8 ms·

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

30 points by david927 2y ago

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?

takkatakka 2y ago
Just dinking around making an RDP electron app.
ryanchants 2y ago
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/ https://nomnominees.com/
ngshiheng 2y ago
adding some minor improvements here and there to my project https://tournacat.com 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
alexplaning 2y ago
Since immigrant community is self-centric rather supportive, I'm building a platform for fellows tech immigrants
milquen 2y ago
I'm building this educational game to help build proofreading skills: https://frogs.cool https://frogs.cool
dearroy 2y ago
Slowly growing HeyForm into the complete open-source form solution, with AI integration coming soon.
BWStearns 2y ago
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 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.
dzonga 2y ago
travel fin-tech platform with credit like rewards for emerging markets but for people without credit cards.
h2odragon 2y ago
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.
mchab 2y ago
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/ https://www.deep-ml.com/, also started making the problems open source https://github.com/Open-Deep-ML/DML-OpenProblem https://github.com/Open-Deep-ML/DML-OpenProblem
nonrandomstring 2y ago
Trust models. Big rabbit hole. Critique and analysis of zero trust, contracts, motives etc. Very enlightening and fun in a way.
- jll29 2y ago
  Good topic. Trust isn't properly understood yet. Look at Sir Berners-Lee: smart guy, but he put "trust" as a component box in his vision of the so-called Semantic Web as if it was an API that you could just call. Trust is of course an emergent property of a well-designed, reliable, transparent, safe and secure system, and as such it is a relation between a system and its human users. Please write up what you find out and share!
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    Will do. Origin story; planned to write a short series of very tiny booklets on cybersecurity for some students. Question arose; what is the most atomic concept in cybersec from which to build? Networks? Crytptography? Identity? Risk? Quality? After about two months I decided it was Trust. Totally sucked me in to reading everything from tribal anthropology to cold-war game theory. It feels like a great invisible dark mass holding a galaxy of other things together.
    - snicky 2y ago
      I'd be interested in reading what you can share on this topic too. What was the most enlighting / interesting read for you so far? Can you point to a single book or two?
cddotdotslash 2y ago
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.
billconan 2y ago
a Free book teaching WebGPU / graphics programming, with a live code playground https://shi-yan.github.io/WebGPUUnleashed/ https://shi-yan.github.io/WebGPUUnleashed/ https://shi-yan.github.io/WebGPUUnleashed/code/code.html#5_06_skeleton_animation https://shi-yan.github.io/WebGPUUnleashed/code/code.html#5_0...
ninjha01 2y ago
I'm working on a UI kit for life science research! https://docs.nitro.bio/ 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--kitchen-sink-viewer-story https://storybook.nitro.bio/?path=/story/ariadne-ariadne--ki...
- wbazant 2y ago
  These are really beautiful components!
garysahota93 2y ago
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/ https://www.tetherdata.io/
ishanr 2y ago
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.
mgl 2y ago
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 https://github.com/openkoda/openkoda Short demo of our insurance application template: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtPOZEERMQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtPOZEERMQo
LolBatmanHuntsU 2y ago
Inspired by this Veritasium video: https://youtu.be/R13BD8qKeTg?feature=shared 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/ https://www.habitually.co.uk/
sshine 2y ago
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
wbazant 2y ago
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 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!
- mbil 2y ago
  One of the linked data sources (for Philadelphia trees) is http://phillytreemap.org/map/ http://phillytreemap.org/map/, which currently points to an odd online betting website...
  - wbazant 2y ago
    Thanks, I told Ethan, he can adjust the description of the dataset.
dvh 2y ago
I'm babysitting a parakeet for whole week. As a programmer, it's very distracting. Don't get parakeet.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  For me it's been a stray cat. My wife trapped him and another cat a few months ago, the other cat escaped but "Bob B" stayed. I set up a "cat room" in our other house which is under renovation and go over there to read books, watch TV, and things like that. When I was there he would always hide on a high shelf in the closet but I had a breakthrough a little more than a week ago when he started coming down to eat his meals and I was able to feed him cat treats, sometimes a few inches from my fingers so he would bump into me with his nose. One time he bit me accidentally when he was trying to bite into a kibble and he immediately seemed contrite and got a lot more careful. https://mastodon.social/@UP8/112824600179209599 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/112824600179209599 I got him back from the vet Tuesday afternoon to get him neutered, vaccinated and all that, when he saw me for the first time from his shelf he was stressed and his pupils expanded to the point where I could not see his irises. The next day though he did come down to eat his dinner although I could only get him to do a short play session... I'm happy though that I didn't lose all my progress. In a week or two I think we can get the rest of the house safe for him and let him have the run of the house. Right now he's obviously depressed and anxious from having too small of a space because every little thing like noises from the hard drive on my Xbox bothers him, so I think he'll blossom in a bigger environment. I'm not worried about a kitten bomb if he escapes now because I do want him to stick around because this changed from "a project I'm doing to learning more about cats" to feeling really attached to him. There's also a concern about what we'll do when we rent the other house and we'll probably have to move him to our house (with two cats) or into the barn (with one cat) but I'm hoping he'll be much much easier to handle by then. (He chomped on me twice when I was packing him into a crate to see the vet, it's a good thing I was wearing heavy gloves)
PaulHoule 2y ago
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.
- endo_bunker 2y ago
  What do you use in your second brain stack?
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    If you look up YOShInOn in the search box for Hacker News you will hear a lot about the last version of the product which is an RSS reader that is written in Python, uses HTMX for the front end and SBERT embeddings and scikit-learn for classification and clustering and does it all with asyncio. (I was about to call it "version 1" but it has predecessors that go back about 20 years) I've also developed Fraxinus, which I was earlier calling an "image sorter" which adds a bookmark manager and webcrawler. It started out asyncio but I was having trouble w/ the web server blocking so I rewrote it as sync and it now runs under gunicorn and has a celery server running. The first version would let me import image galleries with a bookmarklet and it has a tagging and query system which is designed for machine learning systems. (e.g. you can put on a negative tag which says "this is not a member of class C" and also an indeterminate tag which means "we're looking for your opinion if this is a member of class") Believe it or not I am thinking about going to a React or similar GUI, at least for some things, because this query system is capable of answering complex queries that take complements and intersections of a large number of tags and attributes which is more than the "Union of N tags and attributes" which is easy to do in HTMX. I am thinking about merging the code bases which would be basically implementing YOShInOn inside of Fraxinus. I'm not in such a hurry because the system works well, but the one problem I have with it now is that it runs in a batch mode where it picks about 300 articles to show me, I look at them, then it classifies another batch. Earlier I was reading more articles and it turned around in about 1.5 days but I haven't been using it as much lately and sometimes a cycle goes 7+ days and when you add up all the queues involved an article can go a long time between when it is published, my system picks it up, I favorite it, then schedule it to get posted on HN or Mastodon. For most of the topics I cover it is not so bad because many "news" items are still interesting after two weeks but it's a disaster for sports news stories which often are only of interest until the next game. So I am thinking of how to make it run in an incremental mode that can tag certain topics for fast processing and also make it more compatible with ActivityPub so it can be a "Mastodon reader that doesn't suck".
diggan 2y ago
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.
pacifi30 2y ago
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
- jll29 2y ago
  > - a better Siri (but many companies in this space is demotivating) Don't be discouraged, there is so much room for improvement, and we had a better system than Siri (regarding general ability to answer open domain questions) back in 2004 (SMS-based, with a view to eventually incorporate speech recognition). I have not seen a player that does this really well, and the need is unquestionable (despite the VCs that told me in 2004 that the mobile Internet won't be a thing because "if it will be possible, it will be so expensive that no-one uses it").
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jll29 2y ago
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.
bradleykingz 2y ago
I'm working on a financial literacy application. https://kiihela.com 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.
zackbrown 2y ago
A cross-platform UI kit that's also a vector design tool: https://www.pax.dev/ 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.
l3l_aze 2y ago
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.
jasfi 2y ago
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.
impure 2y ago
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 .
dang 2y ago
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 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?
- muzani 2y ago
  I would say Saturday. California Saturdays are someone else's Sundays. Weekends have that chill creativity vibe contrasting with the more serious Who Is Hiring vibes you get on a Monday.
- curtisblaine 2y ago
  It's a great idea and I would like it.
  - david927 2y ago
    I've been running these monthly since 2021. I think it works to tie it to the month, and it's strange to say the month name when you run it on the 21st. I'll move it to the 3rd of each month unless it's the weekend, and then I'll push it to that Monday.
    - dang 2y ago
      I appreciate that you've been making the case for these threads for a long time! The problem is that they get flagged and downweighted because unofficial monthly regular threads are (informally) not allowed here. Otherwise people try to start too many of them, and it's one of those things that only works well within limits. The solution we hit on with whoishiring (a long time ago) was to make it official, give it basically a system account, and take it out of the realm of individual submissions.
      - david927 2y ago
        I had no idea, Dan. Thanks for letting me know. I'll stop posting them.
eappleby 2y ago
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 https://www.forourschool.org
ddgflorida 2y ago
Upload private or public sqlite database files and run SQL statements, explore. Import JSON, XML, CSV, Excel.
ezzabuzaid 2y ago
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 https://app.january.ah Website: https://january.sh https://january.sh
jasondigitized 2y ago
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/ https://little-riddle.com/
- wbazant 2y ago
  Very fun! They're usually not too hard and still gratifying to find
steph-123 2y ago
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/ https://www.x-cmd.com/
GeoHubToday 2y ago
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 https://geohub.today
c0wb0yc0d3r 2y ago
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.
Leftium 2y ago
A new way to visualize the weather (forecast). https://weather-sense.leftium.com 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 https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/41113290
- is_true 2y ago
  I like the graphs. Is the map radar data or a forecast? I'm on mobile in case there a title somewhere that I'm not seeing. If it's radar data. Where do you get it? I wanted to try radar data for my area to help a group of people trying to have a network of weather stations online and making sure everything was working fine.
  - Leftium 2y ago
    The Rain Viewer API provides 2 hours of past radar data and 30 minutes of radar forecast data. If you donate on Patreon you get 60 minutes of radar forecast data[1]. [1]: https://www.rainviewer.com/api.html https://www.rainviewer.com/api.html
    - is_true 2y ago
      thank you. We are gonna try it, we have a a script to extract radar data from the images on the local weather agency but it has a lot of problems with compression artifacts.

30 points by david927 2y ago

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?

takkatakka 2y ago

Just dinking around making an RDP electron app.

ryanchants 2y ago

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/ https://nomnominees.com/

ngshiheng 2y ago

adding some minor improvements here and there to my project https://tournacat.com 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

alexplaning 2y ago

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

milquen 2y ago

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

dearroy 2y ago

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

BWStearns 2y ago

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 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.

dzonga 2y ago

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

h2odragon 2y ago

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.

mchab 2y ago

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/ https://www.deep-ml.com/, also started making the problems open source https://github.com/Open-Deep-ML/DML-OpenProblem https://github.com/Open-Deep-ML/DML-OpenProblem

nonrandomstring 2y ago

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

jll29 2y ago
Good topic. Trust isn't properly understood yet. Look at Sir Berners-Lee: smart guy, but he put "trust" as a component box in his vision of the so-called Semantic Web as if it was an API that you could just call. Trust is of course an emergent property of a well-designed, reliable, transparent, safe and secure system, and as such it is a relation between a system and its human users. Please write up what you find out and share!
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  Will do. Origin story; planned to write a short series of very tiny booklets on cybersecurity for some students. Question arose; what is the most atomic concept in cybersec from which to build? Networks? Crytptography? Identity? Risk? Quality? After about two months I decided it was Trust. Totally sucked me in to reading everything from tribal anthropology to cold-war game theory. It feels like a great invisible dark mass holding a galaxy of other things together.
  - snicky 2y ago
    I'd be interested in reading what you can share on this topic too. What was the most enlighting / interesting read for you so far? Can you point to a single book or two?

cddotdotslash 2y ago

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.

billconan 2y ago

a Free book teaching WebGPU / graphics programming, with a live code playground https://shi-yan.github.io/WebGPUUnleashed/ https://shi-yan.github.io/WebGPUUnleashed/ https://shi-yan.github.io/WebGPUUnleashed/code/code.html#5_06_skeleton_animation https://shi-yan.github.io/WebGPUUnleashed/code/code.html#5_0...

ninjha01 2y ago

I'm working on a UI kit for life science research! https://docs.nitro.bio/ 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--kitchen-sink-viewer-story https://storybook.nitro.bio/?path=/story/ariadne-ariadne--ki...

wbazant 2y ago
These are really beautiful components!

garysahota93 2y ago

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/ https://www.tetherdata.io/

ishanr 2y ago

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.

mgl 2y ago

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

LolBatmanHuntsU 2y ago

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

sshine 2y ago

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

wbazant 2y ago

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 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!

mbil 2y ago
One of the linked data sources (for Philadelphia trees) is http://phillytreemap.org/map/ http://phillytreemap.org/map/, which currently points to an odd online betting website...
- wbazant 2y ago
  Thanks, I told Ethan, he can adjust the description of the dataset.

dvh 2y ago

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

PaulHoule 2y ago
For me it's been a stray cat. My wife trapped him and another cat a few months ago, the other cat escaped but "Bob B" stayed. I set up a "cat room" in our other house which is under renovation and go over there to read books, watch TV, and things like that. When I was there he would always hide on a high shelf in the closet but I had a breakthrough a little more than a week ago when he started coming down to eat his meals and I was able to feed him cat treats, sometimes a few inches from my fingers so he would bump into me with his nose. One time he bit me accidentally when he was trying to bite into a kibble and he immediately seemed contrite and got a lot more careful. https://mastodon.social/@UP8/112824600179209599 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/112824600179209599 I got him back from the vet Tuesday afternoon to get him neutered, vaccinated and all that, when he saw me for the first time from his shelf he was stressed and his pupils expanded to the point where I could not see his irises. The next day though he did come down to eat his dinner although I could only get him to do a short play session... I'm happy though that I didn't lose all my progress. In a week or two I think we can get the rest of the house safe for him and let him have the run of the house. Right now he's obviously depressed and anxious from having too small of a space because every little thing like noises from the hard drive on my Xbox bothers him, so I think he'll blossom in a bigger environment. I'm not worried about a kitten bomb if he escapes now because I do want him to stick around because this changed from "a project I'm doing to learning more about cats" to feeling really attached to him. There's also a concern about what we'll do when we rent the other house and we'll probably have to move him to our house (with two cats) or into the barn (with one cat) but I'm hoping he'll be much much easier to handle by then. (He chomped on me twice when I was packing him into a crate to see the vet, it's a good thing I was wearing heavy gloves)

PaulHoule 2y ago

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.

endo_bunker 2y ago
What do you use in your second brain stack?
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  If you look up YOShInOn in the search box for Hacker News you will hear a lot about the last version of the product which is an RSS reader that is written in Python, uses HTMX for the front end and SBERT embeddings and scikit-learn for classification and clustering and does it all with asyncio. (I was about to call it "version 1" but it has predecessors that go back about 20 years) I've also developed Fraxinus, which I was earlier calling an "image sorter" which adds a bookmark manager and webcrawler. It started out asyncio but I was having trouble w/ the web server blocking so I rewrote it as sync and it now runs under gunicorn and has a celery server running. The first version would let me import image galleries with a bookmarklet and it has a tagging and query system which is designed for machine learning systems. (e.g. you can put on a negative tag which says "this is not a member of class C" and also an indeterminate tag which means "we're looking for your opinion if this is a member of class") Believe it or not I am thinking about going to a React or similar GUI, at least for some things, because this query system is capable of answering complex queries that take complements and intersections of a large number of tags and attributes which is more than the "Union of N tags and attributes" which is easy to do in HTMX. I am thinking about merging the code bases which would be basically implementing YOShInOn inside of Fraxinus. I'm not in such a hurry because the system works well, but the one problem I have with it now is that it runs in a batch mode where it picks about 300 articles to show me, I look at them, then it classifies another batch. Earlier I was reading more articles and it turned around in about 1.5 days but I haven't been using it as much lately and sometimes a cycle goes 7+ days and when you add up all the queues involved an article can go a long time between when it is published, my system picks it up, I favorite it, then schedule it to get posted on HN or Mastodon. For most of the topics I cover it is not so bad because many "news" items are still interesting after two weeks but it's a disaster for sports news stories which often are only of interest until the next game. So I am thinking of how to make it run in an incremental mode that can tag certain topics for fast processing and also make it more compatible with ActivityPub so it can be a "Mastodon reader that doesn't suck".

diggan 2y ago

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.

pacifi30 2y ago

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

jll29 2y ago
> - a better Siri (but many companies in this space is demotivating) Don't be discouraged, there is so much room for improvement, and we had a better system than Siri (regarding general ability to answer open domain questions) back in 2004 (SMS-based, with a view to eventually incorporate speech recognition). I have not seen a player that does this really well, and the need is unquestionable (despite the VCs that told me in 2004 that the mobile Internet won't be a thing because "if it will be possible, it will be so expensive that no-one uses it").

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jll29 2y ago

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.

bradleykingz 2y ago

I'm working on a financial literacy application. https://kiihela.com 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.

zackbrown 2y ago

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

l3l_aze 2y ago

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.

jasfi 2y ago

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.

impure 2y ago

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 .

dang 2y ago

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 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?

muzani 2y ago
I would say Saturday. California Saturdays are someone else's Sundays. Weekends have that chill creativity vibe contrasting with the more serious Who Is Hiring vibes you get on a Monday.
curtisblaine 2y ago
It's a great idea and I would like it.
- david927 2y ago
  I've been running these monthly since 2021. I think it works to tie it to the month, and it's strange to say the month name when you run it on the 21st. I'll move it to the 3rd of each month unless it's the weekend, and then I'll push it to that Monday.
  - dang 2y ago
    I appreciate that you've been making the case for these threads for a long time! The problem is that they get flagged and downweighted because unofficial monthly regular threads are (informally) not allowed here. Otherwise people try to start too many of them, and it's one of those things that only works well within limits. The solution we hit on with whoishiring (a long time ago) was to make it official, give it basically a system account, and take it out of the realm of individual submissions.
    - david927 2y ago
      I had no idea, Dan. Thanks for letting me know. I'll stop posting them.

eappleby 2y ago

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 https://www.forourschool.org

ddgflorida 2y ago

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

ezzabuzaid 2y ago

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 https://app.january.ah Website: https://january.sh https://january.sh

jasondigitized 2y ago

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/ https://little-riddle.com/

wbazant 2y ago
Very fun! They're usually not too hard and still gratifying to find

steph-123 2y ago

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

GeoHubToday 2y ago

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 https://geohub.today

c0wb0yc0d3r 2y ago

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.

Leftium 2y ago

A new way to visualize the weather (forecast). https://weather-sense.leftium.com 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 https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/41113290

is_true 2y ago
I like the graphs. Is the map radar data or a forecast? I'm on mobile in case there a title somewhere that I'm not seeing. If it's radar data. Where do you get it? I wanted to try radar data for my area to help a group of people trying to have a network of weather stations online and making sure everything was working fine.
- Leftium 2y ago
  The Rain Viewer API provides 2 hours of past radar data and 30 minutes of radar forecast data. If you donate on Patreon you get 60 minutes of radar forecast data[1]. [1]: https://www.rainviewer.com/api.html https://www.rainviewer.com/api.html
  - is_true 2y ago
    thank you. We are gonna try it, we have a a script to extract radar data from the images on the local weather agency but it has a lot of problems with compression artifacts.