from Hacker News

Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (August 2024)

by david927 on 8/1/24, 5:01 PM with 60 comments

• by dang on 8/1/24, 7:54 PM

  I think I might have posted this before, but: I'm open to having a regular "What are you working on?" thread. I even reserved https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoisworking for that.

  But it shouldn't be on the first of the month, colliding with Who Is Hiring threads. How about, hmm, the third Saturday of each month? or maybe Friday?

• by mgl on 8/1/24, 6:45 PM

  I'm working within a small team on an open-source alternative to Salesforce Platform.

  Our big dream is to enable companies of any size to build faster and smarter high-quality software with a solid enterprise foundation (think: security, scalability, traceability) and still retain the rights to the product they pay for.

  https://github.com/openkoda/openkoda

  Short demo of our insurance application template: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtPOZEERMQo

• by h2odragon on 8/1/24, 5:19 PM

  Spent a bit of time last month on multilingual scrabble: what set of ~100, or 150 tiles will allow us to play a good scrabble game in language $X?

  There's plenty of word lists on the net to give a sense of "what is a language", and a scrabble simulator script was fun to come up with. So now i have a script that can take a proposed tile set and play a bunch of scrabble games with it in a given language (or group of them) to help judge the viability of the set.

  I took it that far because my wife is learning Czech and wanted a tile set as a study aid. Our ~128 tile English set is providing fun on our refrigerator for the whole family as a "walk by crossword game", and the 150 tile czech set seems to be working for the wife. 98 wouldn't be enough for czech; simulator said, and it was right.

  I was excited at first about the possibility of sharing the results of my work, but "crossword / scrabble game" is apparently a very narrow niche. Most of the world I can talk to doesn't appear to need a better scrabble set.

  I had fun with it, and that's reward enough.

• by jll29 on 8/1/24, 7:00 PM

  Just two ideas from the portfolio:

  - I'm working on LLM-based detection of media bias for English and German (later perhaps other languages), which is more detailed (27 bias sub-types), fine-grained (sentence level instead of document-level) and accurate than the state of the art. The result is be a Web browser plug-in. I'm also thinking about that project's governance and how to deploy this technology to benefit the general public free of charge for end users.

  - I'm thinking of knowledge management processes and tools (both for personal and organizational use) and ways to stimulate adoption because management seems to not see the sad state of affairs (everything is broken) and the value of this working.

  My R&D work aims to cut across the traditional divide between "basic science - applied science - industry applications" in that I like to discover & play with pretty fundamental concepts that can be tried in practical (software) prototypes and then pushed into production use.

• by dvh on 8/1/24, 6:52 PM

  I'm babysitting a parakeet for whole week. As a programmer, it's very distracting. Don't get parakeet.

• by garysahota93 on 8/1/24, 6:42 PM

  I'm building a data seeding / simulation service that populates systems (like Salesforce) with realistic-looking data.

  Thought is that you can build compelling demos with your real app.

  No need for "fake web app" demos anymore :)

  https://www.tetherdata.io/

• by billconan on 8/1/24, 6:07 PM

  a Free book teaching WebGPU / graphics programming, with a live code playground

  https://shi-yan.github.io/WebGPUUnleashed/

  https://shi-yan.github.io/WebGPUUnleashed/code/code.html#5_0...

• by Leftium on 8/2/24, 7:02 AM

  A new way to visualize the weather (forecast). https://weather-sense.leftium.com got some interest in another thread[1].

  Major updates in the past month:

  - Added AQI

  - Adjusted map colors to make precipitation radar more visible

  - Tweaked UI/styling

  If I find some time to work on it:

  - One hour minutely precipitation forecast

  - Allow toggling of all data in plots.

  - Settings UI + persist to cookie.

  - Minor bug fixes.

  [1]: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/41113290

• by l3l_aze on 8/1/24, 7:13 PM

  Just a hobbyist, but always wanted a programming job; not a socialite though as everyone expects nowadays. Currently screwing around with vanilla HTML/CSS/JS to build a zero dependency simple code editor using VSCode as inspiration. Parsing and highlighting is working well, including nested tokens, but folding is kicking my teeth in. Took a break from that to work on Shift/Tab indent/outdent, and that has went about as well. So, bouncing between those and treading water.

• by ninjha01 on 8/1/24, 6:36 PM

  I'm working on a UI kit for life science research!

  https://docs.nitro.bio/

  A lot of bioinformatics tools have been recompiled to wasm, and I'm working on integrating them these vizualizations.

  https://storybook.nitro.bio/?path=/story/ariadne-ariadne--ki...

• by wbazant on 8/1/24, 6:50 PM

  I'm on parental leave and working on the new site for a non-profit, Falling Fruit.

  https://github.com/falling-fruit/falling-fruit-web

  We're looking for more contributions - it's a React / Redux app that tries to replace the current site and mobile app with one codebase, and then go from there - join us if you fancy!

• by nonrandomstring on 8/1/24, 5:20 PM

  Trust models. Big rabbit hole. Critique and analysis of zero trust, contracts, motives etc. Very enlightening and fun in a way.

• by steph-123 on 8/2/24, 2:47 AM

  I'm involved in developing x-cmd. We've been focused on developing new features and optimizing user experience. We occasionally promote it on social media and Hack News, but the results have been poor, which is frustrating.

  https://www.x-cmd.com/

• by BWStearns on 8/5/24, 5:33 AM

  Writing assistant for your second language(s). Right now it’s a web/mobile app but we’re getting ready to launch our browser extension so hopefully that will be more convenient for our users.

  https://nativi.sh

  Also since the backend is in rust I’ve been contributing to a bunch of the libraries I’m using. There’s definitely been a cost to using rust since a lot of the web dev packages are on the younger side, but the reliability has been huge for a side project. Other than one time I set the wrong send grid API key I don’t think we’ve had a single 500.

• by PaulHoule on 8/1/24, 6:53 PM

  At work we take a month or two in a summer to do code cleanup work, we just got up to JDK 21 and I rebuilt the build system for a Javascript project.

  In terms of my side projects recent developments are:

  (1) made a fork of my "second brain" (third brain?) and loaded in a friend's notes from evernotes. I started putting tags on about 400 items one at a time assuming an ontology would emerge (it has in many projects I've done) but I got stuck. I am probably going to add some reports/visualizations and a simple comment facility and move forward.

  (2) I made friends with someone who designs clothing who is interested in collaborating on print-on-demand fabrics. Turns out almost all printed fabric is silkscreened which is great in some respects but doesn't let you render the full range of colors that is possible in print-on-demand which is often inkjet. PoD fabric is about twice as expensive as silkscreen printed fabric so I'm feeling the need to make designs that are unlike anyone's ever seen before: photography-based images that don't make people feel they are "wearing a photograph".

  It's a crazy competitive market with many different vendors that specialize in different kinds of fabrics, I am running 8x8 sample prints, ordering sample books as well as sets of color swatches so I can get a handle on color management.

  I'm probably going to produce the first fabric based on an image I already have which I took of a flower field with a very wide aperture lens but I am thinking for this purpose I don't want to have any trouble making images that tile so I'm planning on photographing 20-50 flowers and cutting them out from the background and then procedurally generating infinite flower fields with the exact properties I want. I got into flower photography last year because I found the photos did really well on social but I was kinda bored doing it last year and would feel even more bored if I kept doing what I was doing last year without adding something to my technique and this is it.

• by zackbrown on 8/1/24, 7:06 PM

  A cross-platform UI kit that's also a vector design tool: https://www.pax.dev/

  Sort of like a new Flash, but open source, compiles to WASM or LLVM instead of requiring a plugin, and driven by language all the way down.

  The language piece is a declarative UI language tailored to vector design; the vector design tool reads & writes this declarative language and you can go back and forth between visual edits and code edits. All of this attaches to and is driven by existing programming languages, starting with Rust and following soon with JavaScript.

  Getting very close to our first launch! Have been quietly developing in the open for a while.

• by ryanchants on 8/2/24, 11:28 PM

  I'm working on a small website for finding restaurants and breweries when you're traveling. It currently has 4 year of Great American Beer Fest winners and 3 years of James Beard nominees and winners.

  It's very alpha at this point with no styling. I'm also working on getting addresses, websites, and instagram links gathered and added. Plus collapsing down the entries, so a place with multiple awards only shows up once, with all of its awards. Right now it's just 1 results per award.

  https://nomnominees.com/

• by impure on 8/1/24, 7:36 PM

  Moving Stratum's (my RSS reader) backend from Firebase to PocketBase. It worked pretty well, even made an offline caching system that works about as good as Firestore's. However I recently found a bug: if the app thinks you're online and you're actually offline it'll try to fetch from the server and it will take forever. I have to add a timeout somewhere.

  The backend is coded in Go which I originally didn't like but now I love. It's so much easier to work with than TypeScript and Firebase Cloud Functions. It allowed me to easily add quite a few features like the one that allows me to summarize Hacker News comment sections .

• by diggan on 8/1/24, 6:53 PM

  As it is summer in my hemisphere of the world, I've been focusing on more fun projects, namely diving into Bevy and game development in order to hopefully one day be able to publish a PC game of my own.

  Currently focusing on reading up on everything I can regarding NPC AI, and 80% done with a library for Bevy that allows one to program NPC AI via GOAP (Goal-Oriented Action Planning, probably made most famous by the AI in F.E.A.R), which has been a lot of fun. Although Rust is basically the opposite of my favorite language, so still taking some time to wrangle the code to my needs, but I'm sure it'll be fine in the end.

• by ishanr on 8/1/24, 6:44 PM

  I am working on a ebook reader which uses AI to make reading easier and has a built in book club to talk about the book as you read it and once you are done.

  Basically I am building it for myself as some books are hard to read, and if I can substitute a paragraph or some sections with an ELI5 version that would get me through a lot more books and may it so much fun.

  And I love chatting about books and that is half of the fun for me, so I am building it in the app itself.

  Using Tauri and Rust for all of this because I don't like slow apps.

  Will also build mobile apps next once I am done with the desktop versions as I like syncing where I read etc.

• by cddotdotslash on 8/1/24, 6:05 PM

  I’ve been working on a tool for managing AWS Organizations, SCPs, and IAM policies. At the moment it’s more a collection of scratch-my-own-itch features (interactive tree view for accounts, access denied debugger, and a few tools related to seeing how SCPs are inherited through the OU structure). Hosting it at wut.dev if this sounds interesting to you.

  One neat thing (although makes it more challenging to build) is that I’m using the AWS JS SDK to do everything client side. So the whole app is basically a single HTML/JS page with no API, creds are only stored locally, etc.

• by jasondigitized on 8/1/24, 11:35 PM

  I just made Little Riddle, a word game for my mom. I took a list of popular nouns, verbs, and adjectives and found words that rhyme with each word. Cleaned up that list, removing obscure words and words that didn't really rhyme together. I then asked ChatGPT to come up with a clue for each rhyming pair. I just gave it to my mom for her birthday and she loves it. It's based on a analog word game people refer to as "Road Toad".

  https://little-riddle.com/

• by pacifi30 on 8/1/24, 6:55 PM

  Prototyping :

  - Financial credit building for children via parent

  - a better Siri (but many companies in this space is demotivating)

  - a Capitol Hill Club, kind of like a country club for people, parents, kids to relax after work and which is not a restaurant

• by LolBatmanHuntsU on 8/1/24, 6:45 PM

  Inspired by this Veritasium video: https://youtu.be/R13BD8qKeTg?feature=shared

  I'm working on a journal that incorporates Bayesian learning on how aspects of my life affect my mental, physical and social well-being. Having used it for nearly 500 days I plan to turn it into a life accounting and auditing tool.

  https://www.habitually.co.uk/

• by sshine on 8/1/24, 6:47 PM

  Consulting:

    - Firmware for high-power EV chargers (Rust)
    - CI/build systems on Raspberry Pi's (NixOS)
    - Documentation for zk-STARK compiler (Rust)
    - Software for insurance back-office (Elixir)
  

  Personal:

    - Turtle graphics with HTML Canvas via WebAssembly (web-sys crate)
    - NixOS configuration for my laptops and Raspberry Pi's at home
    - SSH AuthorizedKeys management for distributing SSH keys
    - A pinyin editor for creating flashcards based on corpuses

• by eappleby on 8/1/24, 8:51 PM

  I’m building a platform that helps elementary and middle schools raise money. Students answer as many math problems as they can over a week or two and ask friends and family to support them by making a donation to their school. The math problems are dynamite created and generally follow the math curriculum that most schools follow. https://www.forourschool.org

• by mchab on 8/1/24, 5:22 PM

  I have been working on a platform where people could solve ML problems similar to leetcode but more focused on learning and less on interview https://www.deep-ml.com/, also started making the problems open source https://github.com/Open-Deep-ML/DML-OpenProblem

• by GeoHubToday on 8/2/24, 3:27 AM

  We're building a platform that gathers all GPS outages globally every day and packs it into a searchable database

  We also map how close these outages are to oil and gas pipelines

  We will also be incorporating ocean fiber outages, Starlink outages, and whatever else we can find that helps us make sense of the world in near real-time

  The future of news is data

  https://geohub.today

• by alexplaning on 8/3/24, 8:36 PM

  Since immigrant community is self-centric rather supportive, I'm building a platform for fellows tech immigrants

• by ezzabuzaid on 8/1/24, 9:25 PM

  I’m working on battery included backend framework + transpiler that emits both maintainable and extendable Node.js and Go code.

  It’s more or less an API development platform focusing on implementing and automating business logic.

  Playground: https://app.january.ah

  Website: https://january.sh

• by bradleykingz on 8/1/24, 7:02 PM

  I'm working on a financial literacy application.

  https://kiihela.com

  I love MoneyManager by Realbyte, but having to manually input transactions became tiring after a while.

  So I decided to build one that works specifically for my country. It parses MPESA smss and, with enough data, we'll be able to automatically categorize almost any transaction.

• by c0wb0yc0d3r on 8/2/24, 4:15 AM

  Outside of work I'm learning about buildroot and building a tiny Linux systems. When I get stuck with that, I'm working through Crafting Interpreters. If I'm lucky I'll be able to take what I've learned and make a unit aware calculator.

• by milquen on 8/4/24, 4:30 AM

  I'm building this educational game to help build proofreading skills: https://frogs.cool

• by jasfi on 8/1/24, 7:13 PM

  I'm aiming for writing full-scale web apps with LLMs, mostly autonomously.

  The advice I got was to talk to customers, because this could be something nobody wants.

• by dearroy on 8/5/24, 3:20 AM

  Slowly growing HeyForm into the complete open-source form solution, with AI integration coming soon.

• by ngshiheng on 8/3/24, 7:57 AM

  adding some minor improvements here and there to my project https://tournacat.com (syncs your fav esports schedules to Google Calendar)

  i don't spend a lot of time on it every day, just trying to accumulative in hopes that it'll add up over time

• by ddgflorida on 8/1/24, 8:59 PM

  Upload private or public sqlite database files and run SQL statements, explore. Import JSON, XML, CSV, Excel.

• by dzonga on 8/5/24, 11:22 AM

  travel fin-tech platform with credit like rewards for emerging markets but for people without credit cards.

• by takkatakka on 8/2/24, 3:27 PM

  Just dinking around making an RDP electron app.