Currently a one-man side project:

https://laboratory.love

Last year PlasticList discovered that 86% of food products they tested contain plastic chemicals—including 100% of baby food tested. The EU just lowered their "safe" BPA limit by 20,000x. Meanwhile, the FDA allows levels 100x higher than what Europe considers safe.

This seemed like a solvable problem.

Laboratory.love lets you crowdfund independent testing of specific products you actually buy. Think Consumer Reports meets Kickstarter, but focused on detecting endocrine disruptors in your yogurt, your kid's snacks, whatever you're curious about.

Here's how it works: Find a product (or suggest one), contribute to its testing fund, get detailed lab results when testing completes. If a product doesn't reach its funding goal within 365 days, automatic refund. All results are published openly. Laboratory.love uses the same methodology as PlasticList.org, which found plastic chemicals in everything from prenatal vitamins to ice cream. But instead of researchers choosing what to test, you do.

The bigger picture: Companies respond to market pressure. Transparency creates that pressure. When consumers have data, supply chains get cleaner.

Technical details: Laboratory.love works with ISO 17025-accredited labs, test three samples from different production lots, detect chemicals down to parts per billion. The testing protocol is public.

You can browse products, add your own, or just follow specific items you're curious about: https://laboratory.love

Repo: https://github.com/mochilang/mochi

I'm building Mochi, a small programming language with a custom VM and a focus on querying structured data (CSV, JSON, and eventually graph) in a unified and lightweight way.

It started as an experiment in writing LINQ-style queries over real datasets and grew into a full language with:

- declarative queries built into the language

- a register-based VM designed for analysis and optimization

- an intermediate representation with liveness analysis, constant folding, and dead code elimination

- static type inference, inline tests, and golden snapshot support

Example:

  type Person {
    name: string
    age: int
  }

  let people = load "people.yaml" as Person

  let adults = from p in people
             where p.age >= 18
             select { name: p.name, age: p.age }

  for a in adults {
    print(a.name, "is", a.age)
  }

  save adults to "adults.json"

Happy to chat if you're into VMs, query engines, or DSLs.

Still working on: an enclosure-compatible open-source version of the 2nd gen Nest thermostat. It reuses the enclosure, encoder ring, display, and mounts of the Nest but replaces the "thinking" part with an open-source PCB that can interact with Home Assistant.

- The encoder ring which works like an LED mouse, but in reverse: Fully reverse-engineered and on its own demo PCB

- The faceplate PCB, which does the actual control of the thermostat wires, has been laid out, but the first version missed a really-obvious problem involving the behavior on power-on with certain of the GPIO pins from the ESP32, so I've got rev 3 on order from the PCB manufacturer.

Nest Thermostats of the 1st and 2nd generation will no longer be supported by Google starting October 25, 2025. You will still be able to access temperature, mode, schedules, and settings directly on the thermostat – and existing schedules should continue to work uninterrupted. However, these thermostats will no longer receive software or security updates, will not have any Nest app or Home app controls, and Google will end support for other connected features like Home/Away Assist. It has been pretty-badly supported in Home Assistant for over a year anyway, missing important connected features.

I made a film called "Searching For Kurosawa". This short documentary chronicles the story of Kawamura, a man who worked with legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa on the set of his opus "Ran". Kawamura was working in the BTS crew, but his footage got confiscated. It took almost 40 years to recover the footage and present that as his feature film.

My film got screened at the Academy Award-qualifying Bali International Film Festival and the Marina Del Rey Film Festival in the past month. It will be screening next month in New York City at the Asian American International Film Festival.

I've been working on a 3D voxel-based game engine for like 10 years in my spare time. The most recent big job has been to port the world gen and editor to the GPU, which has had some pretty cute knock-on effects. The most interesting is you can hot-reload the world gen shaders and out pop your changes on the screen, like a voxel version of shadertoy. https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai

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

https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

After 2+ years of maintaining the FOSS lightweight Reddit frontend Redlib [0], I realized that my niche but extremely detailed knowledge and experience of using Reddit's endpoints might be useful. After reverse engineering the mobile app and writing code to emulate nearly every aspect of its behavior, plus writing a codegen framework that will auto-update my code from analyzing the behavior from an Android emulator, I can pretty easily replay common user flows from any IP around the world, collecting and extracting the data. Some use cases:

* OSINT (r00m101 just beat me to it by launching...)

* Research into recommendation algorithms, advertising placement algorithms, etc

* Marketing (ad libraries, detailed analysis of content given data not even exposed to the mobile app due to some interesting side channels, things like trend analysis, etc)

* Market research for products

* Sales teams can use it to find exact mentions of other products. Eg: selling crash reporting software? Look up your target accounts' brands and find examples of complaints.

Plus a few more with more imagination.

So I'm working on a site that allows user access to some of the read-only functions available here. Coming soon :tm:. Been really fun building it all in Rust, though :) If you're interested in anything here, email in profile.

[0]: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

After 10 years in defense tech, watching missile attacks in Ukraine and the Middle East made it clear how little most people really get about air defense. So I'm builiding this simulator which drops you into the operator’s seat. You can test out different scenarios and build an air defense network against various types of threats (stats from real world). Also have Ukraine, Israel-Iran scenarios.

https://airdefense.dev/

I'm working on a new app for creating technical diagrams - https://vexlio.com. It's an area with some heavyweight incumbents (e.g. Visio, Lucid) but I think there's good opportunity here to differentiate in simplicity and overall experience. I'm still in the fairly early phase, and I suspect I haven't quite found the best match of features to customers yet.

From a dev perspective this area has a ton of super interesting algorithmic / math / data structure applications, and computational geometry has always been special to me. It's a lot of fun to work on.

If anyone here is interested in this as a user, I'd love for any feedback or comments, here or you can email me directly: tyler@vexlio.com.

Some pages the HN crowd might be interested in:

* https://vexlio.com/blog/making-diagrams-with-syntax-highligh... * https://vexlio.com/solutions/state-diagram-maker/ * https://vexlio.com/blog/speed-up-your-overleaf-workflow-fast...

This weekend, my modified Android/mobile Point of Sale (POS) app was used to celebrate the 100th anniversary of our village's volunteer firefighting organization.

The standard fiscal POS app was adapted to support a sort of low-trust swarm of waiters who used the app to collect orders. These orders were then transferred to a few high-trust cashiers by scanning QR codes generated on the waiters' apps.

After receiving payments, the cashiers' apps printed invoices and multiple "order tickets" categorized by "food," "drinks", "sweets"... This allowed waiters to retrieve items and deliver them to customers.

The system was used by around 40 users, with new waiters joining or leaving throughout the event. They used their own phones, and the app functioned without internet or Wi-Fi, gracefully downgraded (If a waiter didn't use the app due by choice or due to technical problems, they could manually relay orders to cashiers), Customers also had the option to approach cashiers directly, receive their order tickets, and pick up items themselves.

This is not that technically interesting, but I liked how the old manual system, the 70+ year village firefighting org. main cashier had, got digitalized in non-centralized way. (and I took this chance in trying to explain it, as I will have to, to maybe find more users for it)

I'm cleaning up a 25-30 year old bicycle. First time I've stripped one almost right back to the frame.

Strongly recommend the rust remover described by Backyard Ballistics[0] on his second channel[1]; 1 liter water, 100g citric acid, 40g washing soda, generous squirt of dish soap. He claims the acid and alkali cancel out so there's nothing to attack the normal metal surface, but they leave citrate ions which dissolve rust by chelation, which makes it better than just citric acid, vinegar, or soda alone, which all pit and dissolve the clean metal surfaces, and easier/better than wire wool scratching. He also claims it's as effective as EvapoRust but much cheaper and can do more rust dissolving per litre than EvapoRust.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@Backyard.Ballistics - restoration of old and very rusty guns

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVYZmeReKKY - "The Ultimate HOMEMADE Rust Remover (Better than EvapoRust)", Beyond Ballistics channel

Ideas are coming way too fast to work on them all at the moment.

* Expect/snapshot testing library for F# is now seeing prod use but could do with more features: https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Expect

* A deterministic .NET runtime (https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.PawPrint); been steaming towards `Console.WriteLine("Hello, world!")` for months, but good lord is that method complicated

* My F# source generators (https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Myriad) contain among other things a rather janky Swagger 2.0 REST client generator, but I'm currently writing a fully-compliant OpenAPI 3.0 version; it takes a .json file determining the spec, and outputs an `IMyApiClient` (or whatever) with one method per endpoint.

* Next-gen F# source generator framework (https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Whippet) is currently on the back burner; Myriad has more warts than I would like, and I think it's possible to write something much more powerful.

A few months ago I launched SpiesInDC - https://spiesindc.com, a mail-based (as in the real mail) subscription service about Cold War history. Subscribers, ahem secret agents, receive packages every few weeks containing reproductions of famous documents, stanps from the USSR, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, coins, and other fun stuff. I keep refining the packages every week to make it better and it is so much fun.

I'm finally getting my online presence in order...

This week, I'll set up a Hugo blog with the Ed theme, love it, looks exactly what I'm looking for, and as a former LaTeX enthusiast, it's pretty close. It's readable, minimalist. I'll need to customize the theme, though. I plan to publish blog posts about anything I find interesting.

https://gohugo-theme-ed.netlify.app/

In parallel to this work, I'm setting up a simple system to keep my website + subdomains easy to build, rebuild, and deploy with Caddy on a cheap Scaleway compute server. In the past, I had some ideas I wanted to publish, but the system I went with made managing the sites dreadful.

Once that's ready, I'm back to learning Rust and crypto. It's fun, interesting, challenging, remote-friendly, and the salaries are usually 30-50% better. My current tech stack feels like a dead end: it has a low ceiling in terms of salary, the projects are generally not very interesting (I'm grateful for my current project, it's the best there is with this technology), and I believe the technology will see a slow and steady decline.

Apart from work, I'm building the playground for my 2 yo son, and planting blueberries, he loves them.

I am a PhD student and for a while now I'm designing and developing a distributed network protocol that enables dynamic resource allocation across heterogeneous nodes, to which I called Rank. It's designed to handle computational, network, and temporal resources in fully distributed environments without central controllers, but that could also handle a centralized environment. Rank implements four core functions: discovery (finding paths between nodes), estimation (evaluating resource availability), allocation (reserving resources), and sharing (allowing multiple services to use the same resources). What I think it makes it unique is its ability to operate in completely decentralized environments with heterogeneous nodes, making it particularly valuable for edge computing, cloud gaming, distributed content delivery, vehicular communications, and grid computing scenarios. The protocol uses a bidding system where nodes evaluate their capability to fulfill resource requests on a scale from 0-1, enabling dynamic path selection based on current resource availability. I've implemented it in C++ and then also created a testing framework to validate its performance across different network topologies. This is still a work-in-progress and I am eager to publish results someday!

Working on a physical and digital archive of all American vintage print advertising. I've built the archival and database software on Lucee & MySQL to store images and automate, and I use OpenAI to analyze images and extra meta data. All of the full page ads are pushed to https://adretro.com.

I've gotten the process to fully catalog all of the advertisements in a magazine (about 150 on average) down from over a week to a few hours. I should be able to get through the material within my lifetime now :)

https://sewerreport.com I am a dev/sewer inspector, done over 20k inspections for real estate alone. I built the ultimate, AI report generator based on my voice to text notes. Reports, email notifications, stripe integration. Payments and invoices. Unlock reports when paid. Square appointments integrations. Pulls all appointments and fills outs new report fields for me. No copy pasting anything ever again. Very niche but saves me 3 hours a day. Next js, it’s really been life changing for me.

https://inlovingmem.com/ - is a tribute to my recently deceased mom that I vibe coded over the last week. I felt her life deserved to be celebrated widely but wanted to be sensitive to her privacy. I've also built in a number of interactive features for participation in funeral services etc, before, during, and after.

Folks have reached out about having an 'In Loving Memory Of' site for their loved ones, so I'm turning this into a side business to help out more with my (now widowed) father's retirement and care.

Not as exciting or big as some of the projects on here, but just a small personal one I’ve been wanting to do for a while.

I recently impulse bought an Epson receipt printer, and I’ve started putting together a server in Go to print a morning update every day. Getting it to print the weather, my calendar and todos, news headlines, HN front page. Basically everything I pick up my phone for in the morning, to be on paper rather than looking at a screen first thing. Very early days but hacking away and learning escpos/go! (Vibecoding a lot of it)

https://github.com/petertjmills/escpos-server

The last couple of weeks I've been building 'Recivo', a very simple way to receive emails programmatically. There are plenty of API-based services that can be used to send emails, but receiving them is harder. My service exposes a simple REST endpoint + event webhook that makes it a 5 min setup to start receiving. Attachments are included as well.

The main use-cases I'm thinking of right now is triggering agents using email or a very simple document upload flow to any SaaS (just forward an email to the SaaS).

https://recivo.email/

I'm working on https://tickerfeed.net - a new kind of forum for stock market discussion.

After HashiCorp was acquired by IBM I decided to take time off from corporate life and build something for myself. For years I've also been a casual retail investor on the side.

Forums like /r/stocks and /r/wsb in the past have been useful resources for finding leads and interesting information. But meme-ification (among other factors) have substantially degraded sites like Reddit, to the point where interesting comments are much fewer and far in between. With TickerFeed I'm hoping to recapture what was lost - a platform where investors can discuss companies and all things stock market through meaningful long form content.

It's also a chance to build something with my dream stack - Go + HTMX + SQLite, and that's been fun :)

A homegrown Plex.

After a lot of grief trying to make Plex and jellyfish to work with my collection, and then some more with the community [1] I decided to make my own.

There's no selling point and clear pathway to monetize, as other solutions are way more mature and feature complete, but this is my own and serves my needs the best.

I've been working on it on and off for last 8 years or so, and it's been my personal benchmark for js ecosystem. The way it works, every now and then I come back to the project, look at the latest trends in js world and ask myself a simple question - what should I change in the codebase to make it online with the latest trends. And everytime it leads to full rewrite. Kind of funny, kind of sad.

In a nutshell I have a huge movie collection - basically I'm preparing for armageddon where all online streaming services cease to exist and I need both backend to fetch me detailed information about movies in the collection as well as frontend to help to decide what to watch tonight.

My next major endeavor will be trying to integrate RAG to take a bite at my holy grail - being able to ask a question like "get me a good gangster flick" and get reasonable recommendations.

[1] I think it was jellyfish where I was asking on their forums for how to manually create a collection, stating I'm a software engineer with 20+ exp and they kept telling me that I shouldn't touch the code... While having an online campaign asking for volunteers to contribute to the codebase.

https://spring-agriculture.com/

Autonomous robotics for sustainable agriculture. Based in the south of the UK. Prototypes of an autonomous mechanical farm-scale weeding robot currently beginning real-world testing. Still a huge amount of work to do though.

Hardware and software developed fairly much from scratch, not using ROS (for not entirely crazy reasons...); everything written in Rust which I find well suited to this application area.

The robot is built using off-the-shelf components and 3d-printed custom parts, so build cost is surprisingly low, and iterations are fast (well, for hardware dev).

On robot compute is a couple of Raspberry Pi 5s.

Currently using the RPi AI Kit for image recognition, ie Hailo 8[L] accelerators.

Not currently using any advanced robotics VLA-type AI models, but soon looking to experiment with some of it, initially in simulation.

Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to talk :) Contact details in my HN profile, and on our website.

Building https://www.typequicker.com

Long-term, passion project of mine - I'm hoping to make this the best typing platform. Just launched the MVP last month.

The core idea of the app is focusing on using natural text. I don't think typing random words (like what some other apps do) is the most effective way to improve typing.

We offer many text topics to type (trivia, literature, etc) where you type text snippets. We offer drills (to help you nail down certain key sequences). We also offer:

- Real-time visual hand/keyboard guides (helps you to not look down at keyboard) - Extremely detailed stats on bigrams, trigrams, per-finger performance, etc. - SmartPractice mode using LLMs to create personalized exercises - Topic-based practice (coding, literature, etc.)

I started this out of passion for typing. I went from 40wpm to ~120wpm (wrote about it here if you're interested: https://www.typequicker.com/blog/learn-touch-typing) and it completely changed my perspective and career trajectory. I became a better programmer and writer because I no longer had to think about the keyboard, nor look down at it.

Currently, we're doing a lot of analysis work on character frequencies and using that to constantly improve the SmartPractice feature. Also, exploring various LLM output testing/observability tools to improve the text generation features.

Approaching this project with a freemium model (have paid AI powered features; using AI to generate text that targets user weakpoints) while everything else in the app is completely free. No ads, no trackers, etc. (Hoping to have sufficient paid users so that we can run the site and never have to even think about running ads).

I've received a lot of feedback and am always looking for ways to improve the site.

Still on my sabbatical and continuing to build on things I enjoy rather than things that pay (for now).

Main focus is https://wheretodrink.beer, collecting and cataloging craft beer venues from around the world. No ambition of being exhaustive, but aiming for a curated and substantial list. After the last thread, a bunch of people added their suggestions, thanks! It helped add interesting new venues from cities I hadn’t covered yet.

I’m very slowly layering on features, and have a few spin-off ideas I’ll keep brewing on for later. The hardest problem thus far has been attempting to automate popularity rankings and automatic removal of defunct venues without breaching a bunch of ToS.

Also made https://drnk.beer, a small side project offering beer-related linkpages and @handles for Bluesky (AT Protocol). It's been on the backburner, but still very much live.

Probably looking for another small project for the next few months to focus on something else for a while. Always curious to see what others are building and doing. Thanks for sharing!

Working on two projects right now:

- LegalJoe: AI-powered contract reviews for startups, at the "tech demo" phase right now: https://www.legaljoe.ai/

- ClipMommy: A macOS tool to help (professionals who record a lot of videos | influencers) organize their raw video clips. Simply drag a folder of "disorganized" videos onto ClipMommy, and ClipMommy organizes the videos into folders / subfolders, adding tags, based upon some special statements that you can make at either the start or the end of your video (think audio-based "clapboard"). I'm expecting to release this within a week or two on the Mac App Store (Apple allowing...).

As an aside, I've been very impressed with Claude Code, it's (for me at least!) leading the way for how the next generation of business software might leverage AI. I plan to iterate on LegalJoe to make more "agentic" as a result of what I've seen is possible in Claude Code.

Working on RSOLV.ai - automated security vulnerability remediation. Currently a one-man shop.

The insight: Most security scanners find problems but don't fix them. Industry average time to fix critical vulnerabilities is 65+ days. We generate the actual fixes and create PRs automatically, including educational content on the nature of the vulnerability and the fix in the PR description.

Technical approach: - AST-based pattern matching (moved from regex, dropped false positives from 40% to <5%) - Multi-model AI for fix generation (Claude, GPT-4, local models) - ~170 patterns across 8 languages + framework-specific patterns; can grow this easily but need more customer validation first.

Business model experiment: Success-based pricing - only charge when fixes get merged ($15/PR at the moment). No upfront costs. This forces us to generate production-quality fixes & hopefully reduces friction for onboarding.

Early observation: Slopsquatting (AI hallucinating package names that hackers pre-register) is becoming a real attack vector. It's pretty straightforward to nail and has a lot of telltales. Building detection & mitigation for that now.

Stack: Elixir/Phoenix, TypeScript, AST parsers

https://rsolv.ai

I'm still working on Habitat. It's a free and open source, self-hosted platform for communities to discover their local area. The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet. I've made some good progress recently. I've added the ability to temporarily freeze user accounts, custom WYSIWYG editing for sidebar content and functionality that allows the administrator to set site-wide announcements to appear and disappear at specific dates/times. I also got some great feedback from users of my instance of it for my local town and so fixed some bugs.

- 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've been working on Splice CAD – an in-browser cable-harness designer.

https://splice-cad.com

Building cables for multiple personal and professional projects, I was frustrated by having to cobble together harness diagrams in Illustrator or Visio, cut snippets from from PDFs for connector outlines, map pin-outs, wire specs, cable constructions, mating terminals, and manually updating an Excel BOM.

Splice gives you:

An SVG canvas to drag-and-drop any connector or cable from your library to quickly route and bundle wires. Assign signal names to wires or cable cores.

Complete part data Connector outlines, pin-outs, terminal selections (by connector family & AWG), cable core colors & strand counts, wire AWG/color.

Automated BOM & exports parts-ready diagrams, wiring drawings, and a clean BOM in SVG, PNG, or PDF.

Connector & Cable Creators. Connectors or cables not in the existing library can be added with an optional outline and full specs (manufacturer, MPN, series, pitch, positions, IP-rating, operating temp, etc.), then publish privately or share publicly.

Demos & tutorials: Harness Builder → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfQVB_iTD1I

Connector Creator → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqDsCROhpy8

Cable Creator → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFdQaXQxKzU

Full tutorials → https://splice-cad.com/#/tutorial/

No signup required to try—just jump in and start laying out your harness: https://splice-cad.com/#/harness. If you want to save, sign up with Google or email/password.

I just took a fortnight off work with the intent of getting away from my laptop, but accidentally ended up making a listings site for London's independent / arts cinemas. As far as I can tell no such thing currently exists, and I feel like it should.

Obviously the main thing is getting the listings data, which as far as I know (mostly) isn't readily available any other way that scraping the cinemas' websites, for which I set this up as a separate-ish project[1]

[0] https://filmhose.uk

[1] https://github.com/Joeboy/cinescrapers

Just built a last-mile logistics management solution to replace a SaaS solution for a delivery company I used to be involved with.

Handles everything from real-time driver tracking, public order tracking links, finding suitable drivers for orders, batch push notifications for automatic order assignment, etc.

Backend: Feathers.JS, Postgres + TimescaleDB & PostGIS, BullMQ, Valhalla (for multi-stop route optimization although most of our deliveries are on-demand)

Frontend: SvelteKit

Mobile App (Android only for now): React Native/Expo, Zustand, Expo push notifications, and two custom native modules for secure token storage and efficient real-time GPS tracking. The tracking was probably the toughest to get right to find the best balance between battery/data efficiency and more frequent updates.

Been testing it for a couple weeks and as of last week, that company moved their operations over to it with 50+ drivers and thousands of orders processed through it so far (in a country with pretty unreliable connectivity/infrastructure).

I built it initially as a favor but open to other applications for it.

I'm writing a decompiler for Turbo Pascal 3.0, to reverse engineer an educational game from the 80s.

Since TP 3.0 does no optimisations, and looking at the progress so far (~25% decompiled), it seems like matching decompilation should be achievable.

If/when I get to 100%, I hope to make the process of annotating the result (Func13_var_2_2 is hardly an informative variable name) into a community project.

I went Yak shaving.

For my 3D audio project I need an affordable way to make plastic cases. I felt like injection molding services are way overpriced, so I decided to make the molds in-house. Turns out, CNC milling is overpriced, too. As are 5 axis CNC mills. So in the end, we built our own CNC machine.

And like these things always go, I found an EMI issue with my power supply and a USB compliance bug in the off-the-shelf stepper control board. But it all turned out OK in the end so we now have the first mold tool that was designed and machined fully in-house. And I learned so much about tool paths and drill bits. Plus it feels like now that everyone has experienced hands-on how stuff is milled, my team got a lot better at designing things for cheap manufacturing.

* https://cijene.dev (HR, open source) - recently, Croatian retail chains were mandated to start publishing grocery prices online, but not how, so they made a mess of it; I've been building a crawler + unified API to avoid people duplicating the crawl/parse/cleanup effort (open source)

* https://trosko.hr (HR, Android/iOS app) - super-simple receipt/bill tracker (snap a photo of the receipt, reads it using Gemini, categorizes and stores locally - no accounts, no data gathering)

* https://github.com/senko/think (open source) - Python client library for LLMs (multiple providers, RAG, etc). I dislike the usual suspects (LangChain, LLamaIndex) but also don't want to tie myself to a specific provider, so chugging on my on lib for this.

I just quit my "day job" to work on a business I've built with some good friends! We make stingray-resistant booties -- ie, if you encounter stingrays in the shallows, these greatly reduce the chance you get stung (https://mydragonskin.com/). I'll be in charge of a couple marketing efforts, helping with Youtube, and other odd things that come up!

My day job required me to go into office frequently, and I'm really feeling the reduced social connection of being fully remote in a small company. Any suggestions how to deal with this? I'm planning to reconnect with old friends, surf a lot, go rock climbing, and maybe take dance / music / other classes. Would also love if anyone wants to work together in the same place (library, coffee shop, etc). I'm in Escondido California, but happy to drive ~30 min to meet folks.

Still working on my books site https://thegreatestbooks.org that I started in 2008. It's been a 1 man team the entire time. I recently made some major algorithm changes that I think greatly improves the rankings. My algorithm code is open source https://github.com/ssherman/weighted_list_rank

I do plan on open sourcing more of the code over time. I also have started working on other sites using the same algorithm implementation (music, movies, video games)

This has just been a side project over the year generating passive income. I get around 250,000 page views a day, and with ads, memberships, and affiliate links I make around $2,500~ a month.

Tech stack is ruby on rails 8, postgresql 17, opensearch, redis, bootstrap 5.3 hosting on 3 servers on linode.

I'm building (and have been for the last few years) an open source high-performance Wordpress alternative on Elixir. It aims to achieve 1:1 feature parity. One thing that Wordpress has built up over the years that will take a little long for me is the plugins eco-system. But, other than that, I think everything else should be on par. IF you're an enterprise, you should easily see over 30-40% in server costs just by switching from Wordpress. This has been tested and proven with one of our enterprise clients who just recorded 500 million requests on a fork of the CMS.

But, I'm determined to see its completion even if there is just one user. I didn't take the Wordpress fiasco and how they handled it, lightly at all and it only fueled my motivation even more. ETA is by end of this year right on time for Christmas.

If you'd like to read more, here's an article about my CMS: https://medium.com/creativefoundry/what-i-learned-as-an-arti...

If you'd like to get Beta access, my email is listed in my profile.

I made the same little Roguelike game with Raylib in Odin, C3, and FreeBASIC over the last few weeks. [0] [1] [2]

I started on a Zig one and nope'd right on out of that after a few hours of fighting the compiler.

I'm currently working on porting a bunch of my Rust mini-games to other languages. [3]

[0] https://github.com/Syn-Nine/odin-mini-games/tree/main/2d-gam...

[1] https://github.com/Syn-Nine/c3-mini-games/tree/main/2d-games...

[2] https://github.com/Syn-Nine/freebasic-mini-games/tree/main/2...

[3] https://github.com/Syn-Nine/rust-mini-games/tree/main/2d-gam...

I am implementing a single Rust process to which you can connect a zero-knowledge proof of identity, such as can be created with ZKPassword from a physical passport. Each user ends up with a keypair which is:

1) Highly Sybil resistant. Neither the keypair owner nor anyone else can re-use the same underlying ID to link to another keypair.

2) Very high anonymity. While the Sybil resistance requires a nullifier representing the underlying ID to be present in a database (or stored in a public, decentralized form for blockchain use), there is no way to connect that nullifier with the keypair. Even if someone were to use brute force to successfully connect the nullifier with a specific underlying ID, such as a passport, there is no way to connect that ID with the keypair. (In the passport case, even merely brute-forcing the nullifier could only be done by the issuing government, someone who has hacked the government database, or someone with physical access to the passport. This is due to the fact that other passport information than the passport number is included in generating the underlying zero-knowledge proof.)

I understand that other technologies may have similar end-functionality, but this has the advantage that most of the functionality is encapsulated in a single Rust executable that could be easily used in any context, whether distributed or decentralized. (If anyone would like to know more, my contact info is at garyrobinson.net.)

I've been working on a fully electric last-mile delivery company: https://hudsonshipping.co

Beyond the landing page (built with Astro), I've been building all of the route optimization, the delivery and warehouse management systems. A combination of go and java has allowed me to write a few microservices in the past 6 months to handle all of my logistical processes, and I'm just testing the mobile app in the field as we speak! I hope to make some of the code open-source one day!

I built a simple web app that helped make me more present during a family tragedy:

https://touchgrass.fm/

Brief backstory: While visiting us overseas, my in-laws were in a very bad car accident. Everyone involved is alive and going to be okay. But what followed was a series of emotional, physical and logistical challenges that pushed my wife and her parents to their limits.

During this time I found myself (shamefully) hiding on my phone. I was obsessively refreshing for updates from insurance/hospital teams, sending empty messages, and mindlessly scrolling feeds. My screen time was averaging 12 hours a day. Time I could have spent being fully present with my wife and her parents.

I finally accepted I have a serious phone addiction. I tried Apple Screen Time and a few popular screen time management apps, but found the blocks were too easy to bypass, and some apps were as useful as they were distracting depending on the context (e.g. YouTube). I didn’t necessarily want to use my phone less: it’s an incredibly useful tool, and the distractions were sometimes helpful.

What I really needed was intentional stretches of time spent away from my phone. I built touchgrass.fm as a simple way to record and incentivize those stretches of time. It’s not quite finished, but it’s been helping me stay present for hospital visits, meals and important conversations.

I'm working on a video game called Astroloot[1], a mix of bullet-heaven and scifi-space ARPG. After two years, I've finally completed the main-campaign and now start with the endgame. Ever since playing Diablo 2, I've wanted to create an ARPG. Have to say, this project brought back the joy of programming for me.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3498390/Astroloot/

My girlfriend recently got into making sourdough and wanted to keep a log of all her recipes. She really wanted to explore the relationships between recipe water percentage and crumb density, or proof time and oven spring, for example. I built her https://sourdoughchronicle.com - a local first bread journal that allows peer to peer recipe and results sharing. Claude + aider had a MVP built in an hour and she's loving it! Oddly enough the comparison charts haven't made it in yet, but that's the next feature on the the to-do list.

We are building video intelligence software. Video has far rich and great information. While text reading primarily engages sight and internal cognition, video adds sound, motion, and emotional intensity, making it a richer sensory experience overall.

Our first product is Joyspace AI Clips. Automatically convert any long video, podcasts, webinars, conference videos, founder sales videos, real estate videos into Short Clips.

We have new and fancy captions, download transcript, download low-resolution video, downloading high resolution video as well.

We can process hundreds of hours of video using cloud very easily.

Check out our app at https://app.joyspace.ai

Visit our website https://joyspace.ai to create truly unlimited short clips.

edit: We have built video understanding model that tracks people, objects, interesting items within video. On next version we are going to allow customers to query the video and also specify who they want to track to create short clips.

Feedback welcome.

Lately, I’ve been exploring a few interconnected ideas:

Local-first web applications with a compiled backend – After eight years working on web platforms, the conventional stack feels bloated. The client already defines what it wants to fetch or insert. Usually through queries. So why not parse those queries and generate the backend automatically (or at least, the parts that can be)?

Triple stores as a core abstraction – I’ve been thinking about using a triple-based model instead of traditional in-memory data structures, especially in local-first apps. Facts could power both state and logic, and make syncing a lot simpler.

Lower-level systems programming – I’ve mostly worked in high-level languages, but lately I’ve been writing C libraries (like hash maps) and built a minimal 32-bit bare-metal RISC-V OS.

It’s all still brewing, but I think these ideas tie together nicely. What if the OS didn’t have a file system and just a fact store? Everything could be queried and updated live, like a Lisp machine but built on facts.

Some other things I’ve been playing with:

A jQuery-like framework and element factory - You can pass signals that automatically updates the DOM.

A Datomic-like database on top of OPFS - where queries become signals that react to new triples as they enter the system. Pairs well with the framework above.

While taking care of my newborn, I had a lot of time to think about what annoys me most about being a software engineer. For me that is interfacing with databases.

So, I embarked a couple of weeks ago on my journey to build a relational database, which checks the boxes for me personally and I hope that this will be useful for other developers as well.

Project priorities (very early stage): - run code where the data is - inside of the database with user defined functions (most likely directly rust and wasm) - frontend to directly query the database without the risk of injection attacks (no rest, graphql, orms, models and all the boilerplate in between) - can be embedded into the application or runs as a standalone server - I hope this to be the killer feature to enable full integrations tests in milliseconds - imperative query language, which puts the developer back in control. Instead of thinking in terms of relational algebra, its centered around the idea of transforming a dataframe

Or in other words, I want to enable single developers or small teams to move fast, by giving them an opensource embeddable relational firebase.

https://reifydb.com/

If you have any thoughts on that, I would love to talk to you.

Lately I’ve been working on two things:

An iOS client for Cloudflare. Surprisingly, there’s none out there, maybe because nobody needs it? I do, so I’ve created one and it’s now available on TestFlight [0].

Another interesting thing I’ve recently discovered is that LLMs are pretty great at vetting tenancy agreements, so I’m working on a website that reads tenancy agreements and will return a list of unfair clauses that might be present in the contract along with a detailed explanation of how you should follow up with the landlord/agency. I still need to finish it but if you’re interested it’s here [1].

[0]: https://testflight.apple.com/join/Jj7WveWb

[1]: https://transparents.fyi

I've been building tooling for better debugger support for Rust types using debuginfo: https://github.com/samscott89/rudy

I'm planning on doing a proper writeup/release of this soon, but here's the short version: https://gist.github.com/samscott89/e819dcd35e387f99eb7ede156...

- Uses lldb's Python scripting extensions to register commands, and handle memory access. Talks to the Rust process over TCP.

- Supports pretty printing for custom structs + types from standard library (including Vec + HashMap).

- Some simple expression handling, like field access, array indexing, and map lookups.

- Can locate + call methods from binary.

http://axcas.net is an online computer algebra system I've been working on. I'm working to finish the programming language which is based on C, and I'm adding an ode solver which I plan to use to evaluate special functions.

I release code into the public domain hoping it will be useful. There's some fast code for Groebner basis computations using the F4 algorithm (parallelized - article to follow), and some routines for machine integers e.g. discrete logarithm, factoring, and prime counting.

Numpad: https://numpad.io/

It's a web-based notepad calculator, which means it's a notes app but it can evaluate inline calculations like

``` £300 in USD + 20%

09:00 to 18:30 - 45 minutes ```

I wrote the core of the calculator a few years ago, and I've just launched a big rewrite that supports

* document syncing * offline editing * markdown formatting * PDF and HTML exports * autocomplete * vim mode

Happy to hear feedback :)

Been working on https://github.com/amterp/rad for almost a year now. It's a programming language designed for writing good CLI scripts, so it's aiming to replace Bash but is much more Python-like, and offers unique syntax and a bunch of in-built support for scripting.

Please check it out if it sounds at all interesting! Keen for feedback :) I've written some docs, including a "getting started" guide, linked in the GitHub page.

https://github.com/srv1n/kurpod

Lets you create encrypted containers disguised as normal files. 1000s of images, pdfs, videos, secrets, keys all stuffed into an innocent look "Vacation_Summer_2024.mp4".

I've almost got true steganography working i.e to get the carrier file to actually open in any file system(currently with mp4, pdf, png and jpeg).

Things like this have existed in the past, but nothing with a simple UI,recent encryption standards.

Still working on https://periplus.app, and recently started to see some traction.

It's an environment for open-ended learning with LLMs. Something like a personalized, generative Wikipedia. Has generated courses, documents, exams and flashcards.

Each document links to more documents, which are all stored in a graph you grow over time.

https://DocCheetah.com - aiming to help accountants chase clients for their documentation. Launched, not got any traction, spent a little bit on advertising through LinkedIn. Probably need to execute more targeted marketing and more problem validation.

https://Full.CX - still hums along in the background. Couple of customers. Just added MCP which has been amazing to use with AI coding agents. Updating the UI/UX to ShadCN to improve usability and make it easier for future changes replacing NextUI and Daisy.

https://Toolnames.com - no changes this month.

https://Risks.io - little bit of work on the new platform, yet to be released.

https://dalehurley.com - little facelift

I'm still working on hcker.news, which first started as a more configurable hacker news frontpage, but has turned into a thing that I've found to be quite helpful at content discovery.

I recently by request[0] added a cohesive timeline view for hn's /bestcomments. The comments are grouped by story and presented in the order that they were added to the /bestcomments page. It's a great way to see popular comments on active topics. I'm going to add other frills like sorting and filtering, but this seems to be as good a time as any to get some of your thoughts!

You can check it out here: https://hcker.news/?view=bestcomments

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44076987 (thx adrianwaj)

I'm working on a rhythm game for original NES: https://zeta0134.itch.io/tactus

This is written entirely in 6502 assembly, and uses a fun new mapper that helps a little bit with the music, so I can have extra channels you can actually hear on an unmodded system. It's been really fun to push the hardware in unusual ways.

Currently the first Zone of the game is rather polished, and I'm doing a big giant pixel art drawing push to produce new enemies, items, and level artwork to fill out the remainder of the game. It's coming along slowly, but steadily. I'm trying to have it in "trailer ready" / "demo" state by the end of this calendar year. Just this weekend I added new chest types and the classic Mimic enemy to spice things up.

I am working on building a prototype for a simple 4-track recorder. It would be a cross between a Yak Back [0] voice recorder and a Tascam DP-004 [1] mixer.

My 7 year-old has gotten into music and is trying to record his own ideas. We have found the existing tools to be either too simple (Yak Back) or way too complex (Tascam). I want to make him something that has a simple interface, few buttons, and simple recording/mixing. The idea is to avoid the software programs like Garage Band and Logic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yak_Bak

[1] https://tascam.jp/int/product/dp-004/top

I'm working on LLM translation research for my tool that teaches you a language while you browse by translating sentences at your level into the language you're learning (https://nuenki.app)

I've had some breakthroughs with LLM translation, and I can now translate (slowly, unfortunately) at a far far higher quality than Opus, and well above DeepL. So I'm considering offering that as an API, though I don't know how much people actually care about translation quality.

DeepL's customers clearly don't care - their website is all about enterprise features, and they appear to get plenty of business despite their core product being mediocre.

Would people here be interested in that?

I finally compiled and expanded on all my various blog posts, tutorials and other Python goodness into a book: Working with Python. It is available as a free pdf download at: https://mkaz.blog/working-with-python/

It's grown over a dozen or so years and when I finally decide to compile into a book, everyone now uses AI and no longer read and learn from books but instead through LLMs.

Building an app that extracts key information from PDFs + highlights citations. You provide a PDF and a JSON schema defining what to extract, and it returns the extracted values, the citations and their precise locations in the document.

This is especially valuable in workflows where verification of LLM extracted information is critical (e.g. legal and finance). It can handle complex layouts like multiple columns, tables and also scanned documents.

Planning to offer this both as an API and a self-hosted option for organizations with strict data privacy requirements.

Screenshot: https://superdocs.io/highlight.png

I've been building small programs in Zig, C and ARM64 assembly without relying on libc and only using Linux syscalls directly.

Some examples:

- A minimal C shell with built-ins like cd, pwd, type: https://gist.github.com/rrampage/5046b60ca2d040bcffb49ee38e8...

- Terminal Snake game which fits in a QR code using Linux syscalls for drawing: https://gist.github.com/rrampage/2a781662645dc2fcba45784eb58...

- HTTP server with sendfile support in ARM64 assembly: https://gist.github.com/rrampage/d31e75647a77badb3586ebae1e4...

I learned to handcraft a static ELF binary using just GNU assembler (no linker): https://gist.github.com/rrampage/74586d0a0a451f43b546b169d46... . Trying to see if I can craft a small assembler in ARM64

Still building. https://tosreview.org/

Reading through the Terms of service in websites is a pain. Most of the users skip reading that and click accept. The risk is that they enter into a legally binding contract with a corporation without any idea what they are getting themselves into.

How it started: I read news about Disney blocking a wrongful death lawsuit, since the victim agreed to a arbitration clause when they signed up for a disney+ trial.

I started looking into available options for services that can mitigate this and found the amazing https://tosdr.org/en project.

That project relies on the work of volunteers who have been diligently reading the TOS and providing information in understandable terms.

Light bulb moment: LLM's are good at reading and summarizing text. Why not use LLMs for the same. That's when I started building tosreview.org. I am also sending it for the bolt.new hackathon.

Existing features: Input for user entered URLs or text Translation available for 30+ languages.

Planned features: Chrome/firefox extension Structured extraction of key information ( arbitration enforced , jurisdiction enforced etc).

Let me know if you have any feedback

I'm not actively working on it daily, as I have shortage of free time and helping hands, but the HTTP Spec Test Suite is my Moby-Dick. I wrote about it here: https://www.caffeinatedwonders.com/2024/12/18/towards-valida..., I also discussed it on the HTTP WG mailing list and presented it at the HTTP WG Workshop last year.

Another Moby-Dick of mine is Kadessh, the SSH server plugin of Caddy, formerly known as caddy-ssh. This one is an itch. I wrote about it here https://www.caffeinatedwonders.com/2022/03/28/new-ssh-server..., and the repo is here: https://github.com/kadeessh/kadeessh. Similar to the other one, feedback and helping hands are sorely needed.

They are both sort of an obsession and itches of mine, but between dayjob and school, I barely have a chance to have the clear mind to give them the attention they require.

I’m building an e-book reader for the web and PWA platforms:

https://flowery.app/books

The library of public domain classics is courtesy of Standard Ebooks. I publish a book every Saturday, and refine the EPUB parser and styler whenever they choke on a book. I’m currently putting the finishing touches to endnote rendering (pop-up or margin notes depending on screen width) so that next Saturday’s publication of “The Federalist Papers” does justice to the punctilious Publius.

Obligatory landing page for the paid product:

https://flowery.app/vocabulary-building

Me and my friend are working on Workback[1], a tool that can fix a11y issues end-to-end.

First we built it as a tool to fix any bug. After talking to a few folks, we realized that it is too broad. From my own personal experience, we realized how messy it is within organizations to address accessibility issues. Everybody scrambles around last minute. No body loves the work - developers, PMs, TPMs etc. And often external contractors or auditors are involved.

Now with Workback, we are hoping to solve the issues using the agentic loop.

If you personally experienced this problem, would love to chat and learn from your experience.

[1] https://workback.ai

I am working on building a custom PDF Web Component. With this web component, you can

- Create your own PDF editor with custom UI with the help of public methods which are exposed in the web component.

- You can add dynamic variables/data to the templates. What this means is you create one template, for example, a certificate template with name and date as variables and all you have to do is upload your CSV / JSON of names and dates, and it will generate the dynamic PDFs for you.

- It's framework-agnostic. You can use this library in any front-end framework.

It's still in early development, and I would love to connect with people who have some use cases around it.

I have integrated this library in one of our projects, Formester. You can see the details here https://formester.com/features/pdf-editor/

I have posted this demo video for reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jorWjTOMjfs

Note: Right now it has very limited capabilities like only adding text and image elements. Will be adding more features going forward.

Working on https://vide.dev, the Cursor for Flutter devs.

While Cursor stops after writing great code, Vide goes the extra mile and has full runtime integration. Vide will go the extra mile & make sure the UI looks on point, works on all screen configurations and behaves correctly. It does this by being deeply integrated into Flutters tooling, it's able to take screenshot/ place widgets on a Figma-like canvas and even interact with everything in an isolated and reproducible environment.

I currently have a web version of the IDE live but I'm going to launch a full native desktop IDE very soon.

Mostly writing for myself; I should really convert some drafts into proper blog posts because I'm really interested in discussing my ideas with others.

I've been thinking a lot about the current field of AI research and wondering if we're asking the right questions? I've watched some videos from Yann LeCun where he highlights some of the key limitations of current approaches, but I haven't seen anyone discussing or specifying all major key pieces that are believed to be currently missing. In general I feel like there's tons of events and presentations about AI-related topics but the questions are disappointingly shallow / entry-level. So you have all these major key figures repeating the same basic talking points over and over to different audiences. Where is the deeper content? Are all the interesting conversations just happening behind closed doors inside of companies and research centers?

Recently I was watching a presentation from John Carmack where he talks about what Keen is up to, but I was a bit frustrated with where he finished. One of the key insights he mentions is that we need to be training models in real-time environments that operate independently from the agent, and the agent needs to be able to adapt. It seems like some of the work that he's doing is operating at too low of an abstraction level or that it's missing some key component for the model to reflect on what it's doing, but then there's no exploration of what that thing might be. Although maybe a presentation is the wrong place for this kind of question.

I keep thinking that we're formulating a lot of incoherent questions or failing to clearly state what key questions we are looking to answer, across multiple domains and socially.

Working on tail calls for TXR Lisp. Current release provides self tail calls only; and certain cases don't work, like applying in tail position. Plus there is a shadowing bug. These issues are addressed already.

Tail calls between different VM functions are the next challenge. I'm going to somehow have it allocate the VM instance in the same space (if the frame size of the target is larger than the source, "alloca" the difference). The arguments have to be smuggled somehow while we are reinitializing the frame in-place.

I might have a prefix instruction called tail which immediately precedes a call, apply, gcall or gapply. The vm dispatch loop will terminate when it encounters tail similarly to the end instructions. The caller will notice that a tail instruction had been executed, and then precipitate into the tail call logic which will interpret the prefixed instruction in a special way. The calling instruction has to pull out the argument values from whatever registers it refers to. They have to survive the in-place execution somehow.

Myself.

Been a freelance dev for years, now beginning a "sabbatical" (love that word).

Planning to do a lot of learning, self-improvement, and projects. Tech-related and not. Preparing for the next volume (not chapter) of life. Refactoring, if you like, among other things.

I'm excited.

I'm building a platform to help people—especially students and young adults—design meaningful, intentional lives with balance, courage, and an entrepreneurial mindset.

In Singapore, the system is heavily academic. You're expected to follow a rigid path (PSLE → JC → Uni → job), but no one teaches you how to think about what kind of life you want to live—or how to create it. That leaves many people feeling lost, even if they’re “on track.”

This platform flips that. It starts with the big picture: *“When you’re 90, what do you want your life to have looked like?”*

From there, users create a personal timeline of milestones across life domains: health, relationships, learning, impact—and now, *financial freedom.*

The app helps users:

1. Set long-term visions, then break them into clear, visual milestones

2. Use an AI assistant to suggest weekly actions and recalibrate as life evolves

3. Voice journal instead of typing; the AI transcribes and flags patterns (“You mentioned burnout 5x this week. Want to add a rest week or revise your work goals?”)

4. Track basic finances and align spending/saving to long-term goals (“You want to take a year off at 30. At this pace, you’ll have the runway by 32. Want to adjust?”)

5. Get matched with mentors or peer circles for guidance and accountability

The goal is not to “optimize” life like a spreadsheet. It’s to help people reflect, take control, and become someone they’re proud of.

If you’ve worked on anything in this space—journaling, goal tracking, financial wellness, coaching—I’d love to learn:

A. What made your tool stick long-term?

B. How did you balance simplicity with depth?

C. Any design or product traps I should avoid?

Appreciate any thoughts, questions, or brutal feedback.

A job feed for remote jobs - https://tangerinefeed.net/

This is something I’ve needed myself over the last few years as jobs become shorter and shorter lived. Keep on improving it as some kind of compulsion.

I’ve been working on an app called Lång. It’s a calm daily spending guide – shows you what’s okay to spend today, based on how much needs to last how long.

The idea came from noticing how most people manage money day to day: checking their balance, adjusting by feel, trying not to drift. There are tons of tools for planning or categorising, but not much that fits that kind of improvised pacing.

Still early, but trying to shape it around those habits – to make something simple and steady, that supports how people already do things.

https://lang.money

I've been working on implementing @mpweiher "Storage Combinators" [0] and "polymorphic Identifiers" [1] in Eiffel [3].

Currently I'm stuck implementing a storage combinator with EiffelWebFramework[4]

[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3359591.3359729

[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_(programming_language)

[3] https://github.com/EiffelWebFramework/EWF