ironically, make people less confident.

I’m building SearchSpot, a “Cursor for travel.” It automatically does what power travelers already do manually — cross-check reviews, verify real photos, compare prices across platforms — and then shows its reasoning transparently so you understand why something was recommended or excluded.

The goal isn’t to replace your decisions, but to help you close your tabs with confidence. From FOMO to flow. From chaos to clarity.

If you’ve ever spent hours researching a trip just to end up more confused, I’d love your thoughts: https://searchspot.ai/home

Why does it need a login though? big friction to just see the result of search

yeah, but there's no way to reach out for feedback or follow ups if not logged in. At this stage, we want loads of feedbacks and help genuine users plan their trips well, hence the login wall.

Well, as a "genuine" user, you'll never get so far as to get feedback since I'm (and likely others too) not going to bother with a tool that I can't even test its authenticity, correctness or usefulness of over known good individual routes for information. So if you want feedback; lower the friction. If it's useful, people will make accounts. E.g. too save searches and whatnot.

I built this: https://github.com/dvcoolarun/web2pdf — a CLI tool for converting web pages to PDFs, recently open-sourced after adding several new features. (Might be useful!)

Not related to the thread, but if anyone is looking to hire a developer or knows of opportunities, I was recently let go and am actively searching. Any leads or feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Sample PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n7M1TKOptSsYiibrbvV_Yojx53T...

I'm working on Flavia, an ultra-low latency voice AI data analyst that can join your meetings. You can throw in data(csv's, postgres db's, bigquery, posthog analytics for now) and you just talk and ask questions. Using cerebras(2000 tokens per second) and very low latency sandboxes on the fly, you can get back charts/tables/analysis in under 1 second. (excluding time of the actual SQL query if you are doing bigquery).

She can also join your google meet or teams meetings, share her screen and then everyone in the meeting can ask questions and see live results. Currently being used by product managers and executives for mainly analytics and data science use cases.

We plan to open-source it soon if there is demand. Very fast voice+actions is the future imo

https://www.tryflavia.com/

This sounds amazing. A demo video would help me finish sign up - I can’t try it without hooking it up to real data, and I don’t want to for a test.

Great feedback thanks! We have added a synthetic e-commerce dataset as an example when you sign up so you can test it without your data first. Will also add a demo video ASAP.

What kind of plan do you have with Cerebras? It seems like something like that would need one of the $1500/month plans at least if there were more than a handful of customers.

They introduced pay as you go recently. The limits on that is similar to the plans, 1 million tokens per minute, so if you stack a few keys and do a simple load balancing with redis, can cover a decent amount of traffic with no upfront cost. Eventually we would have to go enterprise though yes!

ok.. when I tried to use pay-as-you-go it was unusable for me because there were a ton of 429s and 503s. one test it was just constant for a few seconds when I tried it, 429 or 503.

I am using it for a voice application though so retrying causes a delay for the user that they don't expect. especially if it stays unavailable for a few seconds.

Hey! I have a business inquiry for you but I don't see a contact anywhere on your website. Is there a place I can reach you? Thank you!

are you guys built on recall or did you guys build out the meeting joining functionality yourself?

I'm building a small rural ISP and web hosting service, as a way to learn about low-level networking stuff. I've got an ASN + IP space, and am working out the details with a colo, local fiber provider, and some upstreams. Right now I'm configuring the hardware itself (server, router, switch, etc) and learning all the bits and bobs (Proxmox, BGP, OPNsense, IXPs, etc)

All I can say is good luck. We spun up a co-op isp to take advantage of fiber grants for rural areas about a decade ago.

Maybe it was because of the grants, but it was a fucking nightmare getting off the ground even though we had nearly 90% of the population in three counties on board for the co-op. The red tape and regulations (in our state at least) made it clear that government runs for urban and suburban interests and actively undermines rural needs. I'm talking government in bed with large providers who had exclusive rights to run "high-speed" Internet to our towns and farms, even though they had never and were never planning on anything above dsl for most people and cable for the ones in town.

If I was more charismatic (and wasn't 1000% sure there were pictures of me doing drugs when I was in college), I would consider a run for state office, because it's a shit show for small towns here.

And that's the story of a) when we got sued by a large provider that I hope goes out of business and burns to the ground, and b) the last time I volunteered on a large project and why I will never take the lead on anything bigger than the Lion's Club pancake breakfast now.

Oof, thanks for sharing and the well wishes.

I'm funding this myself, and my current approach (hopefully!) avoids most of the red tape. I'm leasing fiber from a local ISP for the colo <-> my home connection, and once I have myself as a successful "customer" of my own ISP, I'll start doing the last mile build out, which is where I expect the red tape to begin.

But I haven't decided if I'll do fiber or wireless, and if I go wireless, I might be able to avoid pole agreements entirely by just working directly with my neighbors. The problem is that our area is pretty heavily wooded, so I'm not sure if I can place antennas high enough to cover a reasonable swatch of the area.

Our best approach was to run fiber in the ground in the public right-of-way on county or local streets and avoided the state highways. It was much easier to get easements with property owners and local towns than the state (as far as I know, our request is still sitting unread with the state). That meant we had to build twice, essentially. Once for the north of the major highway that bisects the area, and once for the south. But that cut out all of the nonsense with existing agreements from the state. So that helped.

Most property owners we had to cut across were willing to forego payment of any kind for free fiber hardware, and access at reduced rates for 10 years. So that was nice.

We didn't evaluate wireless, just because of the terrain, but I do know a local chap who is providing that for folks using grain bins for line-of-site access points. That's seemed to work well for his use case.

> If I was more charismatic (and wasn't 1000% sure there were pictures of me doing drugs when I was in college), I would consider a run for state office, because it's a shit show for small towns here.

Loads of politicians have come back from worse! Don't let that hold you back.

Best of luck with this. If you get the web hosting part going and need to stick a load balancer in front of web servers/front end proxies, may I suggest that you give my project[1] a go? Speaks BGP directly to your routers to advertise healthy services and scales from small VMs (for services that are only a few gigabits/s) to physical servers if you need to serve tens of gigabits/s traffic.

Shameless plug, sorry (not sorry!) but I would have killed for it when I worked in web hosting :-)

[1] https://github.com/davidcoles/vc5

I'm reviving a project I last touched in 2006, in the hopes that it might be of use today in making social networking human again.

Back in the day, after the company I worked for bought the Electric Minds community and migrated it to its own CommunityWare system, and then the company that bought our company decided to shut the platform down, I reimplemented the community platform in Java and helped rescue the community. See: https://erbosoft.com/blog/2025/09/08/electric-minds/

EMinds eventually sputtered out because of the rise of platforms like Facebook. Well, now we see what came of that. So I think there's room for a platform like the one I used to have. See: https://erbosoft.com/blog/2025/11/03/what-we-once-had-and-co...

The new system is being written in Go. I'm porting the code over without using AI, though I have used Claude to translate the old crusty HTML pages into modern HTML with Tailwind CSS. Once it gets to the functionality I had back in 2006, I'll put it up...and then see about going beyond that, including how to make it distributed and provide more interoperability.

Every time I talk acquaintances, friends and family members about finances I'm always shocked at how little people know about basic things like tax brackets, 401Ks, IRAs, ETFs, compounding interest, debt management and etc. So I decided to write a financial literacy/education book with a bit of humor and easily comprehensible language to distill some of these topics. I'm about 1 month into it and try to write a chapter a week.

Really good idea, perhaps you can include some simple guidelines for long term investment as well.

Looking forward for the publication of the book and buying it.

Do you have a sample to share?

Just some drafts in markdown but nothing I can share just yet. I'll be posting it here once I have the ebook done.

I've been working on a sillier project lately. Green teeth!

Lumina has made a probiotic strain that is able to, theoretically, prevent cavities. I don't care that much about, but I do think it is a neat strain that can likely colonize your mouth. I'm genetically engineering it to express sfGFP, which would theoretically make my teeth fluorescent green under black light. Would be fun at raves! Also, if I make out with anyone, you could theoretically see changes in microbiome composition just from green-ness. I do wonder how much microbiomes are shared while kissing: this would be an example of a way to directly measure that, instead of just measuring on proxy like much microbiome research

In future: Papa, why are humans' teeth green?

- Oh, son, let me tell you a story about how an ancient dude called koeng wanted to see how many people he kissed.

That sounds so cool. Could you tell me more?

Working on Strot - an AI agent that reverse-engineers website APIs for scraping.

Instead of DOM scraping, it intercepts AJAX calls and figures out which API endpoint gives you the data you need. Uses visual analysis + fuzzy matching to identify the right call.

The use case: scraping product reviews, paginated listing data (products), etc. Existing AI scrapers either didn't work or were very slow and costly. A product with 1000 reviews takes 10+ minutes with Playwright, costs $10 with LLM scrapers. With Strot? 10 seconds via direct API calls.

Being used in production by a couple of clients. Would love feedback!

Blog: https://blog.vertexcover.io/strot-is-a-api-scraper GitHub: https://github.com/vertexcover-io/strot

Very neat - I imagine you could even use this as a web scanner to identify security misconfigurations in API implementations (e.g. broken access control)

Since I got a baby and we’re still adjusting to their schedule, I’m still working on the same project, Librario[1]. Librario is a simple book metadata aggregation API written in Go. It fetches information about books from multiple sources, merges everything intelligently, and then saves it all to a PostgreSQL database for future lookups.

You can think of it as a data source, or a knowledgeable companion that can provide comprehensive book information for online booksellers, libraries, book-related startups, bookworms, and more.

I got a pre-alpha build running for those that want to test it out[2], but the code is still not out there, as there are a few things I want to refactor. Wrote comprehensive documentation for it this weekend, now I need to refactor the merger package with some new rules, and write something to decrease the number of genres returned.

Been tough to find time to work on it because of the baby, but AI has been helping a lot to speed things up, and the work has been quite fun. Not sure if there will be interest in the idea, but it solves a problem I have, so I had to work on it anyway.

Hope to have the code on GitHub by the end of this week. AGPL licensed.

[1]: https://github.com/pagina394/librario

[2]: https://paste.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/5612eaa80fc7eee8b6180a31...

I’m working on https://regularly.co/ - A website made for inquisitive minds to get their daily puzzle fix. Still very much a WIP (mainly working on tuning the difficulty of puzzles to make it enjoyable for most). That being said I really do enjoy the unique combination of puzzles when I do them each day. I’m looking for feedback so if you do take a look please do let me know your thoughts!

Incredible. Thank you for sharing this, I love puzzles and like setting aside some time in the morning to do them. This will enhance that habit so much! A whole slew of daily puzzles, I'll let you know how it goes!

I don't understand why I can't place two kings in "adjacent diagonal" position when they're in two different regions. Something like:

..k..

.k...

Rules state they must be in different regions, row and column. No mention of diagonal or adjacency.

Maybe it wasn't there when you played, but rule 6 states kings cannot attack each other; chess kings can move one square in any direction. Without this rule the puzzle isn't solvable by logic, only trial and error.

Ah this rule is mentioned under “Kings cannot attack each other” (in the chess sense, two Kings cannot be diagonal from one another). I’ve updated the rule to make this a little clearer

I agree, I had the same problem.

I'm making an HID translation dongle.

In programming mode, its a flash drive you can put LUA scripts on.

In run mode, you can select a lua script to run. Lua scripts can take HID input and produce HID output.

All open source, hardware and software: https://github.com/cedarhacks/ReMapper

It can do things like keyboard -> joystick mapping, key logging, macros, mouse wiggling etc etc

Hey cool! I've been wanting something like this for a while.

Would it be able to take multiple inputs?

There's plans for a future iteration to be able to (I want to decouple multiple keyboard inputs!).

However in the git repo and prototype, ATM it's 1 input 1 output.

https://stretchmytimeoff.com

An algorithm to optimise vacation days using public holidays and weekends. Especially relevant at this time of year.

I created it a year ago and received quite some comments on the Show HN post[1]. Last weekend I updated it to work for end of year planning and adding fixed days off, which seems to solve most of the feedback. It was done with Cursor in agent mode.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42118039

Hey HN! I'm building https://openfret.com/ - the all-in-one platform for guitarists that I wish existed when I started playing.

OpenFret combines everything a guitarist needs in one place: smart gear inventory management, AI-powered practice sessions, real-time collaboration tools, and a vibrant community. Think of it as "GitHub for guitarists" meets comprehensive practice tool.

Core features:

1) Smart Guitar Inventory: Track your collection with auto-filled specs from thousands of guitar models. Monitor woods, pickups, scale length, string changes, and discover patterns in your gear

2) AI Practice Sessions: Generate personalized guitar tabs and lessons based on your practice history, with VexFlow sheet music and integrated metronome

3) Session Mode: Fork and merge music tracks like code. Layer recordings, see version history, and collaborate with musicians worldwide

4) Practice Analytics: Persistent timers, song tracking (Last.fm integration), scale visualization, fretboard maps, and chord progressions

5) Built-in Tools: Guitar tuner with frequency control, Strudel integration for backing tracks, and musical helpers to break out of E minor habits

Looking for:

Feedback from guitarists/musicians on which features resonate most

Link: https://openfret.com/ | Discord: https://discord.gg/G3Pur3PzZm

Thank you!

I think AI guided practice sessions could lead to something incredible but like everything "AI" it actually takes a lot of hard work to make it really useful.

ABISan. Think of it like UBSan, but for assembly.

It's a custom assembler built on top of the LLVM assembler (llvm-mc) that emits instrumentation code to catch ABI violations at runtime. Stuff like clobbering nonvolatile registers, misaligning the stack pointer, misusing the redzone, assuming volatile registers don't change across a function call, etc.

Hoping to finish up basic x86_64 support within the next few days. I can now reliably assemble and run unoptimized gcc output without hitting false positives, but I still have to iron out some false positives triggered by OpenSSL's handwritten assembly routines.

TODO items for the near future include porting the runtime support library into a kernel module so I can instrument Linux, and beginning ports other architectures (ideally something semi-obscure like POWER or RISC-V). I also need to figure out how to support dynamic linking, because the tool currently needs static linking to access its thread-local variables.

https://github.com/kenballus/llvm-project/tree/abisan/llvm/t...

Currently working on two OSS projects:

Laketower: https://github.com/datalpia/laketower A lightweight data lakehouse exploration and management app (web+cli), using DuckDB as the default query engine. It can run locally or self hosted, and for now statically configured only. Hope to integrate Iceberg and Ducklake support by end of year.

Modelship: https://github.com/datalpia/modelship An ML model to app generator. For now, only ONNX models are supported as input, and only static website as target (onnx runtime web wasm/webgpu). I intend to also work more on it the following weeks/months, especially to support more model I/O types, and add support for more targets (REST API, CLI, etc).

These 2 projects were born from professional activity needs but are a nice playground to learn and try new things

DIY grid-tied residential solar+inverter+battery. Trying to design the solar arrays' tilt mechanism now for lifting/lowering 5 panels at a time in winter (60-degree winter angle, 35-degree spring/summer/fall; ~24" difference). Thinking either two linear actuators, or a single hydraulic jack connected to multiple support beams. The weight isn't much, but I want a way to lift entire top edge at once to prevent twisting. Linear actuators are slightly more money and easier to build, but require power and weather-proofing. Jack is cheaper, but more complex to distribute force. Wondering if there's other options. (winch would require more robust/taller rear posts, seems more complex, might shade rear array)

Tilting them vertical or nearly so is very useful if there could be any hail, that might be a good idea to support.

What about compressed air? It might not be too hard to find a small brushless low power air pump that could drive pistons directly.

You could mount the pump controller onto the back of the panels and use an accelerometer to measure angle, and run the pump until it's where you want it.

You'd probably need to do some testing and make sure it couldn't get jammed, then build up pressure, then suddenly unstick and move unsafely.

Nice, I started with 5 panels (450W each) and a simple design of interchangeable long and short rear legs to adjust the angle of each panel. Base of leg sits in a bracket on a steel frame, and pivots on an M8 bolt. Top of the leg attaches to some angled 'meccano' steel I affixed to the rear of the panels. It worked great, but I slightly over optimized by sharing legs, which made the twice a year switchover a bit tricky, since I could only manage to lift a single panel at a time.

Last year the 550W panels here dropped to 90eur, and so I just added some more panels to remove the need for the switchover. I saw last week 600W panels going for 80eur but no space left, but tempting. Good luck! It's a nice feeling to have energy independence.

"Projects With Everyday Dave" has done quite a few tests, and may be worth a look:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-Fz5T5c0OQ

Best of luck =3

Thanks! And I've seen Dave's tests. Since I don't need a fixed angle, do need to maximize production (due to a limited sun horizon), and only have 10 panels, the best option is adjusting angle during winter. The N-S orientation is a really poor performer. (Notice that his test is 30-degree tilt vs N-S; 60-degree tilt will provide 20-25% more power than 30-degree at my latitude, without even considering bifacials w/snow. The only thing that would produce more is an active tracker, but I've got other things to do, and a December deadline...)

I’m working on “Stripe Integration as a Library.” It seems that whenever someone uses Stripe, for example for subscriptions, they go through the same few steps: creating a database table, setting up webhooks, and implementing the events they care about. The challenge of course is that everyone uses a different stack.

I’m building this using our framework for stack-agnostic JS/TS libraries. On the database side, we currently support Drizzle and Kysely, with Prisma support coming soon.

https://fragno.dev/docs/our-fragments/stripe/quickstart

Inspired by the Stripe integration built for better-auth.

Ironically stripe began as "payment integration as a library"

Working on a charity + website (not live yet) that allows you to centrally manage your charity donations.

I'm in Germany so I'm working on a Germany-specific solution for now.

- you choose from a list of charities (right now I'm working with the list from the https://dzi.de plus a few such as Wikimedia Deutschland)

- you setup a recurring donation to our bank account

- we redistribute the money according to your split

- no spam in your email and snail mail

- one pdf at the end of the year for your tax returns

I'm not planning on taking any cut of the donations obviously, so this will be a fully self-funded project at first, but I'll reach-out to foundations once I'm up and running.

The URL will be https://super.giving/ (not setup yet, should be fairly soon).

I'm also planning on releasing the source code as open-source.

I'd be happy to hear your feedback, either here or via email :)

Are you experiencing the HN hug of death or is your website down? Either way I'm super interested in what you're building and I'd love to use it but I cannot reach your link at the moment. Good luck with the endeavor either way and thank you for building this.

Happy you're interested! I haven't set-up the website yet but feel free to reach-out via email (you'll find it in my hn profile)

I am working on Rad [0], a programming language built specifically for CLI scripts, so you don't need to write Bash, and it offers CLI-tailored features which make it a better choice than Python.

Lately I've mainly been working on stability and bug fixes. I've released some big features the past few months so I'm doing a big push on polish, before I again tackle some larger features that I'd like to implement.

If CLI scripts is something you're interested in at all, give it a go! We have docs and a guide [1] for getting started, feedback very welcome :)

[0] https://github.com/amterp/rad [1] https://amterp.github.io/rad/guide/getting-started/

Oh, until the URL part, I assumed you were the creator of Red [1]. I vaguely remembered reading about it a couple years ago, and thought "I don't remember it being positioned as for CLI scripts shrug".

Even seeing 'rad' in the URLs, at first I thought you'd misspelt them there :)

[1] https://www.red-lang.org/

I'm working on fighting IBM's patent trolls. IBM slapped the words 'AI Interpretability' on Gauss' 200 year old continued fractions and was awarded a patent.

Now they can charge rent if they encounter a continued fraction library in the wild.

It's bizarre

Have they actually tried to sue anyone for infringement? Kind of a moot point unless they do.

They haven't and that's the crux of it all: they can sue if they want or when they want.

> they can sue if they want or when they want

If you're assuming that nobody will look at the patent and invalidate it, why would you assume that they can't just sue you for literally any patent they own for no reason? If the court won't care about the fact that the patent is nonsense?

Interesting.

Do you have a link to the patent?

Here it is: https://patents.justia.com/patent/20230401438

On Google Patents: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20230401438A1/en

The authors simply implement a continued fraction library in Pytorch and call the backward() function on the resulting computation graph.

That is, they chain linear neural network layers and use the reciprocal (not RELU ) as the primary non-linearity.

The authors reinvent the wheel countless times:

1. They rename continued fractions and call them ‘ladders’. 2. They label basic division ‘The 1/z nonlinearity’. 3. Ultimately, they take the well-defined concept of Generalized Continued Fractions and call them CoFrNets and got a patent.

IBM's lawyers can strip out all the buzzword garbage if they feel litigious and sue anyone whose written a continued fraction library. Because, that's what the patent (without all the buzzwords) protects.

Thanks for that. That is patently absurd.

You sent me down a rabbit hole. In trying to track it down for myself I read a couple of others that I thought might be it, and was stunned by how obtuse these patents are.

What sort of leverage does this stuff provide? You mentioned "charge rent". What does that look like?

Honestly, I don't even know where to begin. It's insane IBM owns the patent to continued fractions.

If you wrote a continued fraction class in Pytorch and called backwards (or even differentiated the power series) then you're infringing on their copyright.

As a means to learn about both WebAssembly and Rust, I started writing a WebAssembly binary decoder (i.e. a parser for `.wasm` files) from scratch.

Recently it hit v2.0 spec conformance. 3.0 is next on the roadmap. (I'm executing it against the upstream spec test suite.)

My aim is probably not for it to become a highly-performant decoder for use in production environments, but rather one that can be used for educational purposes and/or debugging issues with existing modules. That's why I decided not to offer a streaming API, and why I'll be focusing on things like good errors, good code docs etc.

https://github.com/agis/wadec

P.S. I'm new to the language so any feedback is more than welcome.

I created a free collection of 4,300+ real website designs (screenshots, fonts, colors, live links)

https://fontofweb.com/u/fontofweb

I was tired of inspiration sites like Dribbble full of polished mockups that aren't practical. Or awwward like sites that don't represent the mundanity of most websites.

So, I spent a while building a tool that captures website design snippets. It's now a collection of 4,363 designs from 544 different domains.

For every design, it extracts:

The exact fonts used on the page (so far 561 unique font families I've found)

The precise color palette

A direct link to the live site

You can check out the full free collection here: https://fontofweb.com/u/fontofweb

Very cool, I will for sure be checking it out from time to time.

Bookmarked. Thanks for sharing!

About 2 years back I began working on a very simple markdown compiler, it was “immediate” in that it would consume markdown and immediately spit html. That project turned into a whole static site generator called Kevlar — https://github.com/aadv1k/kevlar

Entirely built from scratch in C without any dependencies. Now I wrote this code when I was 16, so many memory leaks and generally issues that I wanted to rectify and begin using third project for my own blog (currently old version is used — https://aadvikpandey.com)

The Kevlar v3 (https://github.com/aadv1k/kevlar/tree/kevlar-v3) here is all that it includes; more spec compliant markdown AST-based parsing; A better .ini config parser (right now it’s literally strtok on ‘=‘ and generally very hacky) as well as name spacing; more powerful templating tags like IF, FOR with lisp-like configuration

Of course staying true to the spirit of “from scratch” :)

Honestly I did scope creeped a little since I mainly wanted to fix a memory leaks issue in the markdown compiler lol; anyway I will share it once it gets completed on hacker news :)

> Entirely built from scratch in C without any dependencies. Now I wrote this code when I was 16

Very few young folk are learning C; I think it is commendable that you are.

You code doesn't seem very strongly structured (to be expected, TBH) but much better than any learner would see.

What resources did you use to start learning C? I ask because it looks to me that those resources covered "how to program in C" but not so much design and structure.

Here's two links (my own blog) to get you started on one or two common C patterns designed to minimise bugs:

https://www.lelanthran.com/chap9/content.html

https://www.lelanthran.com/chap13/content.html

Hey, thanks for your comment :) I had a look at your blog, it's looks really useful and high quality! I will go through it with vim open on the side and a nice coffee

Yeah and I'd agree with your point. One BIG critique I have for my own 2-year-past code was that I did not know how to do dynamic heap allocation very well, hence you may have seen everything is stack allocated lol

Particularly egrigeous example:

  typedef struct ListingItem {
    char lTitle[CONFIG_MAX_PATH_SIZE];
    char lDate[CONFIG_MAX_PATH_SIZE];
    char lContent[CONFIG_MAX_FILE_SIZE];
    char lPath[CONFIG_MAX_PATH_SIZE];
    int lOrder;
  }  ListingItem;

So with the V3 release, I am re-writing the markdown compiler for instance, and being a bit more mindful of the structure

Example: https://github.com/Aadv1k/kevlar/blob/markdown-compiler-rewr...

I think once I am done I will create a separate "Show HN" post to get valuable feedback (like this one!) from smarter folks than me. Once again, thanks for the fantastic blog :) will be sure to go through it

Cheers!

Plug-That-In [https://plugthat.in] (Mac App; Paid)

An annoying little laptop charging reminder utility that does the job.

---

There are times when I am deeply involved in a focus-work session, a meeting, OR watching some sort of engaging video content, and don't pay timely attention to the standard low battery notifications from my MacBook.

After the laptop shuts down suddenly, what follows is the most annoying walk to find the charger or the charging outlet. It's frustrating at times, sometimes embarrassing because you have to say, "Sorry, my battery died down" as you join back the session after 2-3 minutes.

Over the last 3-4 weekends, I have been building Plug-That-In, which has floating notifications. Essentially, a notification that follows my cursor movement, so I get a stronger nudge irrespective of what I am doing.

There are a few other critical features, such as Reminder Mode and Do-Not-Disturb Settings.

- Reminder Mode: On critical/lower battery levels, it will keep beeping like a car's seat belt alert for some time (configurable) when the battery is really low.

- Do-Not-Disturb settings: Configure what sort of alert/sound it will generate when I have system audio playing or video playing, or the camera is active.

It has addressed a personal need and has already proven useful a few times over the last weeks.

I recently have gotten into the "drag and drop" forms of programming like Node-RED and n8n.

Obviously, anyone here who has read my posts knows I know how to write code, but having a bunch of built in connectors that are agnostic to each other with the Oauth and the like being somewhat plug and play allows me to iterate on some ideas a lot quicker.

I installed an n8n instance on my server, and have become kind of addicted to making different Discord bots, and I'm having more fun with this than I thought I would. 95% of the stuff on there is basically drag and drop, and when I need more elaborate logic then I can easily drop into JavaScript. I am looking into writing new nodes for different services, and I keep having new ideas for different stuff I want to build.

Check out my project at https://www.MobiusClock.com: A 3D WebGL Clock on a Möbius Strip that shows 24hr time on a 12hr face. The hour indicator follows the edge of the strip, thus must make 2 turns to return to its starting point, giving you a 24 hour clock. The minute and second indicators move along the middle of the strip and thus return to their starting points in only one turn. Has the ability to rotate!

Just added a new feature: a 'Fast Mode' button to temporarily speed up the hands, which helps visualize how the slow-moving parts work, how the hour indicator moves along the edge. Would love feedback on the implementation.

If you happen to have an old or spare iPad or tablet, you can open my mobius clock page in a browser and set it on a shelf (plugged in of course). Kind of like a weird wall clock...

I am working on SecurityBot https://securitybot.dev a service that combines uptime, performance, SEO, and security monitoring. Among other things it inckudes PageSpeed Insights analysis, a broken link auditor (401, 404, 500, etc), and historical ping/uptime results.

I recently shipped an MCP server thst can delivered broken link results to Cursor so they can rapidly be resolved.

I love this - great work.

I’ve been working on ScratchTJ, a DIY digital turntable built with a Raspberry Pi and Arduino Nano. It’s based on the open-source SC1000 code, but with some hardware changes and tweaks to make it easier to build and customize.

It runs on a Raspberry Pi 2 with an AudioInjector sound card, a small LCD screen, a rotary encoder, and even an old hard-drive platter as the “deck.” The goal is to make a simple, open, and affordable way to experiment with scratching and mixing — no fancy gear required.

It’s still in progress, but it works pretty well and has been a fun way to explore DIY DJ tech and embedded audio.

Repo: https://github.com/no3z/ScratchTJ

I’m working on Shapiful, a cloud-based platform that makes designing and generating 3D-printable labels and custom objects fast, simple, and accessible to everyone. https://www.shapiful.com The idea is to remove the steep learning curve of traditional CAD tools while still giving you precise, print-ready models in minutes. With Shapiful, you can create personalized labels, signage, tags, stamps, LEGO-compatible pieces, or even board game tiles by customizing shapes, text, braille, or QR codes. You can also upload existing STL files and overlay text or graphics seamlessly, with live 3D previews, parametric scaling, and automatic surface detection to make placement easy. We support a variety of shapes, mounting styles, and text styles (embossed, debossed, engraved, or negative), all designed to produce durable, professional-quality models ready for printing. The platform is aimed at engineers, designers, educators, hobbyists, gardeners, and 3D printing enthusiasts who want fast, flexible, and fun customization without the complexity of traditional CAD software. Essentially, Shapiful turns 3D printing personalization from a technical chore into an intuitive creative process, whether you’re making home labels, company signage, accessible braille tags, or playful DIY projects.

Building https://typequicker.com

I’ve always wanted a typing application that’s both more than typing random words and is data-focused so I built this.

The more you type, the more the analytics system learns about your typing patterns and generates natural text to target those weakpoints (SmartPractice mode).

There’s a lot of variety as well; you can practice typing code in any programming language, or type text of various topics, use custom text, etc).

Porting my 2014 WebGL game (https://phoboslab.org/xibalba/) to the N64: https://x.com/phoboslab/status/1982883072292069641

How are you doing this? Do you have a blog going over the work or a Github page? Just curious, it's an interesting project.

The WebGL game was build with my 2D game engine "Impact", which I previously ported to C[1]. The game has a 3d view, but logic still mostly works in 2 dimensions on a flat ground. The N64 version "just" needed a different rendering and sound backend.

[1] https://phoboslab.org/log/2024/08/high_impact

So you're writing the game in C and targeting the N64? Utilizing your custom Impact game engine, which is also written in C?

Do you flash the game to a custom cartridge for testing?

[dead]

I am spending my free time doing a few projects to relax and "fix" a few things that should improve my productivity:

- An AI RSS feed summarizer (https://feeds.carmo.io)

- A PyObjC replacement for the bloated StreamDeck app (https://mastodon.social/@rcarmo/115498602604176483)

- A new keyboard, mostly to get back into SMD soldering (https://mastodon.social/@taoofmac/115521815709828495)

- A bunch of small MCP servers for other projects (https://mastodon.social/@taoofmac/115315732816298110)

- A case for a little server (https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/11/09/1930) that will eventually run at family's out in the countryside and manage a few ESP32 boards scattered around

I've built a self-hosted reddit-like community platform in Go: https://baklab.app

Users can create their own sub-communities, and within them, set up different categories and boards. Posts can be voted on, and board types can include regular posts, Q&A, or live chat. It's like a hybrid of Reddit and Discord but leans more towards a traditional web community. It also supports server-side rendering, making it SEO-friendly. This project is an extension of my previous Hacker News clone, dizkaz (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43885998).

In network code: most people just let the OS choose a default adapter. It works fine, but it makes it hard to write software that works across machines with either (1) multiple NICs (and/or networks they point to.) or (2) multiple external Internet IPs. Look at STUN, for example.

A STUN server that lets people test what type of NAT they have uses two IPs. For such a server you have to manually specify the addresses to bind on to make for sure its setup right. As it goes, writing network software to do simple things like "bind on all local addresses", "bind publicly", "bind on all", is harder than it sounds. There are edge cases on different OSes and address families, so manually managing IPs is hard to do.

My network software lets devs easily manage NICs and routes they support without guessing about addressing. Additionally, I've written a bunch of software with the library already to do things like NAT traversal. So its really my own redesign of how to do networking on the Internet. Designed to hide a lot of the messiness. I'm still improving code quality so it's not ready yet. But I've been dog fooding with a lot of software written in it and smashing bugs every day.

Project page: https://github.com/robertsdotpm/p2pd Built this recently with it: http://ovh1.p2pd.net:8000/servers (server monitor for public STUN, TURN, MQTT, and NTP servers. Only checks every 4 hours to avoid spamming them though.)

Pretty much finished my photo gallery app for Windows -- https://github.com/Bloomca/Piktosaur. It is a pretty standard gallery viewer, the main feature is that you can point it at any folder and it will recursively search nested folders for extra images, e.g. an external hard drive.

Really happy with it as I wanted exactly that for myself.

---

The next idea I am going to work on is the audio player. I already wrote a Rust library to read TOC + raw track data from audio CDs (https://github.com/Bloomca/rust-cd-da-reader) and a CLI tool to do so + convert to FLAC and embed metadata from MusicBrainz (https://github.com/Bloomca/audio-cd-ripper).

I've been researching this topic and while my background is related to digital signal processing, I think I will use a library, there seem to be too many edge cases to work with WASAPI and such directly.

I just launched a 10-Bit Video Thumbnail Provider for Windows.

Windows does not natively support rendering thumbnails for 10-bit videos, which are commonly produced by cameras like the Sony A7IV.

When I started working on a short film the video clips were piling up on my hard drive. Opening them one by one to find what I was looking for was tedious.

I could not find a reputable solution to this problem, so I started a company and built one. I went through the process of EV Certification to have the installer and executable code signed.

I hope to be in the Microsoft Store soon.

I'm also building other utilities with similar purpose.

https://ruptureware.com/thumbprovider

I'm building a Jellyfin client focused on music using Rust + GTK:

https://github.com/Fingel/gelly

I've been enjoying rebuilding my music collection from both old hard drives and ripping old CDs. Jellyfin is great but I wanted a native application focused on music, not video. Thus Gelly. It's been really fun to work on.

I am working on my own Lisp-like language (cliche, I know). Goal is a hybrid. Syntax is a bit more Clojure inspired, but want to emulate the interactivity of SBCL once I am done.

And the other goal is minimal dependencies. The only bootstrapping stage is a very very small core in Common Lisp + FSet but could also be replaced with other languages, and then using that subset to bootstrap the rest.

There is absolutely zero claim to be highly performant, it is more of an educational experience.

All of it is done via literate programming in org-mode. So far it's working pretty well, but will have to see how that approach works if the project grows.

OOI how does the org-mode dev work? Are you tangling and then compiling in a hot-reload loop?

So far it works pretty good. Minor edits I just quickly edit and tangle, otherwise I open the source block in a buffer (C-c '), and from there I can just use the usual C-c C-c shortcut to send it to the REPL.

But as the first stage bootstrap in CL is mostly done at this point, I have to hot-reload anyway.

At some point it might be nice to have my own REPL running in Emacs, but that is a worry for way later when I actually get something usable. For now this is purely for personal entertainment.

I'm working on a K8S hosting solution that just gives the user a simple Kubernetes cluster. I (or we) handle the compute, (networked) storage and ingress hosting for you, and the cluster provision time should be within minutes.

You just need to pay for a fixed monthly upfront cost rather than PAYG, giving small developers a good save of their money.

In other words, this is similar to self hosting with K0S/K3S/OpenShift, except you don't have to own servers to begin with, in other words, it is a little similar to serverless K8S.

Well, all you those you can actually do with a VPS today, heck why do I have to do it if EKS/GKE/LKE/OKE/DOKS exists? That's because it takes a lot of time to properly setup VPC/EBS/S3/EC2, you need to pay an insane amount of premium and overheads to those while an ordinary user just don't want to hassle too much.

I want to undercut the big clouds by saving people's money and time. I have had enough of seeing a ludicrous EKS billing. I just want K8S to be the control panel of everything.

Deploy, run and scale later, simple as that

This resonates with my experience as a small startup dev. I wouldn't mind bringing my own servers for running my apps but for k8s I need at least 3 control nodes in each cluster and I need multiple clusters to cover different parts of the world. All those control planes are idling most of the time but cost money and effort to keep them alive. I'm sure those could be shared among dozens of users. Is this something you are going to support? Or I'll also have to rent the worker nodes from you?

You rent the compute, storage and network from the worker clusters at a fixed monthly price as one budget package, just like how you buy VPSes back in the days (think EC2 Lightsail or Linode, except now you just have a K8S context). You can choose multiple geolocations, but I'm still looking for a successful lab simulation first.

Right now I'm hosting my own test cluster under my bed so I can't show it.

You don't have to manage CNI, CSI, Linux kernel, etcd. You just need Kubernetes app development knowledge and that's basically it.

Now I'm still thinking about how to get live migration and failover working, so it is going to take a painful while...Kata Container doesn't support it out of the box but Cloud Hypervisor does

Link? :)

No link yet as I'm still just a solo dev, the (hobbish?) project is crawling very slowly, but I have the general architecture in mind. I need to get the frontend first.

I tried to submit it as a startup project last year but the feedback isn't great, I want to have something polished first before making it public

I'm resurrecting peer-to-peer Matrix (https://arewep2pyet.com) thanks to the Dutch government, who started funding it in October.

The main question is which P2P overlay network to use, if any: the prior incarnation used Pinecone (a variant of Yggdrasil), whereas this time we're pondering keeping it simpler and more scalable and using Matrix itself as the backbone to connect together smallish local P2P meshes - so by default you try to route via Matrix, but failing that you look on your LAN or BLE to see if you can talk directly to whoever you're addressing. Time will tell if this works :)

If you are open to suggestions, libp2p has a good amount of sdks for several languages and you can integrate kademlia for peer discovery

We are open to suggestions :) And the very first generation of P2P Matrix was indeed built on libp2p (and Protocol Labs led Element's Series B). However, the thought experiment here is whether we can get away without a full global P2P overlay at all in the interests of keeping it simple & stupid. We might well end up back at libp2p tho!

Edit: another option on our todo list to look into more is Iroh (https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh)

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Currently working on getting back into a fitness routine. I got into this habit of hacking on side projects in my very little spare time but I have realized taking care of my body will pay off far more than any project

20 minutes a day is all it takes. Don't even think about it - just do it. After a couple of weeks you'll wonder how in the world you ever lived without exercise -- trust me on this one :)

All the best - the best project to work on! I recently tested a walking pad with a standing desk at my friends place - I was surprisingly productive being able to walk while using the computer. Will be investing in a standing desk and walking pad for my home office.

Today I'm hacking on automate-terminal, a command line program and Python library that abstracts the various terminal emulator automations (iTerm2, WezTerm, Kitty, tmux) into a single API. Mostly made for use by other tools. https://github.com/irskep/automate-terminal

sounds interesting. what was your first scenario when you thought, “Baam! I need to automate this, and I'm going to do it right now!” ?

Working on a binary that will instrument every Java service running on Linux host machine with OpenTelemetry Java Agent.

Kinda like this (https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-injector) but with support of having multiple service name for different services. This includes tomcat, normal systemd services and also services running inside docker containers.

EDIT: I am popping my cherry with this comment on HN. Been a lurker since past 2-3 years.

I've just released my beta of FURS.

FURS does for Forth, what headers do for C, namely provide all the embedded configuration information inside a Cortex-M MCU, for the up to 100 inbuilt peripherals.

Without this data, neither C nor Forth (or any other language) have any clue about how to use the peripherals.

FURS does this by intercepting the Forth user source as it's uploaded to the on-chip compiler and transforming it into language the MCU inherently understands.

The Forth user source code is not altered in any way.

I've used the Fossil DCVS for the entire FURS project so that all the flowcharts, pictures, code, user doc, trouble-ticket, wiki ... everything is contained in the ONE FILE, under 5MB.

This one file gives you a web server so all you need is a browser to easily view all the above from the main menu.

Howto: https://sourceforge.net/projects/mecrisp-stellaris-folkdoc/f...

I'm working on Pocketdata - a personal, private AI data plane.

The idea is to take boring components: PostgreSQL, Bifrost (LLM gateway), Open WebUI, LanceDB, Agentgateway (MCP and OpenAPI gateway) and deploy them in Fly.io. One Fly.io "org" per user. The closest equivalent is blaxel.ai, but it caters for AI SaaS startups, not individual customers.

The combination of the fact that Fly secrets are visible only from within the apps, distroless containers, and transparent data encryption for PostgreSQL assures that the service (Pocketdata) provider cannot access their data, only the infrastructure provider (Fly.io) theoretically can, but practically speaking, this gives an extremely high degree of privacy assurance.

The latest update on the project: https://engineeringideas.substack.com/p/tasklet-is-the-o1-mo...

Hey! Your project looks very similar, from a conceptual point of view, to what I'm doing with https://github.com/superegodev/superego. Would you like to have a chat about it? Email in my profile, if you're interested.

I've been wanting to learn more embedded type projects, and I've been snacking too often so I've been building a box that will only open on the weekends.

I got all the components, tested it on a breadboard, learned to solder and now I'm working on the 3d Print to enclose everything.

I actually just did a test run to see if my current 3d design would fit my PICO board, and it fit, but not that secure yet.

Im a developer but never worked this close to metal, so I've been so happy with how it's been going so far, making me real proud of myself.

Great project, hope you enjoy (not) using it!

Dog enrichment calendar - I have a lot of different types of treats, toys and activities that I'd like to do with my dog but I fell into routines and just gave him two or three toys and treats on repeat. So I'm building an app where I'd be able to configure an inventory of all the treats and toys I own and the app would remind me to use a new toy or treat every day, to minimize repetition. You'll also be reminded ahead of time for toys and treats that require preparation

I’m working a Garmin watch app to query all the rich data on the watch (health, physical, environmental, location sensors) from the watch + general AI assistant. Privacy focused using your own keys and Gemini. API calls direct from watch - no backend. https://untether.watch

https://RadioPuppy.com - Listen to 1000s of online live radio streams.

This is a pet project for myself. I love listening to online radio while at work, helps me focus. But I didn't really click with any of the current selection of web apps out there so decided to build one myself.

It uses the great API available at radio-browser.info for all the radio information.

Been using it as a way to learn how to market a website as well. Learning a lot.

I welcome any constructive feedback.

Very cool, will be using this.

Would suggest that you filter out any radio stations where the URL isn't working if possible.

For example I filtered down to "United Kingdom" and then "bass" - 3 of the 6 worked and would rather see ones that are active.

Also if possible to apply the country filter within the search bar, took me a second to realise I had to open the filter for country, select that, then go back to my search.

When clearing my search of "Bass" in the example above, it reset the search to default (didn't have my country filter) even though the filter was still applied when opening the filter section.

Super easy interface to use though, really well done.

Hey thanks so much for checking it out.

It is annoying when some of the stations don't work. I've done an initial try at filtering them out without much luck but will try again.

Good idea about the country filter.

Thanks for the feedback really appreciate it!

Fun!

Thanks glad you enjoyed it!

https://eidetica.dev

I've been building a Decentralized Database built on top of syncing CRDTs, and recently got it to a point I can demo. It's definitely in a "proof-of-concept" stage though, known security holes and all.

I've been focused on building out the featureset and keeping everything unstable instead of trying to finalize each piece as I build it. It's the opposite of how I normally build things but I think it's been working pretty well for this.

I've written about it a few times, most recently "Using CRDTs + Sync as a Database" - https://jackson.dev/post/crdts_as_database/

Really cool, thanks for sharing

I'm working on Solitairle – a Yukon solitaire game where every board is guaranteed solvable: https://solitairle.com

Why? Most solitaire apps frustrate players with impossible games or endless randomness. Solitairle is designed for people (like me) who want a satisfying win through skill, not luck. Every day brings a new, solvable challenge, complete with helpful tools (back button, dead-end warnings) to keep it fun and frustration-free.

I’m especially interested in feedback from people who:

Enjoy casual puzzle games but get discouraged by unwinnable setups,

Value clean, minimalist interfaces without ads,

Have ideas for daily challenges or fun player stats.

Would love your thoughts: What frustrates you most about digital solitaire? What would make you want to play daily?

https://linog.ph

LINOG.ph is a live earthquake tracker for the Philippines.

The Philippines deals with thousands of earthquakes a year. Whenever the government volcanology and seismology department detects earthquakes, they post it on their official website.

When a major earthquake happens, a huge number of people try to visit the site, causing downtime for up to an hour.

LINOG.ph caches earthquake data from the official government website and the U.S. Geological Survey site, and makes them highly available to the public.

I built this after seeing friends and family donating and providing support for affected families after a major earthquake in Cebu. This was my way of helping out.

Two super typhoons have hit the Philippines in the past two weeks, so I'm also considering adding in typhoon tracking.

Why doesn’t the government put Cloudflare or something in front of their site?

https://socratify.ai

Career Skills AI Coach. Sharpen how you think and speak by debating AI

We are clearly on the verge of the largest white-collar skills dislocation ever. Our goal at Socratify is to make skill building and reskilling for interviewing, onboarding, promotions, and career change as effective as possible with an AI coach and sparring partner.

I’m working on a quantum simulator written in C++ from scratch. I’m not using any external library, so I had to implement everything from the lazy eval structure to the eigen solvers and so on. It’s still very a WIP, but here’s the repo: https://github.com/braketware/hilbert-qusim

Any feedback is welcome!

Frustrated by the complexity and high overhead of most monitoring tools, I wrote Simon.

It’s a single binary, dependency-free monitor in Rust that does it all: metrics, Docker, alerts, and file browsing. While maintaining a minimal footprint for embedded systems and other constrained hardware.

https://github.com/alibahmanyar/simon

I've been working on Tech Talks Weekly which is a free weekly email for software engineers who want to keep up with new conference talks and podcasts without drowning in YouTube/RSS feeds.

https://techtalksweekly.io/

Every week I pull together all the new talk recordings from hundreds of conferences (Devoxx, KubeCon, PyCon, QCon, LeadDev, dotJS, and many more) as well as podcasts. I highlight a few must-watch ones with short summaries, then include a list of everything else uploaded that week.

It started as a personal project to fix my own messy YT subscriptions, and now 7,000+ people read it. I also publish fun extras like “Most Watched Talks of 2024” for Python, Java, Rust, etc.

If you watch engineering talks, you might find it useful. I’d love to know what you think!

There are many language-learning apps, but almost none that focus on improving conversational Hindi for kids.

Made this web app for my nephew, based in Singapore, after watching him struggle to find anyone to practice Hindi with outside of family calls (since most of his friends are Chinese). The idea is to have a 24x7 partner to speak with Hindi and make it fun. This can complement the formal Hindi classes that most kids of Indian diaspora parents take.

My nephew started using this and is enjoying it!

Link: https://www.hindispeakingtutor.in/

Looking to hear feedback from the community!

I have always wanted to learn Rust, but was too distracted to get started.

So, I started working with Claude on building a postgres database replication application. I'm learning Postgres internals as well as how brittle database replication and subscription can really be. Although this is for Seren, you can replicate between any PG databases. https://github.com/serenorg/postgres-seren-replicator

Big learning: Claude Sonnet with Rust is massively productive. I'm impressed, but code bloat is a thing.

I‘m working on Astroloot, think of a Diablo/PoE like ARPG but in space.

I‘ve just finished the final pinnacle boss of the endgame in the version released last weekend.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3498390/Astroloot

I'm working on boiling the ocean - we're building a new CRM to compete with some of the big players. I tried very hard to avoid doing this, but I've helped enough business owner friends set up CRMs to realize there's MUCH to be desired. My goal is to create a CRM that people rave about - something that is very rare. Pretty much everyone I help views CRMs as a necessary evil. Our bold challenge is - can we make a CRM that is delightful to use?

Of course we have to slap "AI" on it in this market, but we plan on adding AI features that are actually thoughtful and not just a glorified chatbot.

Sounds interesting! As someone who works in Revenue Operations the CRM space is ripe for disruption, especially around using CRM data to help sales teams explore the data.

I vibecoded a POC of what something I think would work (around the latter part around exploring the data). Need to complete it and start testing it.

Thanks! I totally agree. It starts with getting the basics right. I think this is where most CRMs get it wrong - getting users to correctly enter and maintain clean data is a challenge. We're trying to build smarter schemas for contacts, quotes, sales, etc. but we're also making a really intuitive UI for easily updating information. Further still, we're trying to automatically fill in data for the customer. Many fields can be automatically inferred based on the context of a deal.

Once we get this right, I think the next step is exactly what you said, building really good tools to explore the data. Making it easy for non-technical users to run machine learning on their data to make business decisions or see cool visualizations. We realize that so many of our customers want to know this stuff and have no way of getting at it! We've got a lot of ideas for both visualizing and analyzing the data. I think there's a ton of potential for cool things here. Heatmaps, spiderwebs, interactive charts, etc. Stuff that brings the data to life. One of the common asks from some of our early customers is a heatmap of the world to visualize their sales/reach and see changes over time. Visualizing progress per sales region, etc. I think sales especially has a lot of opportunities for better lead generation and qualification as well.

i'm currently unemployed but i have experience as a CSM and account manager for multiple companies (all have used Salesforce) if you ever want feedback or bounce ideas.

This would be awesome, we're in hardcore MVP build mode right now - when we get closer to launch I'll hit you up.

I'm a little delusional, but I think there's ground to steal back from Salesforce. Most folks I talk to hate how complicated Salesforce is (one even calls it Salesfarce). I've heard a story or two about smaller companies trying to adopt it and wasting a hundred thousand or two implementing Salesforce only to have it never get used. On top of that, you need to train your employees to use Salesforce effectively.

The key is simplicity, building a CRM that anyone can instantly understand just by looking at it. This is insanely hard but I think we'll pull it off. I'll show you more what I mean when I reach out. Thanks!

I'm working on Volt-Test, a performance testing engine I started building after repeatedly debugging concurrency and race-condition issues in Laravel/PHP applications.

The idea is to bring something like k6 to the PHP ecosystem:

A Go-based load-testing engine

A PHP SDK that lets developers write performance tests inside PHPUnit

Assertions for latency, error rates, and business logic

Can spin up local servers and run in CI/CD

Working on distributed mode to scale tests across multiple nodes

Currently building the cloud version so teams can run large tests without managing infrastructure

For Laravel developers, I also released a package that integrates Volt-Test directly into the framework:

https://github.com/volt-test/laravel-performance-testing

It supports automatic route discovery and makes it easy to write performance scenarios using familiar testing patterns.

Docs + examples: https://php.volt-test.com

If anyone here has experience building or running distributed load-testing systems, I’d appreciate any feedback or pointers.

Reverse image search to match dirty XTC tablets to lab reports https://pillscanner.app/

https://kauwenofspauwen.be/en Belgian food hygiene rating from official gov reports

Been working on documenting as much publicly-accessible stained glass as possible with https://stainedglassatlas.com/. No fancy tech (vanilla HTML/CSS/JS). Come document any local stained glass in your area!

I'm working on a JSON schema discovery tool, JSONoid[0]. JSONoid can discover many more features of JSON Schema than existing tools such as regular expression patterns, formats, and dependencies. I'm also working on integrating this with some past work I've done on using LLMs to augment JSON Schemas[1,2].

There are a number of use cases for such a tool. One is for helping data analysts who are handed a pile of JSON documents to be able to more quickly and effectively craft analytics pipelines for heterogeneous data where just inspecting a few documents isn't sufficient. Another is to help automate API specification generation and regression testing. Definitely interested in any feedback.

[0] https://github.com/dataunitylab/jsonoid-discovery/ [1] https://michael.mior.ca/blog/llms-for-schema-augmentation/ [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03286

https://www.saintbeluga.org/

I was a YC founder in 2006 and now work as a data scientist full-time, but on the side I also do Christian apologetics, helping fellow engineers/scientists/mathematicians seek answers to life's deepest questions.

Some cool articles for the HN crowd:

- [published several days ago] Medical miracles in Lourdes, France recognized by the Catholic Church 2018-2025: https://www.saintbeluga.org/our-lady-of-lourdes-immaculate-c...

- My interview of Evan O'Dorney, a three-time Putnam Fellow and two-time IMO gold medalist, who converted to Catholic Christianity: https://www.saintbeluga.org/veritas-part-i-conversion-of-a-p...

- In-depth scientific overview of Eucharistic miracles: https://www.saintbeluga.org/eucharistic-miracles-god-under-t...

- Conversion testimony by Harvard astronomy professor Karin Oberg: https://www.saintbeluga.org/veritas-part-ii-conversions-at-h...

If we collect DNA from eucharistic miracles can we clone Jesus?

I know you're being facetious, but DNA tests in the Tixtla case said the DNA was too degraded to analyze.

For the past 2 months I have been doing a heavy deep dive into image generation and image generation editing capabilities. This then had me discover that you can generate storyboards for short stories, and automate the creation of these as videos with video generation models. This is a topic that interests me heavily, and as such I am now building my own workflows around that. I am documenting the entire journey here:

https://edwin.genego.io/blog

https://edwin.genego.io/blog/lpa-studio

https://edwin.genego.io/blog/ai-branding

It's not something I am looking to commercialize, but I actually did drop out of film school (with semesters in creative storytelling) to pursue software 15 years ago. And I feel like this will open up a whole new way of visual storytelling as well as personal and product branding. I have gotten quite some emails about it, from interesting people in different industries, as some more strongly worded (not so nice) emails from someone in the VFX industry since I started. Its by far one of the most interesting tangents I have ever went on.

A low(er)-level agent runtime: https://github.com/smartcomputer-ai/agent-os/

AgentOS is a lisp-machine inspired runtime where agents can safely propose, simulate, and apply changes to their own code, policies, and workflows, all under governance, with full audit trails. Every external action produces a signed receipt. Every state change is replayable from an event log.

I've been working on two game development projects for the past couple of years.

One project is for building rhythm games in multiple game engines and multiple platforms. Currently, it works in Unity, Unreal, Godot, SDL (or any C++ game engine), and MonoGame (or any C# game engine), and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. I'm working on adding Love2d (or any Lua game engine) and Bevy (or any Rust game engine). I have a few local prototypes of it working in Unity and Godot, but nothing public yet. Still trying to figure out what kind of game I want to make with it.

https://github.com/neogeek/rhythm-game-utilities

The other is a general purpose game engine in C++ with SDL. It's far enough along that I'm building games in it, but it's more of an exploration into how games are made than a replacement for Unity or Godot. I suppose it could be eventually, but I'm trying to be realistic with what it can do. One thing I'm pretty happy with regarding this engine is that one of the demo repos will automatically build to WebGL and publish to itch.io when changes are pushed.

https://github.com/HandcrankEngine/HandcrankEngine

I’m building A2Fusion [1], a dual RP2350 expansion board for the Apple II to provide, storage, hdmi video and other functions in one card. The PoC is currently a big mess of wires. Waiting on JLCPCB for first prototype boards.

[1] https://m.facebook.com/groups/5251478676/permalink/101664026...

Assuming that you're in the US, what's been your experience with JLCPCB recently re:the tariff situation?

I'm getting ready to have a couple prototypes made soon and trying to decide between getting boards made at OSHPark and hand-stuffing/reflowing myself or having JLCPCB do all of it.

Timing seems to be about the same (but just in production now). But tariffs/taxes were 55% of merchandise cost. DHL is expensive too, $52 for 10 boards (shipping to Cali). I haven’t used OSHPark.

A Civil 3D plugin (Genabler) that will include all the network catalogs and collate the Civil 3D styles for civil engineers to use. There are some out-of-the-box catalogs and styles shipped with the default installation, but they are quite limited and fairly well hidden—which is not surprising, given that Civil 3D is a huge beast. As a result, they are not commonly used.

When people think about Civil 3D, they often assume it requires BIM modelers (in a sense, just glorified drafters) to create all the necessary catalogs and styles, and to assist with their use.

My Civil 3D plugin will:

1. Make standard, market-compliant catalogs and polished styles available to engineers at large. Think of it as the WordPress theme provider equivalent.

2. Make the entire process easy and painless through the plugin, with prominent buttons for quick access.

If the plugin is done well, there will be less need for BIM modelers, since for a fee, engineers could simply purchase catalogs and styles that are so easy to use they require no technical training.

As a side benefit, I also get to explore how LLMs can help me write code. It has been a while since I last updated my AI usage policy [0], and I look forward to revisiting it.

[0]: https://civilwhiz.com/my-ai-usage-policy/

I'm working on restoring (or really resto-modding) a 1980's Japanese arcade machine.

https://share.icloud.com/photos/00ajYWxKpZmYrh6KmlHOxW4tA

I was able to get the original 15khz CRT monitor up and running by recapping the board. I decided that the control panel was unsalvageable, and insufficient for what I wanted to do, which was make this cabinet compatible with most any game that would have run on a cab like this.

I decided to use RGB lit buttons, so I could change the color's depended on which game was loaded. I used an ESP-32s2 to emulate a keyboard, and accept serial messages from the host computer that changes the button colors.

I also incorporated a Stream Deck in the control panel for auxiliary functions. I was able to write a node application to run the stream deck (with the help of a library) since there is no OEM software for linux.

By far the most challenging part was getting a suitable signal to the CRT. The first thing I tried was using the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins through a VGA666 board, but this limited my colors to 16bit, which makes 3d games look pretty awful.

Next I tried using a downscaler. This got me 24 bit color, but resolution switching doesn't work with this method.

I'm trying an AMD system now. Apparently the linux driver lets you set custom resolutions, and output 15khz (and 25khz for that matter) right from the VGA port.

I plan on doing a writeup after I near completion.

I'm working on Argon Chess, a deterministic chess variant with some degree of cheat resistance (hard to describe to chess engines like Fairy Stockfish) and tons of variety. A week ago, I added a way to play friends online a week ago (a Discord Activity) and a simple Play a Dumb AI feature on its website. You can also print the cards for free for offline play. https://argonchess.com/

I am learning Godot engine, going through the list of 20 games in order to build up my experience https://20_games_challenge.gitlab.io/

I am almost done with flappy bird (2nd challenge)

Why? I love the old arcade and game boy games, and I want to recreate them to my liking. I also love mechanical systems and space rovers, and I want ro build worlds to explore and simulate these things

Thanks for the link to that 20 games challenge. Godot is fun and something I want to get back to eventually!

I'm working on 3 projects right now:

---

Backdoor: https://github.com/tanin47/backdoor

A self-hosted database querying and editing tool for you and your team. Modern and elegant UI. Supports Postgres and ClickHouse. It can be embedded into any JVM app or runs as a standalone.

---

Embeddable Java Web Framework: https://github.com/tanin47/embeddable-java-web-framework

A lightweight production-ready Java web framework that comes with batteries (e.g Svelte, Tailwind, Github Actions, browser testing).

It is packaged into a single fat jar with no external dependencies. The starting size is 350KB. This is great for embedding into your larger JVM app or runs a lightweight website.

---

PlayFast: https://github.com/tanin47/playfast

An opinionated production-ready PlayFramework that comes with batteries (e.g Svelte, Tailwind, Github Actions, browser testing).

Postbase

Open source, drop-in replacement and self-hosted alternative for Firebase

Using Node.js, Express.js, BetterAuth and PostgreSQL (JSONB)

https://github.com/umrashrf/postbase

https://bgpipe.org/

I'm working on a man in the middle proxy for BGP, which can fix and inspect routing sessions on the fly. Like a firewall for the BGP control plane.

Some time ago I was building a mitm proxy myself, then I found out about: https://www.mitmproxy.org/ Maybe you already had it in your radar

That's for HTTP/S and related, as parent said his is for BGP which is a completely different protocol

I've been studying wine and was a bit frustrated with the wine note taking apps around, so I've been building one. It allows to:

- Scan wine labels (it analyzes the label automatically)

- Add structured or unstructured tasting notes

- Create lists (shared or not) to keep wines organized

- View information about the regions/grapes

It's called Cork Club: https://corkclub.app/

https://gametorch.app/sprite-animator

Create video game sprites and animations via prompts.

Pretty excited because I've started to get high volume, repeat customers.

Ahhh this is exactly what I'm looking for! I don't see any pricing on any pages. Would love to know how much this costs (I don't know what 455 diamonds is worth) as there's a few sprites that I'd love to animate and use in my app.

Not a fan of signing up before seeing how much I'd have to pay. The examples look great though.

1 diamond = 1 cent

Prices are about to drop dramatically. Many of the models dropped >80% in price since initial launch. Any time I have a reduction in cost, I pass the savings directly on to users.

> The animations cost $0.32 ( 32) each.

Not sure if you just added this in or I overlooked it, but exactly the kind of transparency I love. Will give this a try.

--

EDIT - Did an image generation using the OpenAI 4o model, then ran through the lowest quality animation. This is awesome and first pass is very strong and usable (around 100 diamonds used).

I look forward to seeing prices drop more and the asset pack area fill up. Keep going man, really awesome stuff.

I've tried making game tiles and sprites with Craiyon, which works surprisingly well now. But I always struggle with consistent style, scale, colors. And if I want a border around buttons, it's better if I make it once and apply it myself in photoshop, because the AI will change it slightly every time I ask for a change to the sprite contents.

A RAG Boilerplate with Extensive Documentation

I open-sourced the RAG boilerplate I’ve been using for my own experiments with extensive docs on system design.

And I have bunch of LLM+RAG blogs I post frequently last 2 months : https://mburaksayici.com/blog

It's mostly for educational purposes, but why not make it bigger later on? Repo: https://github.com/mburaksayici/RAG-Boilerplate - Includes propositional + semantic and recursive overlap chunking, hybrid search on Qdrant (BM25 + dense), and optional LLM reranking. - Uses E5 embeddings as the default model for vector representations. - Has a query-enhancer agent built with CrewAI and a Celery-based ingestion flow for document processing. - Uses Redis (hot) + MongoDB (cold) for session handling and restoration. - Runs on FastAPI with a small Gradio UI to test retrieval and chat with the data. - Stack: FastAPI, Qdrant, Redis, MongoDB, Celery, CrewAI, Gradio, HuggingFace models, OpenAI. Blog : https://mburaksayici.com/blog/2025/11/13/a-rag-boilerplate.h...

For my work I've developed a web-based Monte Carlo simulator with a visual, node-based editor for building supply chain models. Last week, I started making it available for everyone.

You can have a look at https://simcarlo.com. The tool allows you to see the full spectrum of potential outcomes instead of just a single guess.

A kernel extension-less sshfs for macOS. I tried using FSKit and got halfway before I felt too constrained by the extension security model (must be app sandboxed, must be approved by the user in system settings). Now it’s just a standalone command line binary that doesn’t require any special permissions since it proxies NFS to SFTP. Everything “just works” and performance is reasonable

Interesting... the way I workaround'd non-macos-native-sshfs is by using docker and mounting a local folder, do you plan on publishing your tool?

Absolutely: https://github.com/jabedude/sshfs

I built a tool to generate a PDF for each row of a Google sheet. For example, you can generate 100 personalized PDFs (like certificates) for 100 students listed in a Google Sheet.

https://sheetstopdf.com/

Once you sign up and connect your Google sheet, it generates a template (using AI) based on your data, which you can edit in a Notion-like editor. You can then generate PDFs for your entire sheet or a for a range of rows.

Some use cases I'm seeing:

* Certificates for students or course completions

* Monthly invoices for all your clients (https://sheetstopdf.com/use-cases/business/invoices)

* Personalized reports with individual client data

* Event tickets or conference badges

* Contracts, offer letters, or any personalized documents

* Really anything where you have rows of data that need to become individual PDFs

Would love to hear what you think or if you have use cases I haven't thought of yet!

A modern day mail merge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_merge

I recently started a local chess club, and did a quick search for software to use to allow us to manage the club, but couldn't find anything open-source/free.

I wanted something that would allow us to record members, games, etc., and also allow us to be assigned a local club rating. Anyway, after doing some searching and only finding paid software, I decided to just build something. That lead to https://openchessclub.org

You can check it out on GitHub: https://github.com/OpenChessClub/openchessclub.

I plan on building a QR code generator that allows club members to check-in during meetings, which will then allow players to be matched, and some other features, although it is primarily aimed at smaller chess clubs, so don't know how far it'll go.

I’ve been working on MemoryPlugin (https://www.memoryplugin.com), a tool that adds long term memory across AI tools

Lately I’ve worked on a chat history based memory feature that can recall information from every conversation you’ve ever had with ChatGPT and Claude. It’s been particularly useful and also technically fun to implement. Speed has been very important as I do just in time summarisation and a multi stage RAG pipeline, and most LLMs have unacceptable performance. I ended up going with GPT-OSS on Groq due to its ultra low latency often completing full generations before Gemini or ChatGPT APIs return even the first token.

The ability to recall details from conversations going back years makes tasks where I want personalised plans or feedback like 10x more useful, at times I get the AI to ingest tens of thousands of tokens of context to help me better.

The Board: A feature board that vibe-codes the top voted feature into itself every night: https://theboard.stavros.io

very surprised I haven't seen this done before - cool idea!

Probably because security nightmare

I’ve created a small command-line tool that generates a hash-based, human-readable list of git repositories and data folders. Its purpose is to capture the exact state of all projects and files in a single plain-text file.

I built it because I work across multiple machines and often worry about which projects are on which computer or whether I’ve left any files in unique locations. Now I can diff the summaries between devices to see what’s out of sync, which repositories have uncommitted changes, and which folders have been modified.

I avoid using cloud sync services, and most of my files are already in git anyway. I find that having clear visibility is enough, I just need to know what to commit, push, pull, or sync manually.

I would be glad if it proves useful to someone besides me.

https://github.com/senotrusov/fstate

I am working on https://embedhub.com

I am building better dev tools for firmware and PCB developers.

For example, we have GitHub Action workflows that allow you to push builds to the connected EmbedHub project. Your EmbedHub project has fine grained release management - so for example only the git tagged releases will be shared with the customer, but the testing/QA team will get access to builds from regular commits on branches as well.

I am also building a physical device (called HAL) similar to the now discontinued EtcherPro[1] - which will connect to your EmbedHub account and have access to your releases. This will let you offload tasks like long term testing, mass flashing and provisioning of devices, and more.

[1] - https://www.balena.io/etcher-pro

A new ping pong paddle design.

My backhand is OK but my forehand sucks. Grip styles for standard handles usually end up favoring one side or the other. I'm making a handle shape that's easier to get the blade angle right on both sides. Hopefully a couple more iterations on the 3D printer and then I can have a functional prototype made.

Building https://www.hessra.net/, an authorization system based on the Biscuit token format (decentralized, signed, and attenuable). The goal is to push beyond JWTs and Zanzibar-style policy engines by giving every machine-to-machine request its own embedded, verifiable authorization logic in a small capability token. These tokens can be delegated, restricted, and verified locally with no extra network calls required after getting the token.

Early use case is replacing API keys with identity tokens that expire, delegate, and prove possession and then can be used for easy step up to fine-grained authorization. There's some pretty interesting authorization stuff you can do, like having multiple parties sign off before a token is valid or requiring a series of micro-services sign a token for it to be valid.

I made an LLM-assisted DnD character sheet tracker! It's up here:

https://www.csheet.net/

And the repo is here:

https://github.com/igor47/csheet

If you play DnD, I would love feedback! Feel free to leave it as GitHub issues or discussion.

If you don't play DnD, you might still find the repo interesting. It's hono on bun, I render jsx server side and client side is all htmx. I use vercel's ai toolkit for the LLM interactions, which are super fun and work really well. I think this is a great use for AI actually. I've structured the code so the same services can be called either by the user via forms and routes, or via LLM tool use, so for every action in the code you can do it via either LLM or "manually".

The LLM usage is fun and interesting. What model are you using, and how much customization are you doing to integrate with the app and maintain character?

I suggest adding an export function to make the characters more portable. Maybe export to PDF as well as JSON.

Using haiku 4.5 right now. I think I could get away with even smaller models. The prompt is here: https://github.com/igor47/csheet/blob/main/src/ai/prompts.ts and my tool use is here but it's really all through the code: https://github.com/igor47/csheet/blob/main/src/tools.ts

Amazing! I was planning on making a tool just like this, will take yours for a spin!

Thanks, let me know what you think!

I'm working on a (hopefully) better version of Spelltable to play Magic: The Gathering with my friends: https://cardcast.gg.

I think I got all of the important bits in place, now just working on improving the quality of life experience and bug hunting.

A multiplayer falling sand game - kinda like Noita, but faster paced and online & couch co-op - which happens to run on both desktop and in the browser (including online multiplayer, powered by webrtc data channels).

I have a lot of devlogs at https://www.slowrush.dev/news though at this point I am quite behind showing off the latest graphical improvements there.

Here is some more up-to-date gameplay footage: https://bsky.app/profile/slow-rush.bsky.social/post/3m523ft2...

https://kastanj.ch/

It is a recipe app but better, and way more technically capable than anything out there. The goal is to make the best recipe app ever made. With bulletproof easy to follow recipes and smart features to make cooking simple. Everyone deserves good food at home, but good food is complicated and time consuming. An experienced cook can make good food quickly, cheaply and make it look easy. The idea is that Kastanj will have the knowledge you don’t so you can cook like a pro without having to spend years learning everything.

Backstory: I have a note where I write down practical problems I experience in life. I noticed over time that the amount of notes related to food and cooking was growing faster than anything else. I then began searching for a solution. I tried over 50 recipe apps, always the premium version if possible. There are some good apps out there but even the best ones only solved something like 50% of my issues. After enough frustration and search I just decided to start working on my own app. That was 4 years ago... It turns out that solving some of these problems where technically complicated to do, so now I understand why no other app could solve my problems. None the less, after 4 years of work, starting over from scratch 5 times, I have now landed on a solution that technically solves all my problems.

Going forward: Now I am working on filling the app with data and make it easy to use for normal humans. I am on purpose limiting myself to only perfecting the core functionality of what a recipe should be. I intend to launch sometime in 2026. The UI will be small and limited at first, but it is perfect for my needs. Therefore I hope it will also be perfect for someone else. Over time I will enable more advanced functionality and build it out based on user feedback. I know the backend can support 100% of my needs, but I don’t want to make it bloated. Therefore the UI is on purpose focused on only the most important things and then we will build it out with time, together with the recipe creators and end users.

Live wallpaper for Android that shows your local weather radar (US only for now):

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.radarlove....

Just launched last month.

I have been working on implementing iCalendar/RFC5545 in Emacs Lisp. I recently submitted a large patch and hope it will be merged in the next couple of months:

https://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2025-11/msg0...

This will add an iCalendar library to GNU Emacs, allowing packages in core and third-party packages to work with the format. More on the decisions I made and what I learned here:

https://recursewithless.net/emacs/index.html

I’m building an AI-powered fashion search engine that helps people find clothes that actually match their style, fit and price across 1000s of brands and millions of products

Most shoppers spend hours to find the rights product. We’re fixing that with intent-based search that understands descriptions, images and personal preferences.

We’ve hit 25K+ searches in 4 months, growing 50% MoM, and built our own scraping system that makes product data collection 100× cheaper than existing tools.

Still early, but live. Would love feedback on search quality and result relevance.

PS! There are some products out of stock, this is expected, fixing it right now.

https://justsayless.com/

Really cool. Found myself a specific jacket that I have been looking for a long time and made the purchase. 25k+ searches in 4 months. Which markets you launched in or marketed so far? How you chose where to start?

pretty damn cool. tested it with some still frames from movies and pinterest boards and it found most of the things.

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Thanks! We’re adding millions of products and thousands of new brands over the next few weeks. We’re also exploring second-hand listings.

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We differentiate by focusing on intent, not keywords. The giants return results based on matching terms. We return results based on understanding what the shopper actually wants to do, backed by curated, high-quality data.

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Biggest challenges in search relevance are: - collecting and maintaining a large, clean, diverse product catalog (up to hundreds of millions of products) - actually understanding what users mean (not just what they type) - giving them ways to refine vague searches.

Skip any of these and even the fanciest ranking algorithms feel useless. Helping users bridge that gap is where relevance actually clicks.

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I've been working on an open-source containerized agent framework called Capsule Agents. Its built around 3 key ideas I've dealt with inside the agent ecosystem

1. Agents become far more capable when they have access to a CLI and can create or reuse scripts, instead of relying solely on MCP.

2. Multi-agent setups are often overvalued as “expert personas” but they’re incredibly effective for managing context, A2A is the future.

3. Agents are useful for more than just writing code. They should be easy for non-engineers to create and capable of providing value in many domains beyond software development.

If that sounds interesting take a look! https://github.com/brycewcole/capsule-agents

My friends and I have been hacking on http://dateit.com for a while. It's an event planning app (works best on iOS and android, but there is a web app) with lots of fun features:

  - Calendar sync
  - Photo upload
  - post/comment/reactions
  - Recurring events
  - SMS notifications
  - Greeting card maker
  (and a lot more)

It's grown into something much more than our original idea. Most of the features are free and we have a fair pricing model that doesn't nickel-and-dime you like many of the competing apps do. Would love your feedback!

I've been working on a factory sim game for some time now and I'm finally getting to a stage where I might be comfortable enough showing it off soon and maybe even try my luck with some sort of crowdfunding.

Where do I sign up ?

I duct-taped together a quick website[1], you can sign up for the mailing list or the discord if you're interested... Or just check up on the website in couple of weeks.

[1] https://keropunkgame.com/

The "follow KeroPunk" part renders a bit wonky on mobile (you have to scroll inside the pane) but ... I signed up. :D

If you uh... need any early testers, LMK.

Thanks :) I'll definitely be sending out an update soon... And yeah, I haven't really mobile optimized the site yet.

I'm building a Meetup.com alternative, of sorts - https://www.radius.to/

It's intended to be a sort of social network focused on IRL groups/communities and finding others with the same interests in the same area, and just building local communities in general.

It's currently still a part-time venture, but I'm planning a launch on HN soon to get input/gauge interest in the latest iteration. FWIW, I posted the initial version on HN just over a year ago and got a ton of amazing feedback, much of which I've incorporated over the last year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398

https://tryward.app

We’re building Ward, a security browser extension that uses Gemini Nano, an on-device LLM, to scan for phishing, scams, and other threats from the DOM.

Think of an antivirus for everyday web users, like young children, older adults, and less savvy individuals.

We recently participated in the Google Chrome Built-in AI Challenge 2025 and have submitted to the Chrome Web Store.

We’re looking to meet people who may know someone Ward is good for and would want to provide feedback. Alternatively, we’d love to chat with any IT Managers/Directors of Security/Google Apps Admins who would be interested in piloting us as an anti-phishing enterprise solution.

You can DM or hit me at fitzgeraldcedric(AT)gmail.com :)

You should probably make a version that is usable as an email filter plugin for mail servers

Ooh, good idea. It started as a question: "How do we make this thing the most private?" and the obvious answer was using offline local device LLMs (e.g. Prompt API/Gemini Nano).

Will poke around and see if there's interest here, thank you!

I built a website (https://hpyhn.xyz) for hacker news users for reasons:

1. hn comments are valuable, I've spent a lot of time going through hn comments. I think there are valuable comments buried in the threads with fewer points, so it's not enough to just read top3 threads.

2. Sometimes a good post is ignored due to a bad title, sometimes I still have no idea what the post's theme even after I read a few paragraphs.

3. I want to filter out some posts I'm not interested in, but I realized I need read some other posts it's not a simple yes/no problem, so I gave every post a interesting score based on my own preference

so I want a tool to save my time while not missing out too much on hn

I'm glad to hear feedback

I tried to register, and clicking on register button did nothing.

Thanks for feedback! It's working now.

Any questions we could chat on X @liqilin3

Working on a free alternative to Masterclass - compiled from YouTube clips!

Currently have two binge-able mini courses on How to Start a Startup (could be relevant to folks in here)

Here it is: https://opencademy.com/

I think this is pretty interesting, especially if you could remix courses... like if you had a bread baking playlist and a pizza making playlist. The pizza making course could include or use modules from the bread course as a requirement.

Similar with learning software development, you usually need basic modules like regex or databases before learning more complex skills.

That's a great idea, kinda like the Civilization game series' "tech tree" concept. Thanks for checking out the site :)

Recently launched my free app for gardeners to share plants with each other, Plantshare.

Now I'm working on a few changes to the app, most notable is moving any plants marked as 'for sale' out from the main section because it turns out people are more greedy than I anticipated and it's getting in the way of sharing the free stuff, cuttings etc.

There's also some demand for a web front end so I might work on that next. (currently only android and ios)

I had an initial boom of downloads in South Africa but lately most new downloads are in USA.

https://ps-prod.bloodys.cc/links/getplantshare/

I buy and operate e-commerce brands that sell on Amazon, and I'm working on handing as much of the operation of the business off to AI as possible. Doing this both for actual time savings for myself and also as my big-picture eval of new AI models + products as they come out.

I also started a Substack to document it - here's a recent post on using Gemini to screen inbound emails with prospective acquisition targets via a Google Apps Script that evaluates the listings in those emails daily: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/screening-inboun....

The Daily Baffle, a site with all sorts of daily puzzles including one clued daily by NYT-published constructors.

Can check it out at https://dailybaffle.com

I'm still working on growing the audience. App coming soon!

This is awesome, shared with a few people I know would like this.

Been working on https://usedigest.com

- It's a personalized newsletter for you

- All data aggregated from sources around the web

- News, weather, newsletters, social media posts, reddit, youtube, etc. all appear in your digest.

- Launching a mobile app as well now but this will be slightly different than the web app. It will use AI to automatically prepare your daily digest based on preferences/settings you give it during onboarding. Each day when you wake up you'll receive a notification of digest being ready, and it will contain all the content you care about for the day ahead (meetings, weather, health data, commute data, news, etc).

I still need to go back working on https://www.cinekids.info/ , a tool I made for myself to use before showing any movie to my 4 years old kiddo. It scrapes reviews from some parent friendly movie reviews websites and aggregates them.

I'm also automating more stuff around bookmarks management -> I used to manage an awesome list as a repository on GitHub for myself and over a couple of years there are relatively many stars on this repository. However I lost interest in maintaining this repo manually as I prefer to save my bookmarks on Shaarli. I'm coding a CLI tool to automate the work of syncing my shaarli links to my public "popular" (+500 stars) repo at https://github.com/SansGuidon/bookmarks

Myself and other users complain a lot about the "native" Plex -> Ombi watchlist integration being broken, I coded some sync tool to workaround the app malfunctions, by using Ombi, Plex and TMDB (The Movie Database) APIs and ensure Ombi is always up-to-date based on Plex watchlist. This works very well and allowed me to put a stop to the complains from my family members :-D

I'm also automating most of my email/linkedin interactions thanks to userscripts. And I keep automating more of the work I do around Cloudron, which is a very fun and stable platform to manage apps on VPS without the pains.

A webcam & microphone JS tester library that you can put in front of your WebRTC or MediaRecorder web app to diagnose any possible issues (the presence of getUserMedia, secure context, required devices, policies blocking device access, supported resolutions, etc.). It also primes your users’ OS/browser permissions before they get to the real app.

https://github.com/addpipe/webcam-tester

Live demo @ https://addpipe.com/webcam-tester/

Meta question:

Is there a cadence for these threads? I had in mind to "be prepared" to post in November's with what I'm working on, but I expected it to come around on the 15th (mid-month).

What I'm working on:

- skuilder - (skill builder) - https://github.com/patched-network/vue-skuilder - an AGPL framework / toolkit for SRS++ based interactive tutoring systems

- https://letterspractice.com - a low cost, hopefully high quality early literacy acquisition app, targeting ages 3-5.

- https://flutor.app - an app to learn the flute

(The proprietary apps are built with the toolkit).

I've struggled to pitch or articulate the vision here, but my latest pithy attempt is: scaling self-actualization by mechanizing the nested loops described by Anders Ericson's 'deliberate practice' - Inner loop: individual learners maximize their skill uptake velocity and performance peak by adhering to domain specific best practices - Outer loop: domain specific best practices get refined according to innovation or serendipitous discoveries from the inner loop (eg, someone is observed to beat out prior best practices)

As mentioned, I'm flat-foot posting here, so the pages aren't all prepped. https://flutor.app/dbg and https://letterspractice.com/dbg show some of the innards. Not linked, but I'm especially fond of https://letterspractice.com/dbg/juggling - the premise here that as child practices the letters, the letters exemplify the principles of effective practice in alliterative skill domains (juggling Js, batting Bs, flossing Fs (it's hard ok?))

I believe it is every other Sunday but I'm not 100% sure.

https://homefree.host

All-in-one router/nas/firewall/adblock/app server (each piece optional)

Declarative and reproduceable as it is built off of NixOS, but administered through a UI, so the user doesn't have to know this.

All state managed in a backup bundle, so it can be hosted at home or in the cloud.

Goal is to have a box you plug just like a wifi access point into your modem, follow a simple web-based installation flow, then you are running a personal cloud.

Website is self-hosted by HomeFree, but installation instructions are very out of date, which I'm working on right now. There are now installation ISOs that I will soon add a link to.

Manabi Reader: Japanese learning through reading

https://reader.manabi.io

I recently added FSRS (besides also having Anki integration). Now I'm working on replacing the need for reviewing flashcards by having reading activity automatically mark flashcards (current and future) as reviewed, so that you can get many of your reviews in just by reading native materials that interest you instead of sacrificing most of your study time to contextless flashcard grind.

I'm also working on a manga mode using a new manga OCR tech I have licensed out of academia that is ahead of state of the art alternatives.

This project now sustains my full-time focus.

This looks super cool. I love to see people working on language learning tech. I'm working on a language learning app too but it only really works well for indo-european languages. That said I would still love to collab or talk shop, my contact info is in my bio

Looks good. Hope you'll do an Android version sometime.

It's native SwiftUI and Swift so I want to avoid a rewrite. I am experimenting with porting my Swift code to web via WASM, now that SQLite WASM backed by IndexedDB is usable so I can reuse the data layer too. I'm also evaluating https://skip.tools for running my SwiftUI on Android.

Either of web or Android would be great. Looking forward to trying it once one of them becomes available.

After one of my cyber security research caught some attention in media, am now working on -

Open Source Vacuum Robot firmware

https://github.com/codetiger/VacuumTiger

Building https://github.com/openrundev/openrun, a platform for declarative deployment of web apps.

OpenRun runs as a web server, which does GitOps driven app deployments. You can currently deploy apps on a standalone machine, on top of Docker/Podman. Working on adding support for deploying on top of Kubernetes. On Kubernetes, OpenRun will replace your build jobs (Jenkins/Actions etc), CD (ArgoCD etc) and IDP (Backstage etc). The same declarative config which works on a standalone machine will work on Kubernetes, with no YAML to maintain.

A visual editor for creating video games on the browser and on Linux desktop: https://stickyfingies.github.io/g2ngine

I've done this with C++ in the past, but ran into substantial friction with the CMake toolchain, specifically w.r.t:

- cross-platform compilation with large dependencies (vcpkg ports)

- running multiple compiler chains in the same build step

That second point is necessary if, for example, there's some AOT asset processing work that uses a native tool, and you're building for web. Expressing that some targets should use the emscripten toolchain while others should use the native toolchain, and interleaving between them, was a mess. TBF, I haven't done that with cargo or build.rs yet and it may prove to be equally frustrating.

Other features:

- undo/redo using a stack of swappable states

- serialization to disk (native) and LocalStorage (web) with some integration tests in progress but I am not satisfied with the correctness of my implementation: I want to *guarantee* that all information is preserved round-trip, but I also want a Patek watch.

- OBJ, GLTF, GLB models are loaded as "blueprint scenes" which are distinct from the "world scene." I made this distinction at the type-level because "scenes" are groups of entities that use newtype IDs (`LightId(u64)`, `MeshId(u64)` etc.) as primary and foreign keys to refer to each other, and I wanted to make it impossible for an entity in scene A to hold an ID for an entity in scene B. Instantiating a blueprint requires creating new IDs for every object.

- W.I.P. Alpha rendering, depth sorting, overhauling the material system to support multiple shaders (tough) that may be compiled after the engine itself (even tougher, a lot of runtime dynamic state and schema validation stuff), physics, scripting - oh yeah!

- Scripting using JS on both web (runs in browser itself) and desktop (uses a packaged JS runtime `Boa`) but Boa doesn't perform well on desktop in debug mode so I'm exploring other options.

I'm getting back in to audio programming, starting off with Pd[1] and reading Miller Puckette's book[2]. I'm planning on writing some low-level C libraries afterwards, using The Audio Programming Book[3] as a guide

[1] https://puredata.info

[2] https://msp.ucsd.edu/techniques.htm

[3] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262014465/the-audio-programming...

Working on therapy software, for porn addiction.

https://zenstreak.app/

I'm building a tool for managing Google Ads campaing called Rudys.AI:

- Search campaigns: - automatically crawl website, find the offerings and generate new campaigns - Provide qualitative recommendations such as, relevant terms to include/exclude, e.g. including typos as keywords, improvements on landing page

- Shopping campaign: - Smart labeling of all products to allocate the budget among Top performers, Rising and Ghost products to avoid draining the budget. E.g. instead of a campaign with 10k products with one budget , turn it into 5 campaigns with different budgets doubling down on what works.

Feel free to reach out for a demo

I built Arty: https://github.com/vibemachine-labs/arty

It's an open-source iOS voice agent that uses the OpenAI Realtime API (bring your own key).

Current connectors: Hacker News (check demo in readme!), Google Drive, GitHub, and web search.

I got frustrated with the limitations of the OpenAI Realtime Voice iOS app—for example, it can't even connect to Google Drive.

Arty is self-contained except for the OpenAI model and any third-party services you connect to. Uses local tools—no MCP support yet.

If you'd like additional connectors, feel free to open an issue.

This is super cool. I noticed that you mention that you will add MCP support soon. I was wondering, do you think it would be possible to control MacOS via voice, remotely, through one of the available MCP servers that allow MacOS control. Do you think that would be feasible?

yes but ud ideally want ur own high uptime mac mini

Got it. But you could just use it on your MacBook on those occasions where you want to "talk" to your computer remotely to check on some progress it made on a specific job. My use case would involve switching desktops, activating specific windows, and reading their content and taking some action. But depends more specifically on the MCP that exposes that functionality, and not your app. I was asking because you're probably more familiar on how reliable such an approach might be.

I've been building with local AI, on Apple Silicon. It's only 8mb, but runs 30% faster than Ollama.

https://github.com/dinoki-ai/osaurus

did you really solo develop this entire application? including dinoki-ai which appears to be SAAS?

I've working on an AI Thumbnail Generator for making YouTube thumbnails and social media images the last few months. https://thumbnail.ai/

Nice work. I am bookmarking this. Looks really good!

Built a web interface for Magic: the Gathering draft pick advice, trained on top player data.

Website: https://statisticaldrafting.com

Turns out to be a small niche, but I enjoy it!

Updating partijgedrag, which is a voting compass based on how parties vote on motions in the Netherlands!

Apart from that I have a personal SaaS idea I want to release soon. Its something that started as a joke but the joke is still not finished

Building an MCP Gateway: https://www.gatana.ai/

Idea came from one of my clients, where they wanted to use AI agents throughout the organization but at that moment there was no centralized governance or security concepts. This pulls everything at one place and tries to solve the security concept with per-user credentials, which can be provided out-of-band through the MCP protocol (generated a one-time link end-user can use to sign in to the underlying MCP server with OAuth or provide API key)

I'm still working on WithAudio (https://desktop.with.audio). A one time payment Text To Speech Desktop App. Because I think everything doesn't have to be a subscription.

In October I finished the PDF parser. It was a big challenge extracting PDF contect with correct paragraph breaks on user's computer locally. I'm gonna write about this soon.

Now I'm working on a web extension that talks to the app that run locally on your system so you can use WithAudio in your browser with very good performance, 100% local and private.

I’m working on a Chrome extension called Console Dock, which adds a floating dev console window directly inside the page. I built it as a fun side project because I often work on smaller screens and hate constantly switching or resizing panels. Still very experimental, but it’s already proving useful for quick debugging sessions.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/console-dock/biplbp...

I used Eruda before. Is it similar?

Looks great BTW. Installed.

Working with a group of friends on a "microcontroller-for-makers" kind of thing called the MakerPort. (https://makerport.fun) Sort of similar to an Arduino or micro:bit, but uses the MicroBlocks programming editor (https://microblocks.fun) created by John Maloney, who was the original team leader for Scratch at MIT for 11 years. The hardware includes an mp3 player, I2C ports, accelerometer and true capacitive touch sensors.

I’ve been working on http://www.13radar.com for the past 4 months, and we launched about two weeks ago. The platform tracks hedge fund portfolios in real-time based on SEC 13F filings.

I’m responsible for product research, analysis, design, development, and promotion. Most of the workflow was powered by AI tools — more than 60% of the research, design, and coding involved AI assistance. Initially we used Bootstrap for responsive design, but later switched to a lighter TailwindCSS framework.

Right now traffic is very low (just a few dozen users per day), and I’m trying to figure out whether that’s a product issue or simply a lack of promotion. Honestly, it’s a bit discouraging, but I’m hoping to learn from feedback and iterate.

Curious if anyone here has experience growing early-stage products with niche financial data — how did you approach the balance between product refinement and marketing?

I finally started modding a total war game (Warhammer 3). I played the series since the very first title, Shogun and I always wanted to improve the control over units and add my custom AI to not micromanage everything, but assumed it would be too time consuming and distracting from my main work. And well, it likely would have been.

But thanks to LLMs, I finally decided to give it a go and got something basic working in a short time, hurrey for AI assisted coding!

Feels empowering to be honest. No idea if I will really implement the main ideas, that I have since a long time, but I know that I can now if I want to.

Working on a CLI tool called xpire which can add expiry dates to filesystem structures: https://github.com/benibr/xpire Idea is to use filesystem specific structures (eg. snapshots) if possible to prevent long treewalks for searching and store the dates in the filesystem itself not a seperate database. It's written in go and currently supports btrfs snapshots and zfs datasets.

I wanted to give anyone the magic power to make himself an FPS game of their place (appart, museum,ect...). Still not perfect but it's light and my 3D editor is simple enough for anyone. - No coding. - And no need for Unity or Unreal.

==> Here is a photo of the Editor : https://ibb.co/FC9Hzj2

==> website with an example of a FPS visit https://free-visit.net

Please be honest, tell me why I don't have traction.

This is a cool idea! So I think, unfortunately, you are competing with automated tools like https://poly.cam/ My cousin-in-law produces music videos, and he'll take a polycam of sports cars (or even people!) and add them to his videos, it's powerful and instantaneous. No 2-3 day wait time.

It's great that you're working on this. If you want to continue on this, I'd consider: - Cleaning up the design of the website-- it looks kind of crappy. Get an AI agent to clean it up for you, it's better to look like "generic professional website" rather than "crappy amateur". - Use the more common words for creating 3d models. A "Visit" sounds like an experience, but what you're really making is a "scene", or a "spatial capture", or a "floor plan". - Maybe try to figure out a niche. Is your niche that people can edit this the 3d object afterwards? Or is the niche integration with video games? You gotta find something that doesn't directly compete with polycam.

Thank you civilian for your answer and hints. It's funny I though matterport was more like me. Because both of us make " virtual reality".

I think You are right It's a bit idiotic from me to be cautious and say 'result in 3 days'. I could say 4 Hours now.

And yes.It's not 100% automatic. I agree, my low point.

Built an in-browser AI managed spreadsheet. https://banker.so/

Too many things I wanted to analyse went to nothing because I was too lazy to fetch information and the put it inside a spreadsheet cell by cell. So I developed this to help me extract docs into spreadsheets while also having access to the web.

Now working on a vibe-coded version of it where instead of showing a spreadsheet, it will be able to generate data-focused tiles and apps

I was working on a iPad-focused Dungeons & Dragons app focused on the Dungeon Master called Campaign Codex but I got a little bored with building CRUD apps.

Decided to pivot and start learning about databases and their internals more. Currently pulling down Clickhouse and reading some code along with the reading the book Database Internals by Alex Petrov.

So I'm technically not "working on" an app...I am working on myself to branch out and attempt to specialize a bit more as I progress in my career.

Any advice/papers/books to read is very welcomed!

https://github.com/dmjio/miso-lynx

Building native applications for iOS, Android and Huawei devices in Haskell.

This sounds very interesting. You say “native” but miso generates JavaScript, right? I’m not familiar with mobile development. Can you run JS natively on mobile devices?

Yes, miso uses the JS backend in GHC, and mobile phones have embedded JS interpreters (e.g. JavaScript Core). These interpreters can access native libraries to draw native views, or access native device APIs.

Projects like lynx and react-native automate this process using something akin to node-gyp, exposing kotlin / swift libraries via C ABI w/ a JS API. Miso accesses the kotlin / swift native modules by FFI'ing into the JS that exposes them.

The JS doesn't get compiled, but on Android it does get JIT'd. So it's "native" in the sense that the views drawn are native (not WebViews), and the device APIs are native, but not "native" in the sense that it's compiled.

That is very interesting. I never knew that JS could access native APIs. That's very promising for compilers that can generate JS, like GHC!

Working on a phone app that streamlines household management for unmotivated losers (like me) so that they stop wasting money (wasted food) and time (procrastination)

Working on an app that helps me (and other people) do household management on autopilot. It helps me manage things, food, expiration dates, shopping, chores, and I get notified periodically to review my lists. I waste way less food and I actually do my chores instead of procrastinating. https://okthings.app

It looks like you have to do a lot of data entry when you buy things, no?

Yes. How i tried to solve it: you have a shopping list where you can add things on the fly. These things will need to be categorized (food, household supplies etc) at a later date, which is when the review is due for the "Uncategorized" category.

Generally, i tend to buy the same things, so the "big" data entry job happens only once.

Learning that RCS is even more of a monstrosity and a lie than I thought a few years ago. Yikes. Lots of groundwork a decade ago setting the stage for "the carrier creates a common service anyone can interact with" (like sms/mms currently do, which would be great) but in practice it's pretty much 100% "only the carrier app or Google/Samsung messages has access to literally any of it".

Yeah I'm not gonna touch it and I'm going to actively encourage people to disable it. Use signal instead.

Working on a low cost, miniature Bluetooth tracker. The inspiration was my parents keep losing (forget) their spectacles in the house. I wanted to build something that is very easy and simple to use and it was important to keep it small. SO the form factor is something like an airtag but 10x smaller which can be just stuck on to the spectacles and forget that it exists. Next step, obviously is to build a simple app that shows the location of this tracker with a range based on the Bluetooth signal strength.

https://aykev.dev/webgpu-waveform/

https://github.com/mrkev/webgpu-waveform

Made some updates to this open-source library I wrote to render audio waveforms using the GPU on the browser (WebGPU).

Example on the site. Works without enabling flags on Chromium browsers. There's an example to scrub and zoom in real time on some audio. Feedback welcome!

For fun have been creating a mashup of old school DnD map generation using Commodore "10 Print Chr$(205.5+Rnd(1)); : Goto 10" style logic (in TS/Svelte/SVG):

https://imgur.com/a/qMeEoPK

Have been down a rabbit hole ensuring the stairs are realistic and that grid connects properly. Lots of fun and frustration with AI coding tools trying to solve that (they mostly don't/can't). Some fun detours learning a little Prolog to help out as well.

I'm building a coding agent, named VT Code [0]. VT Code is a Rust-based terminal coding agent with semantic code intelligence via Tree-sitter. Supports multiple LLM providers with automatic failover and efficient context management. Support OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, xAI, DeepSeek, OpenRouter, Z.AI, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, and Ollama (local & Cloud). Agent Client Protocol and Model Context Protocol fully support. VT Code supports a rich set of configuration options, with preferences stored in vtcode.toml. Has both Visual Studio Code and Open VSX extensions so that you can install in VS Code or Cursor, Windsurf, Eclipse.

I've been building it for several months now and enjoy the learning process, I also wrote a blog post and learnt a ton about terminal, ANSI processing. The learning has been immense for me, I now have working knowledge of ANSI escape codes, grapheme clusters, terminal emulators, Unicode normalization, VT protocols, PTY sessions, and filesystem operations, all the low-level details I would have never think about until I were implementing them. [1]

[0] https://github.com/vinhnx/vtcode [0.1] https://deepwiki.com/vinhnx/vtcode [1] https://buymeacoffee.com/vinhnx/vt-code

Highlighting the nftables rules. For Vim/NeoVim editor, using your own color scheme and background.

Like grouping statements together within a rule with heavier emphasis on keywords that starts each of its statement.

Even has the easiest Vim installer, `make install`/`make uninstall`; none of that funky Vundle, or other relatively unknown Vim packagers.

Has over 2,500 semantic nodes, 15,000 syntax match statements, and under 5ms rendering.

This is a purely deterministic LL(1) full semantic parser.

https://github.com/egberts/vim-syntax-nftables

Skip the release (I cannot delete it), go full repo clone.

Is it ready? Yes, almost entirely, unless you are a firewall expert using few remaining nftables-supporting but esoteric features like ‘synproxy’. Gotta master that first before I can highlight it properly.

Finally started getting back into game programming and have been working with Lua and Love2D - been trying my best not to get bogged down in the weeds (eg how do I animate a 3d cube on a 2d plane?) and I’m focusing on learning how to actually work with the Love system and organize my code. I’m getting a crash course in jj as an added bonus!

Building an ai powered threats deception proxy.

It's a honeypot system that uses AI to mess with attackers. When someone tries to hack your app, it detects them and serves up fake responses based on attack type.

The system learns from attackers behavior and creates convincing decoys to waste their time and frustrate their efforts. It's basically a trap that gets smarter the more attackers poke at it.

https://github.com/0tSystemsPublicRepos/IfritProxy

Tired of having my notes spread everywhere, on uncomfortable software, I'm writing my own Notational Velocity desktop app clone in Godot:

https://share.combo.cc/-Z7hBzNbaCc

(work in progress prototype, design is not final)

Intentionally made simple and centered around plain text files and editing speed. I've spent a week on the prototype, now it's good enough to dog-food. Would like to eventually distribute it as a multi-platform app.

I’m working on a MUD server. I want text-based adventures.

Also... would it be crazy if services and social media were text-based applications too?

Not necessarily through telnet, but with some kind of standard so that instead of the web/browser, we use a CLI(s).

I dunno, maybe I’m just bored.

Recently I've been wanting to build a chat server that works over ssh. And by that I don't mean it uses the ssh protocol but that you ssh into the server and the shell you get is the chat client.

One day, maybe

I've been really frustrated with the state of networking and discovering new career opportunities lately. Both in person and online I feel like there aren't very good tools and I have a growing disdain for LinkedIn. I wanted to make a tool that helps ambitious navigate their career goals and meet people who are going to move the needle. It's called Catalyst: https://getcatalyst.tech/

Hey, how can I contact you privately?

I followed up via email

I have been working on https://easymiet.eu/ It is specific to the German rental market. Basically if you want to rent an appartment in Germany most landlords require you to fill out a non-standardized self-disclosure form. That can be annoying to the landlord because especially in larger cities you might have a couple of hundret applicants and it is also annoying to the possible renter since they have to fill out the same information for every apartment they apply for. This is where easymiet comes in. As a landlord you can generate a viewing, shared it through QR or a link. Interested renters can apply using their profile. It also has a application approve and dismissal workflow automatically sending emails to the applicant. My plan was to monitize it selling applicants the ability to add more info to their profile like a picture or relevant documents. However so far I haven't been able to generate much interest. The tech stack is Next JS with BetterAuth, Drizzle and Postgres. It is hosted on a Hetzner VPS using Kamal ( wrote a blogpost about that if you are interested: https://markow.dev/blog/complex-next-js-app-kamal )

Quick feedback: looks way too empty for me to look real. Could also just be a scam. Also: why would I as an applicant add more data for money? The landlord has the benefit, they should pay for that.

> Wir sind nicht bereit oder verpflichtet, an Streitbeilegungsverfahren vor einer Verbraucherschlichtungsstelle teilzunehmen.

Doesn't help haha. Maybe explain why?

To be fair, the thread is called "What are you working on", so it's by definition work-in-progress.

> Also: why would I as an applicant add more data for money? The landlord has the benefit, they should pay for that.

In many hot rental markets (My experience mostly with Berlin), you are mostly not in a position to say "the landlord should pay that" and everyone is desperate to supply the best, most complete and most convincing documents even if it feels bad to fork over that much personal data to a random stranger on a platform.

Bread and butter stuff. Pulling together all of the assorted algorithms and data structures I implemented in C over the years out of necessity - lists, trees, stacks, queues, hash tables, memory pools, etc. - aligning the APIs, cleaning up and merging into a library. It's a background project but super fun. This and several parsers - JSON, some config file formats, and parsers for some GPS / GNSS receiver data protocols. FSMs also always feel like nice, clean fun. And prematurely optimising every bit.

I’m building Sink It for Reddit (https://gosinkit.com), a browser extension to make Reddit usable on the web. It’s similar to RES with broader support for all the different Reddit UIs (there are 4).

It’s mostly free with only old Reddit features gated behind a one time $5 fee. The app has a few hundred thousand users on the Apple platforms but recently it was invited to join Mozilla’s Recommended Extensions program so I’m hoping to grow the non-Apple user base.

Creativity and game development clubs for kids:

https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids

Basically, I'm building tooling and providing these to community run clubs that help turn kids from consumers into creators. I'm focusing on game development initially, but have plans to expand into other areas of creativity.

We're using Godot + GodotJS (which I'm a maintainer of): https://breaka.club/blog/godots-most-powerful-scripting-lang...

I've much experience building software for creators. I'm a (core) developer of Tabletop Simulator. I worked at a now defunct startup which allowed people to create and distribute their own interactive fiction stories using partner third-party IPs.

I have a background in EdTech. I used to be Head of Engineering at Ender, where we ran custom Minecraft servers for kids: https://joinender.com/ and prior to that I was Head of Engineering at Prequel / Beta Camp, where we ran courses that helped teenagers learn about entrepreneurship: https://www.beta.camp/. During peak COVID I also ran a social emotion development book subscription service with my wife, a primary school teacher.

Sewing my own clothing.

But of course the programmer in me needs to make my own software to design patterns with code. Enjoying using paper.js to do all the complicated math to calculate lengths and angles.

Month three working on my game development resources website: https://raizensoft.com/tutorials/

I write almost daily article about libGDX - my most favorite code-centric game framework. There are now over 100 articles covering topics from basics to advances. I plan to post more because this is more or less a passionate project.

In the future I hope it evolves into a definitive resource for learning game development with Java and libGDX.

A tool for “grep”ing MIPS binaries[0] to find duplicate code (functions, segments, sections) primarily to aid in decompiling.

It does some neat things to match instructions while avoiding location dependent references, then creates a hash that can be used to used to search binaries in linear (or faster!) time.

Still a WIP, but being used on at least one decomp project.

0 - https://github.com/ttkb-oss/mipsmatch

Ugh. It's time for me to start transitioning my iOS/Watch/Mac programs to be "Liquid Glass-native."

I should be able to do it with my various personal apps, but one app I've written, was done in concert with a professional graphic designer, and he is not happy with LG, so I expect that app to be a pain.

These are my apps: https://littlegreenviper.com/AppDocs/

I'm working on https://www.evcourse.com/ (I work in the EV industry)

This is pretty cool. can imagine it being useful for people thinking to switch to am EV.

the popup for miles/km stays too much on top. it should go away after selecting it once.

Thank you! Good tip, I'll update the miles/km

Built min., it's like Airtable on top of an email client. Add any column you want, extract structured data from emails automatically, so you can sort, group, emails for your team.

First use case is hello@ email addresses for fellow founders. Free for founders!

https://getmin.ai

We are building end-to-end accessibility compliance tool[1] that will take care of auditing, remediation, verification and generation of ACR/VPAT.

Because of the well bound nature of the problem space, we are able to unlock a lot of power from LLMs and put together a good end-to-end product that delivers the promise.

Still early days. I know there are lot of folks who care about a11y. I would love to chat and learn from your experience.

[1] https://workback.ai/

My friend and I working on PennyPost, financial analyst that solely focuses on your spending.

It looks at your spending across all your accounts, categorizes, identifies patterns, trends, runs predictions and sends weekly/monthly summary email.

No apps or dashboards, just insight.

Plug in once and forget. Takes 5 minutes to keep track of your spending.

We are still at early stages but you can check it out here

https://pennypost-landing.vercel.app/

Appreciate any feedback you might have!

I am finally making my own blog. I have been only planning for ages. I found that I had a lot to say for the past years working on AI, and I want to record them somewhere. I do not expect a lot of visitors or at all in fact. The blog is going to be just for me to remember stuffs and to keep track of them.

I am using hugo to build suckless static pages. LLM helped me so that I don't need to read all their docs. I haven't finished it yet nor posted a single blog. But there will be one soon.

I’ve been reverse-engineering an obscure childhood game called Entomorph:

https://github.com/entomorph/reverse-engineering

I started the project when ChatGPT 4 was first released, using it as a way to explore what LLMs could actually do. I also find working on it very relaxing, there is something cool about uncovering secrets hidden in code for more than twenty years.

I'm thinking a lot about the ARC-AGI ML benchmarks, especially the "shape" of the dataset and what that says about how it should be solved. I think there's good reasons to believe that deep learning - at least differentiable SGD backprop style - is a bad fit for this specific benchmark, due to the tasks being almost entirely discrete symmetries, and also having so little data to approximate the discrete symmetries with continuous ones (considering deep learning to be the learning of continuous symmetries). I think that a more explicit and discrete approach is the way to go, and it's possible to build something surprisingly general and not heuristic-based even without gradient descent, guided by minimum description length to search for both grid representations and solver functions. I'm looking for teammates for ARC-3 so hit me up if this sounds interesting, I'd love to chat!

I made a viewer on my website to build intuition for my preferred perception algorithm which is entropy filtering + correlation. Pretty neat to check out the heatmaps for random tasks, there is a lot of information inherent in the heatmap about the structure of the task: https://synapsomorphy.com/arc/

I’m working on a performance capture library for Python because I often need to know the performance of backend systems I maintain. I frequently build tooling to capture performance and save it for later analysis. I/O operations get costly when writing lots of data to disk and creating good real-time analytics tools takes a lot of my time. I wanted a library that captures real-time performance analytics from Python backends.

https://github.com/jakeroggenbuck/kronicler

This is why I wrote kronicler to record performance metrics while being fast and simple to implement. I built my own columnar database in Rust to capture and analyze these logs.

To capture logs, `import kronicler` and add `@kronicler.capture` as a decorator to functions in Python. It will then start saving performance metrics to the custom database on disk. You can also use the middleware for FastAPI.

You can then view these performance metrics by adding a route to your server called `/logs` where you return `DB.logs()`. You can paste your hosted URL into the settings of usekronicler.com (the online dashboard) and view your data with a couple charts. View the readme or the website for more details for how to do this.

I'm still working on features like concurrency and other overall improvements. I've added a lot since the last time I shared on HN. I would love some feedback to help shape this product into something useful for you all.

Thanks! - Jake

I wanted to see if I could use generative AI to build a whole business. Not just a digital product or an app — but the entire business from end to end:

(Spoiler: I did manage it and launched in just 75 days from start to first order)

- Three tier corporate structure with manager-managed LLCs and a private WY LLC as manager, complete with a knowledgebase-powered assistant that can write share registries, banking resolutions, meeting minutes, contribution contracts, loans and more

- Supply chain management with proprietary lot tracking that tracks PO line items from production to delivery

- Generated the base for all product images, helped write and research label design and text, wrote SEO titles and product descriptions

- Used Claude Code to build the entire Shopify theme for the site, all collections, product pages, legal pages and a COA database to boot

- Used Claude Code to build a custom Shopify app to integrate lot tracking into the shop so that when lots sell out the next lot is queued for sale and all lot-related metadata is synced to the product variant and displayed on the product page

- used Claude Code to build a super analytics platform that combines the data from GA4, Shopify orders, and Meta business suite into a single feature store where I can wrangle the data to ask/answer any question I can dream of about audience segments, product popularity, what’s working or not, and get insights on what to do next

If you care to check it out, the site is https://cosmicpeptides.com

this is super cool

Currently building a suite of media inspection and encoding tools for video engineers: https://video-commander.com.

Still very much a work in progress, but expecting to release a first version by end of year. Built on Tauri, in case anyone is curious.

I've created various open-source and commercial tools in the multimedia space over the last 10+ years and wanted to put it all together into something more premium.

I'm working on Habitat. It's a free and open source, self-hosted platform for communities to discover and discuss their local area. The plan is for it to be federated. I've recently solved an issue with cron jobs that was driving me mad for ages. I feel that I'm pretty much nearing a first tagged release, but I feel that I need to work on branding and messaging a bit before I do. I can't tell if I'm procrastinating that final push to something that makes it more official or not.

- The idea: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-net...

- A build update and plan: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/

- The repository: https://github.com/carlnewton/habitat

- The project board: https://github.com/users/carlnewton/projects/2

I am working on a SQL query engine for multi-dimensional and hierarchical analysis compatible with Apache Spark, ClickHouse, BigQuery, Snowflake, PostgreSQL and DuckDB. GitHub https://github.com/squashql/squashql Website https://www.squashql.io/

I'm working on a book about using WebViews for cross-platform music software GUIs. It has a particular focus on performance, which I gave a talk about at the Audio Developer Conference last year:

https://www.arthurcarabott.com/adc-2024/

As part of it I am building a code generator to generate shared type definitions in C++ and TypeScript (plus serialization, comparison and cloning).

Assets — Personal Wealth Tracker https://github.com/venil7/assets A self-hosted net worth and portfolio manager. Track multiple portfolios (ISA, General, Pension, Crypto, etc.) and monitor individual or total performance. Supports any asset available via the Yahoo Finance API, automatically converts to your base major currency.

please leave us a github star or some feedback on github!

I'm building a Twitch streamer focused version of cameo. The first beta version is specifically for League of Legend streamers.

https://demo.replays.lol/clipper (recording the demo video today).

The idea is that a generic video message doesn't appeal to a fan of a video game streamer, instead what really would be cool would be watching them react to your best moment in a game.

Our software removes all friction from the journey, the fan doesn't even need to record their own gameplay, we have bots set up that can load up someone else's gameplay just from their username, record their highlight for them, upload it to our platform, then the streamer just needs to come in, watch a ~60 sec clip, give a genuine reaction, press 'submit' and its all done.

There's a few markets I'm trying to find product market fit in: ~1-2 minute coaching sessions, sports commentator style commentary over your clip from influencers, hyped up reactions from your favorite streamer, a community-focused segment on a stream of watching a compilation of your fan's best moments.

We're ready to launch, just trying and struggling to find the first few people to sign up.

I'm currently in a group project for my edtech entrepreneurship course where we've launched a start-up website off of lovable, which provides an ai chatbot that helps check CVs and run mock interviews for finance and consulting students looking for internships: https://next-step-craft.lovable.app . Test it out now!

Working on https://libredesk.io/

It's a modern, open source, self-hosted customer support desk.

https://voicesinmyhead.co/ - AI-powered voice dictation. 5x faster than typing.

Absolutely hilarious name

I’m working on a platform to run a friendly competition in “who builds the best reasoning AI Agent”.

Each participating team (got 300 signups so far) will get a set of text tasks and a set of simulated APIs to solve them.

For instance the task (a typical chatbot task) could say something like: “Schedule 30m knowledge exchange next week between the most experienced Python expert in the company and 3-5 people that are most interested in learning it “

AI agent will have to solve through this by using a set of simulated APIs and playing a bit of calendar Tetris (in this case - Calendar API, Email API, SkillWill API).

Since API instances are simulated and isolated (per team per task), it becomes fairly easy to automatically check correctness of each solution and rank different agents in a global leaderboard.

Code of agents stays external, but participants fill and submit brief questionnaires about their architectures.

By benchmarking different agentic implementations on the same tasks - we get to see patterns in performance, accuracy and costs of various architectures.

Codebase of the platform is written mostly in golang (to support thousands of concurrent simulations). I’m using coding agents (Claude Code and Codex) for exploration and easy coding tasks, but the core has still to be handcrafted.

Ooooh, neat, I had a similar idea, like an AI olympics that could be live streamed where they have to do several multi-stepped tasks

Yep, exactly the same concept. Except not live-streaming, but giving out a lot of multi-step tasks that require reasoning and adaptation.

Here is a screenshot of a test task: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/abdullin_ddd-ai-sgr-here-is-h...

Although… since I record all interactions, could replay all them as if they were streamed.

Currently working on building my first 3D printed star tracking rig for astrophotography (via the incredible OpenAstroTracker project) and beginning to think through a 3D printed Dobsonian telescope. Also working on some ceramic glazing techniques to try and make cool gas giant-looking tiles. I'm on a real space kick right now!

A structural biology viewer/editor/CAD-style application. Combines functionality similar to PyMol, Coot, VMD, and GROMACs. Open-source, standalone executable. Built in Rust and CUDA.

And the host of bio libs required to do it. The sort of thing that are mature in Python, for example, but I needed to build for Rust.

https://www.athanorlab.com/daedalus

I’m currently creating a simple community where people can honestly share their emotions and empathize with others’ feelings (without comments). It’s a web community where users can receive a comforting message from AI based on emotion analysis of their text, emojis, and chosen colors.

If you have any ideas or comments for improvement, feel free to reply anytime! (For reference, this service is designed for Korean users — I’m Korean myself.)

We are working on desplega.ai, and we are toying with this long term vision https://www.pleasedontdeploy.com/p/the-trap-we-automated-cod...

I would love feedback on the post, how do you see the tech stack for software control evolving into this new category.

https://inSolitaire.com

I've spent several years since Covid times solo-developing an ad-free website with 50+ solitaire/puzzle games.

I've gathered some feedback from users from HN already and now trying to fix things.

I'm looking to genuinely improve the experience so would be incredibly grateful for any feedback. I'm also wondering what it lacks – any particular games or modes?

A game-agnostic social/legal/financial overlay for virtual worlds. Minecraft, Rust, Roblox, etc.: legal ownership claims (vs possession), titles (recognized by other players or not), laws, player-issued currencies. Smart contracts but with as little blockchain stuff as possible.

The iron rule is no direct interaction with the world. These are things that players can in theory always start on their own as long as they can communicate.