It’s inspired by tile placement board games like Patchwork and crosswords. You rotate and move tiles to rebuild a broken crossword.
It’s free, web based, and responsive.
I currently have several hundred daily players and growing. My wife and I create the puzzles and I’m continuing to fix bugs and add new features.
I just launched a ”community puzzle” feature to let players help build new puzzles.
I’d love to know what you think!
I do a lot of NYT puzzle stuff every day and some other random puzzle sites before I get out of bed. That said, I'm over 40, love puzzles, love complicated board games, went through your brief explainer, and could not get a sensible handle on how to even start this thing. A new player has to really care about how to even try to begin to figure out whatever this is. I gave it about 20 seconds after the "how does it work?" Honestly, I gave up. I'm really not trying to rain on your parade. You might find a niche audience, and it'll be what you're going for, but I think you need a much, much better rules explainer if you want to be even remotely in the vicinity of a Wordle-level banger.
This thing might be really awesome, but not being able to figure out how to use it is a hard out for me.
i wonder if have the clues point to a starting square (e.g., "E5") would be better than the current "reveal" aid. The spatial information would become more helpful toward the end when the player is dealing with the words they need help on.
(She finished today's puzzle, and I gave up.) From a UI perspective it is very slick - very smooth, and I like how it kind of "gets" what you were trying to do when providing corrections/hints.
This game was Show HNed two times in ten days, [1][2], but unfortunately, it didn't get as much attention as it should! Ironically, this current thread has already gained almost double the comments from both submissions combined!
I whish you best of luck to succeed in your journey.
___________________
The game design is really good too. It has just the right amount of juice.
As a non native it feels awesome to finish a puzzle like this haha
How do you market it – now or planning to, if I may ask?
I hope you make a success of this and sell it to the NYT for a disgusting amount of money.
This is a classic HN comment but I’d love a Thursday/Friday crossword difficulty equivalent in addition to the dailies which are a ~Monday.
I was getting a little bored of retrocomputing discourse being so centered on gaming, so I'm exploring the productivity software of the 8/16-bit era. I put real effort into learning and using the programs, giving my light-hearted but heartfelt assessment of its form and function for both its time and today.
Using the software inevitably gets me thinking about other things, and I explore those threads as well. For example, "Superbase on the C64" also discusses the legacy and promise of "the paperless office." A couple of other posts got some nice traction here on HN, notably "Deluxe Paint on the Amiga" and "VisiCalc on the Apple 2".
I'm hoping to build a strong monthly readership, so I'm putting in the work. It's been up for two months and five posts now, with a new one coming at the end of this week.
> There is utility in those old tools and interesting ideas to be mined. Recently I stumbled across something that by all accounts should have set the world on fire, but whose ideas needed more time to germinate before blossoming much later. Discoveries like this are not just nostalgic “what ifs” to opine wistfully upon, they can be dormant seeds of the future.
> Computing moves at such an unrelenting pace, those seeds may lie dormant for any number of reasons: bad marketing, released on a dying platform, too expensive, or even too large a mental leap for the public to “get” at the time. I see this blog as a way to explore the history of the work tools we use every day. I don’t do this out of misty-eyed sentimentality, but rather pragmatic curiosity. The past isn’t sacred, but it is still useful.
What's your research process? Do you use lots of Internet Archive material? Do you reference any personal artifacts i.e. old hardware or documentation laying around? Any interviewing?
My first job out of college was with a tiny, now-defunct company that built simple I/O hardware for 8-bit systems. One of the "side products" was a MacPaint clone for the Radio Shack Color Computer II called CoCoMax. We didn't write it: AFAIK, the programmer for the original version contacted the company and asked if they wanted to buy it and pay him royalties. He later went off and built an even more successful product used in TV stations called the Video Toaster. Side product or not, CoCoMax was a cash cow!
On the heels of that success, another programmer who'd written a more advanced version for the Color Computer 3 offered the same deal. From what I recall, they both made buttloads of money from their royalties.
Sometimes I wish I had kept some of that old hardware & software, but it's long gone.
So, my impression is that, for a while, things started getting simpler by having WYSIWYG editors and multiple things running at the same time in windows, but as the processing power and memory started improving, instead of making things easier and better, we (as people) started just adding more features and other things that they just made things more complicated than they should be.
Well, with all that, I wish success for you!
PS: It would be great if you had RSS support on your website.
https://www.inclusivecolors.com/
The interface is optimized to let you quickly explore and tweak multiple tints/shades at once so you can customize all colors exactly how you want e.g. try dragging vertically through the saturation curve in one motion to edit all the tints/shades at once, or shift whole curves horizontally by dragging between the dots on a curve.
It uses the HSLuv color space, where (unlike say HSL) the WCAG contrast stays the same when you change the hue and saturation sliders. This makes it much easier to explore accessible colors choices as you know only changes to the lightness slider will impact the contrast. You can also switch from the WCAG2 contrast checker to using APCA, which is meant to correct for inaccuracies in WCAG2, such as it being too forgiving for dark mode color combos.
Note the mobile version is more of a preview and the desktop version has more features.
I probably need to add something like a tutorial as there's a lot going on, but I've added more hints and tooltips recently. Open to feedback on what's initially confusing and what changes might help!
It's still a small closed alpha, if anyone is interested: https://testers.birdlego.com
Here is a rough trailer of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVpR8aafFjI
- No sign-up, works entirely in-browser
- Live PDF preview + instant download
- VAT EU support
- Shareable invoice links
- Multi-language (10+) & multi-currency
- Multiple templates (incl. Stripe-style)
- Mobile-friendly
GitHub: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf
Would love feedback, contributions, or ideas for other templates/features.
PS: e-invoice support coming soon
No signups, free for all, browser-only, live pdfs, etc
Built it for a friend and decided to share with all, it's just a react app (no backend) running on GCP and costs almost nothing to run.
Didn't think about opensourcing it and I will, why not.
Only thing I would suggest is, to support different tax formats (or provide an ability to fill custom tax format name that applies to the whole invoice). Right now, it is largely VAT. In some countries, it may not be relevant.
(Having said that, as a work around, currently anyone can use Notes field to fill custom tax details and hide all VAT related fields.)
I think by this point everyone that is learning a language knows that immersion is very important, however a problem I've had myself is that the content that interests me is beyond my reach, and the content that is within reach doesn't interest me.
This is my attempt at doing something to remediate that. You select the content you want, and I create a personalized study plan to learn the most important words to achieve a target % of understanding. Then I generate a short story each week for your particular level containing the new words in the context of your content.
The idea is to bring the content you want to learn to your level so you can watch what you want to watch.
I'm making Easel, a 2D game programming language designed to match how humans, not computers, think about game logic. It also has automatic multiplayer. I've been working on it for 3 years!
Easel feels like a declarative programming language even though it is imperative, because lots of useful game-oriented features are first class. Like behaviours - you just say `on Pointer { ... }` and you have a concurrently-executing coroutine that's lifetime is managed. But you don't think about any of that complexity, you just think of your entity as having a behaviour and go forth and make your game.
It also happens to have automatic multiplayer. Normally with multiplayer you have to worry about doing everything in a "multiplayer safe" way (i.e. be deterministic and only modify the things your side has authority over). My idea was to put all the multiplayer stuff in the programming language itself, underneath all your lines of code. This way, anything you write in that programming language can just be made multiplayer, automatically. So you can just pretend all your players are in one shared world, like a singleplayer game, and the engine does all the multiplayer for you. It was really difficult to make but it makes multiplayer so easy for you now.
Easel is my idea of how games should be made, or at least as close to the idea as I can achieve with 3 years of work, and I would love for more people to try it out.
But how does this really work? The website also says it's just baked into the language but there are many different approaches to networking games that have their own pros and cons.
I tried doing something much more rudimentary before. Will be following
https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai
I recently ported the terrain generators to the GPU, and increased the visible volume to 1 billion voxels cubed. I did a short YouTube video about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLfgjWsM1PI
I also wrote a metaprogramming language which generates a lot of the editor UI for the engine. It's a bespoke C parser that supports a small subset of C++, which is exposed to the user through a 'scripting-like' language you embed directly in your source files. I wrote it as a replacement for C++ templates and in my completely unbiased opinion it is WAY better.
But I'm hoping to have it out by the first week of December.
It's an explorable database of films, TV shows, books and board games based around their historical setting: where and when the thing is set. It's been incredibly complex and interesting getting the (messy) data, making sense of it and trying to design a UI to explore it.
https://stevebennett.me/2025/08/26/whenever-exploring-times-...
I will note that there are some Norfolk England things showing in Norfolk Virginia.
It’s exactly the product I wish I had when I started my previous company. Running on PaaS is incredible for devex but the pricing is bonkers, and the vendor lock in makes it really hard to deal with annual price increases. We spent close to 400k / year for just 128GB combined fleet in our last startup on Heroku.
Canine tries to get the best of both worlds: developer friendly PaaS with no lockin or price gouging.
Just added build packs as a build option recently.
Also got a sponsorship from the portainer folks which lets me work on this close to full time
Hoping this saves someone the headache I had two years ago.
FinBodhi uses double entry so complicated set of transactions and accounts can be modeled (which happen often enough in users financial journey). We wrote about double-entry here: https://finbodhi.com/docs/understanding-double-entry
We do use online services like firebase for auth, and some service to fetch commodity prices etc. But all your financial data is on your system (we use sqlite over opfs, in browser). For synching across devices, that data is encrypted with your key before it leaves your device. You can backup the data locally (if you are using chrome) and/or to your dropbox. It's designed so that we (the people building it) can't access your data.
There are many more features, like multi-currency, visualizations, a sheet to use your data to do complex calculations like taxes, planning for your future etc.
Feel free to try it out with the demo account (no sign-in required). Note: app doesn't work in Firefox private mode.
A few of my recent favorites: - swim lap counter in html/JS that uses the camera to watch you swim and count laps/timing - video recorder that records your window/desktop and uploads a file to S3 - video conferencing app that allows a 2 year to click on a family member face and initiates a video conference using webRTC, STUN, and browser audio/video capture with automatic bandwidth adjustments (works on all platforms with pure HTML/JS). - CUDA based ray tracer with HTML UI that can trace over 2m rays per second on my laptop for scientific study, allowing real-time display of optical parts. - chat front-end for image models like gemini-pro and openai that take other images and text as references and generate a big library of options to chose from in seconds, I've been using photoshop for decades but I tend to use this more now.
I'm curious if you mean they're running a raytracer on the back end, and you interact with an HTML UI, or if it runs browserside, maybe via WASM. AFAIK CUDA isn't directly compilable to WASM (yet?)
It's very interesting because the Ruby codebase uses a `typedef uintptr_t VALUE` type to mean any of the following:
- A pointer to the heap
- A Ruby tagged value (which may be a pointer to the heap)
- Any integer value that fits in `uintptr_t`
Fil-C doesn't allow you to carry around pointers using integers, in the sense that when you do that, the pointers lose their capabilities.
But in Ruby's case, it's not as simple as changing the typedef to a pointer type, since `VALUE` variables often end up being used for integer math (including bit math, shifts, etc).
So, it's going to take a nontrivial patch to Ruby to get it to work in Fil-C. I think I'm about 70% of the way through (I started Friday afternoon).
My favorite so far is: "The Anti-AI UI Test".
After ChatGPT Atlas came out I thought it would be fun to find UI patterns that AI browsers couldn't figure out like multiple download buttons, hidden unsubscribe buttons, etc. So I created 7 levels of web dark patterns for AI browsers. You can try it yourself if you want:
https://codinhood.com/anti-ai-ui
I found Atlas can get through most patterns, so I created an even more unhinged one (job application form) that shifts the interface and flashes content.
Don't take it too seriously as actually testing AI browsers, it just a fun side project. I documented the patterns here: https://codinhood.com/anti-ai-ui/about
- Currently in free Early Access with 18 competitive mini-games.
- Players use their mobile phones as controllers (you can use game pads as well!)
- Everything is completely web-based, no downloads or installs necessary to play
- The games are all action based, with quick ~one minute rounds to keep a good pace. This means there are no language based trivia games!
- In the future we plan to open up the platform for 3rd party developers as well. We take care of the network connectivity, controllers etc.. 3rd party devs can focus on developing cool multiplayer mini-games without spending an eternity with networking coded and infrastructure.
Would love any feedback you might have!
I tried this in 2014 with happyfuntimes
https://docs.happyfuntimes.net/
My conclusion was, past a certain number of people no one wants to game
Around the same time was AirConsole and still available
After being downsized twice in two years from senior engineering roles, I realized how painful it is to reconstruct what you actually accomplished at a job once you’ve lost access to your repos.
Each time, I had to dig through memory and scraps of old PRs to remember what I’d built. The first time, I lost GitHub access immediately after the layoff notice. This time, at least we got 90 days of paid transition work. But even with just 5 months in the role, I’d already made hundreds of commits. For engineers who’ve been around for years, that’s an impossible amount of history to summarize manually.
So I’m building CommitKit, a command-line tool that scans your repo for your commits, groups them by feature or theme using embeddings, and generates professional CV bullet points or behavioral interview summaries. It runs locally using Ollama, so your commit messages and diffs never leave your machine. The goal is to help people quickly turn real engineering work into clear narratives of impact, especially when time or access is limited.
It’s still early: the clustering isn’t grouping commits quite as I’d hoped, possibly due to sparse commit messages or embedding quirks. But it’s been a great learning project: my first CLI tool, my first deployment on Render, and my first serious use of Ollama for local LLM inference.
It has been a super fun experience so far - I'm using CPLDs instead of an FPGA which makes the logic a bit more era period. I have a working system now with the math coprocessor, SRAM, DRAM, and other device support.
I am just about ready to get the VGA card I designed produced so I can work on debugging the design.
While this is fundamentally a system that ss less powerful than my apple watch, it is just fun to work on. Going back to very first principles debugging, building tools, and of course getting to exercise an old logic analyzer!
So I've been building something with no imported libraries or dependencies: a card game that gamifies Maslow's hierarchy of needs: https://gamefound.com/en/projects/nicomar/actualize-this
Each player drafts cards that represent ways you can spend your limited time on earth to gather resources (wisdom, gold, and virtue) to complete your own personal player board (your hierarchy of needs) with the goal of reaching self-actualization before other players. However, you can still win without becoming self-actualized, if you complete more hidden quests (which can only be discarded by the "therapy session" card).
My one comment would be, I think you need to change the branding a little bit. It's a bit too close to Magic the Gathering, and this feels like its own IP and can stand on its own legs. So I think you need to just adjust the cards enough so they don't instantly read as a Magic the Gathering card.
It looks inside each file to see what it’s about, then moves it to the right folder with a single click. Everything happens on your Mac, so nothing leaves your computer. No clouds, no servers.
It already works with images, Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) PDFs, ePubs, text, Markdown, and many other file types (30+) in English. Next I’m adding multi-language support.
If you have messy folders anywhere on your Mac, Floxtop can help.
Try it for free - requires macOS 14+ with Apple Silicon: https://github.com/taranntell/fallinorg/releases/download/1....
Just for clarity, it looks like image content itself isn't addressed, but rather just any text that might be in an image, correct?
Also: "Your sensitive data never leaves your Mac." Does anything leave the mac? Any metrics? I don't want this to have network capabilities at all.
Maybe it's a story about named local fishermen from the early 1900s, with pictures, the history of a statue and videos of the process, or the state of a graffiti wall over time.
Currently in a phase of UI development and testing, and historical societies outreach for collaboration. It might stall and just fizzle into nothing, or it might be something cool.
Also still doing https://wheretodrink.beer, but haven't added anything of note since playing on this other project.
https://autio.com/ is similar - but obviously not open source, and more limited.
It seems like it could even tailor itself to what an individual user is interested in, and with AI - could turn more "dry" encyclopedia-type information into more compelling narratives. With some kind of route planning software, you could even pre-plan your trips ahead of time and select the things you're interested in.
Obviously not what you're building, but something related that's been clunking around in the back of my head for a while.
[1] https://smartmap.ai [2] https://github.com/space0blaster/smartmap
* Disk images
* Liveboot isos
* Container images (docker/podman)
Many build products are supported, with more on the way:
https://chrivers.github.io/raptor/builders/index.html#compat...
It uses a syntax that is inspired by Docker, but significantly enhanced.
Take a look at:
* The project: https://github.com/chrivers/raptor/
* The book: https://chrivers.github.io/raptor/
The code is at https://github.com/matthiasgoergens/git-snap-fs
The original was in Python and actually had a decent excuse for existing for a very specific problem at work a few years ago. The new version is in Rust and exists just for fun.
This was also a small experiment in coding with OpenAI's codex. I wrote the Python original by hand---like a caveman. Codex was mostly ok at the actual code, especially once I told it to make `cargo clippy` happy, but it needed lots of help with the design. It kept insisting on extra complications and state.
But perhaps I'm a bit unfair here, because I only figured out the nice and simple design after reflecting on the connection between Linux's fuse and git's design for a while when writing the original. So it's only fair that the computer would also need some help to see how to match them up nicely.
Speed is not an optional feature on the web. The site above is written in Firefly, uses hydration, and scores 100% on PageSpeed Insights.
The language is largely complete, and we're now working on DX: Got a language server, a devserver, and some essential libraries.
In general I prefer a better language over an involved javascript framework that does not look like js anymore.
A simple iOS app for scanning (almost any) barcode and storing in the app, or adding it to your home via a widget. No tracking, no subscriptions, just a simple free app that is pretty simple to use and does the one thing I want it to do.
Building my own software has been super refreshing compared to working within a large organization. I really enjoy the path of just developing and it is fun to get into something different than React/TypeScript and Java. It was also really interesting to go through the process of publishing the app in the Apple App Store. Heard so many bad stories, but it was OK. Definitely not great, but not as bad as I was expecting.
Two learnings from this so far:
1. I do not think that I would want to do any Swift development in a large organization. Super fun to build indie style, but I can't imagine having to support 5+ years of old iOS versions. 2. I ditched most social media a long time ago and if you do not have any personal promotion channel, you are super limited into reaching any potential users for your software. I still do not know how to deal with this; I do not have any ambition to go back into building a social following. I just like building the "thing", but just building it is definitely not enough to get any traction.
For the current project I am building another iOS app, a bit more complex, also something I want to use myself. I was considering building with React Native, but ditched that plan because when I am building for myself, there would (I think) be a lot of overhead in testing Android.
For now I really like what I am doing, but financially I think I should consider going back to Java/Scala or React dev for a corporate client :-|.
My friend had a cute baby boy and mentioned difficulty in finding children's storybooks in Spanish.
Challenge accepted:
I built an AI generated multilingual storybook, just to see if it would work.
Tap or click the little monster to have it read to you.
Local LLM generated the story, stable-diffusion generated the images, AI converted text to speech in two languages: English and Spanish ( could easily do many more languages ).
I "filled the app out" by adding a simple landing page placeholder, login page and "library" page.
Not very phone friendly, was made for her iPad.
Just click login to move on, as it is currently not connected to a backend.Only the second book currently has a story, the others are placeholder templates.
Bedtime Bulb v2[0]: A massive improvement over our original Bedtime Bulb, a light bulb meant for use in the evening to reduce blue light. The headline feature is the re-introduction of infrared, which was removed from lighting to make it more efficient, but emerging research suggest it's beneficial for health. After a long wait, this is shipping in 2 weeks!
Atmos Bedside Lamp[1]: A fully automated circadian lamp that automatically shifts in color and brightness throughout the day, helping you prepare for sleep and wake up more naturally. Working on some machine learning features that mimic the functionality of the Nest Learning Thermostat, but for lighting. The first units are shipping by Christmas.
Circadian Mode for Philips Hue[2]: A web app that gives your Philips Hue lights circadian powers, so that they gradually shift from bright light during the day to dim, low-blue light at night. It's way more powerful and easier to use than first- and third-party options from Hue, Apple, and Home Assistant. Just launched this week; looking for beta testers to give feedback!
[0] https://restfullighting.com/products/bedtime-bulb-v2-preorde...
[1] https://restfullighting.com/products/restful-atmos-preorder
[2] https://restfullighting.com/pages/circadian-mode-for-philips...
Hope to document 100 ideas. Wish me luck.
So I'm building a distributed AI inference platform where you can run models on your own hardware and access it from anywhere privately. Keep your data on infrastructure you control, but also leverage a credit system to tap into more powerful compute when you need it. Your idle GPU time can earn credits for accessing bigger models. The goal is making it dead simple to use your home hardware from wherever you're working.
It's for anyone who wants infrastructure optionality: developers who don't want vendor lock-in, businesses with compliance requirements, or just people who don't want their data sent to third parties.
Get notified when we launch: https://sporeintel.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jmWnPfgtik
[End] --- for the visuals, reflect on the lyrics... think about AI learning more about how its thinking interacts with manifolds...
⎿ Claude usage limit reached. Your limit will reset at 3pm.
/upgrade to increase your usage limit.
> now let's continuehttps://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielkrol_openstreetmap-acti...
All of the street and satellite tiles are thanks to maps.black. The search uses Nominatim's sqlite3 mode. I was told that it's experimental only because it hasn't been tried in production yet, so I'm sort of testing it in the process. So far I'm only doing administrative boundaries and natural features, but so far so good! I'm going to slowly add a few more types of POIs, I just don't want the database file to get too big.
Note that Internet in a Box has an OSM offering already, but the data is five years old and the tech makes it harder to update. As of today, there are much easier options on the table, and we get cool stuff like 3d buildings. Also, the search was much more limited.
* https://internet-in-a-box.org/
* https://nominatim.org/release-docs/latest/customize/SQLite/
Trying to fix this problem with Eternal Vault.
Link: https://eternalvault.app
Another thing thats in early alpha right now is CapKit, AI professional captions for short form videos
Turns out not that hard.
In about a weekend, I built a UETA and ESIGN compliant tool. And it was free. And it cost me less than $50. Unlimited free e-sign. https://useinkless.com/
I’ve been obsessed with how people actually make travel decisions — not how platforms think they do. From a consumer’s standpoint, travel isn’t just “search → compare → book.” It’s emotional, contextual, and full of FOMO.
You open 20 tabs across Booking, Google Maps, Reddit, and Instagram trying to answer simple questions like: Is this the right area? Is this hotel actually good? Am I missing a better deal somewhere else?
Most existing tools either oversimplify (like ChatGPT giving three confident but unverifiable answers) or hide information behind algorithms and commissions (like OTAs). Both remove choice — and ironically, make people less confident.
I’m building SearchSpot, a “Cursor for travel.” It automatically does what power travelers already do manually — cross-check reviews, verify real photos, compare prices across platforms — and then shows its reasoning transparently so you understand why something was recommended or excluded.
The goal isn’t to replace your decisions, but to help you close your tabs with confidence. From FOMO to flow. From chaos to clarity.
If you’ve ever spent hours researching a trip just to end up more confused, I’d love your thoughts: https://searchspot.ai/home
Not related to the thread, but if anyone is looking to hire a developer or knows of opportunities, I was recently let go and am actively searching. Any leads or feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Sample PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n7M1TKOptSsYiibrbvV_Yojx53T...
She can also join your google meet or teams meetings, share her screen and then everyone in the meeting can ask questions and see live results. Currently being used by product managers and executives for mainly analytics and data science use cases.
We plan to open-source it soon if there is demand. Very fast voice+actions is the future imo
Maybe it was because of the grants, but it was a fucking nightmare getting off the ground even though we had nearly 90% of the population in three counties on board for the co-op. The red tape and regulations (in our state at least) made it clear that government runs for urban and suburban interests and actively undermines rural needs. I'm talking government in bed with large providers who had exclusive rights to run "high-speed" Internet to our towns and farms, even though they had never and were never planning on anything above dsl for most people and cable for the ones in town.
If I was more charismatic (and wasn't 1000% sure there were pictures of me doing drugs when I was in college), I would consider a run for state office, because it's a shit show for small towns here.
And that's the story of a) when we got sued by a large provider that I hope goes out of business and burns to the ground, and b) the last time I volunteered on a large project and why I will never take the lead on anything bigger than the Lion's Club pancake breakfast now.
Shameless plug, sorry (not sorry!) but I would have killed for it when I worked in web hosting :-)
Back in the day, after the company I worked for bought the Electric Minds community and migrated it to its own CommunityWare system, and then the company that bought our company decided to shut the platform down, I reimplemented the community platform in Java and helped rescue the community. See: https://erbosoft.com/blog/2025/09/08/electric-minds/
EMinds eventually sputtered out because of the rise of platforms like Facebook. Well, now we see what came of that. So I think there's room for a platform like the one I used to have. See: https://erbosoft.com/blog/2025/11/03/what-we-once-had-and-co...
The new system is being written in Go. I'm porting the code over without using AI, though I have used Claude to translate the old crusty HTML pages into modern HTML with Tailwind CSS. Once it gets to the functionality I had back in 2006, I'll put it up...and then see about going beyond that, including how to make it distributed and provide more interoperability.
Looking forward for the publication of the book and buying it.
Lumina has made a probiotic strain that is able to, theoretically, prevent cavities. I don't care that much about, but I do think it is a neat strain that can likely colonize your mouth. I'm genetically engineering it to express sfGFP, which would theoretically make my teeth fluorescent green under black light. Would be fun at raves! Also, if I make out with anyone, you could theoretically see changes in microbiome composition just from green-ness. I do wonder how much microbiomes are shared while kissing: this would be an example of a way to directly measure that, instead of just measuring on proxy like much microbiome research
Instead of DOM scraping, it intercepts AJAX calls and figures out which API endpoint gives you the data you need. Uses visual analysis + fuzzy matching to identify the right call.
The use case: scraping product reviews, paginated listing data (products), etc. Existing AI scrapers either didn't work or were very slow and costly. A product with 1000 reviews takes 10+ minutes with Playwright, costs $10 with LLM scrapers. With Strot? 10 seconds via direct API calls.
Being used in production by a couple of clients. Would love feedback!
Blog: https://blog.vertexcover.io/strot-is-a-api-scraper GitHub: https://github.com/vertexcover-io/strot
You can think of it as a data source, or a knowledgeable companion that can provide comprehensive book information for online booksellers, libraries, book-related startups, bookworms, and more.
I got a pre-alpha build running for those that want to test it out[2], but the code is still not out there, as there are a few things I want to refactor. Wrote comprehensive documentation for it this weekend, now I need to refactor the merger package with some new rules, and write something to decrease the number of genres returned.
Been tough to find time to work on it because of the baby, but AI has been helping a lot to speed things up, and the work has been quite fun. Not sure if there will be interest in the idea, but it solves a problem I have, so I had to work on it anyway.
Hope to have the code on GitHub by the end of this week. AGPL licensed.
[1]: https://github.com/pagina394/librario
[2]: https://paste.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/5612eaa80fc7eee8b6180a31...
..k..
.k...
Rules state they must be in different regions, row and column. No mention of diagonal or adjacency.
In programming mode, its a flash drive you can put LUA scripts on.
In run mode, you can select a lua script to run. Lua scripts can take HID input and produce HID output.
All open source, hardware and software: https://github.com/cedarhacks/ReMapper
It can do things like keyboard -> joystick mapping, key logging, macros, mouse wiggling etc etc
An algorithm to optimise vacation days using public holidays and weekends. Especially relevant at this time of year.
I created it a year ago and received quite some comments on the Show HN post[1]. Last weekend I updated it to work for end of year planning and adding fixed days off, which seems to solve most of the feedback. It was done with Cursor in agent mode.
OpenFret combines everything a guitarist needs in one place: smart gear inventory management, AI-powered practice sessions, real-time collaboration tools, and a vibrant community. Think of it as "GitHub for guitarists" meets comprehensive practice tool.
Core features:
1) Smart Guitar Inventory: Track your collection with auto-filled specs from thousands of guitar models. Monitor woods, pickups, scale length, string changes, and discover patterns in your gear
2) AI Practice Sessions: Generate personalized guitar tabs and lessons based on your practice history, with VexFlow sheet music and integrated metronome
3) Session Mode: Fork and merge music tracks like code. Layer recordings, see version history, and collaborate with musicians worldwide
4) Practice Analytics: Persistent timers, song tracking (Last.fm integration), scale visualization, fretboard maps, and chord progressions
5) Built-in Tools: Guitar tuner with frequency control, Strudel integration for backing tracks, and musical helpers to break out of E minor habits
Looking for:
Feedback from guitarists/musicians on which features resonate most
Link: https://openfret.com/ | Discord: https://discord.gg/G3Pur3PzZm
Thank you!
It's a custom assembler built on top of the LLVM assembler (llvm-mc) that emits instrumentation code to catch ABI violations at runtime. Stuff like clobbering nonvolatile registers, misaligning the stack pointer, misusing the redzone, assuming volatile registers don't change across a function call, etc.
Hoping to finish up basic x86_64 support within the next few days. I can now reliably assemble and run unoptimized gcc output without hitting false positives, but I still have to iron out some false positives triggered by OpenSSL's handwritten assembly routines.
TODO items for the near future include porting the runtime support library into a kernel module so I can instrument Linux, and beginning ports other architectures (ideally something semi-obscure like POWER or RISC-V). I also need to figure out how to support dynamic linking, because the tool currently needs static linking to access its thread-local variables.
https://github.com/kenballus/llvm-project/tree/abisan/llvm/t...
Laketower: https://github.com/datalpia/laketower A lightweight data lakehouse exploration and management app (web+cli), using DuckDB as the default query engine. It can run locally or self hosted, and for now statically configured only. Hope to integrate Iceberg and Ducklake support by end of year.
Modelship: https://github.com/datalpia/modelship An ML model to app generator. For now, only ONNX models are supported as input, and only static website as target (onnx runtime web wasm/webgpu). I intend to also work more on it the following weeks/months, especially to support more model I/O types, and add support for more targets (REST API, CLI, etc).
These 2 projects were born from professional activity needs but are a nice playground to learn and try new things
I’m building this using our framework for stack-agnostic JS/TS libraries. On the database side, we currently support Drizzle and Kysely, with Prisma support coming soon.
https://fragno.dev/docs/our-fragments/stripe/quickstart
Inspired by the Stripe integration built for better-auth.
I'm in Germany so I'm working on a Germany-specific solution for now.
- you choose from a list of charities (right now I'm working with the list from the https://dzi.de plus a few such as Wikimedia Deutschland)
- you setup a recurring donation to our bank account
- we redistribute the money according to your split
- no spam in your email and snail mail
- one pdf at the end of the year for your tax returns
I'm not planning on taking any cut of the donations obviously, so this will be a fully self-funded project at first, but I'll reach-out to foundations once I'm up and running.
The URL will be https://super.giving/ (not setup yet, should be fairly soon).
I'm also planning on releasing the source code as open-source.
I'd be happy to hear your feedback, either here or via email :)
Lately I've mainly been working on stability and bug fixes. I've released some big features the past few months so I'm doing a big push on polish, before I again tackle some larger features that I'd like to implement.
If CLI scripts is something you're interested in at all, give it a go! We have docs and a guide [1] for getting started, feedback very welcome :)
[0] https://github.com/amterp/rad [1] https://amterp.github.io/rad/guide/getting-started/
Now they can charge rent if they encounter a continued fraction library in the wild.
It's bizarre
Recently it hit v2.0 spec conformance. 3.0 is next on the roadmap. (I'm executing it against the upstream spec test suite.)
My aim is probably not for it to become a highly-performant decoder for use in production environments, but rather one that can be used for educational purposes and/or debugging issues with existing modules. That's why I decided not to offer a streaming API, and why I'll be focusing on things like good errors, good code docs etc.
P.S. I'm new to the language so any feedback is more than welcome.
https://fontofweb.com/u/fontofweb
I was tired of inspiration sites like Dribbble full of polished mockups that aren't practical. Or awwward like sites that don't represent the mundanity of most websites.
So, I spent a while building a tool that captures website design snippets. It's now a collection of 4,363 designs from 544 different domains.
For every design, it extracts:
The exact fonts used on the page (so far 561 unique font families I've found)
The precise color palette
A direct link to the live site
You can check out the full free collection here: https://fontofweb.com/u/fontofweb
Entirely built from scratch in C without any dependencies. Now I wrote this code when I was 16, so many memory leaks and generally issues that I wanted to rectify and begin using third project for my own blog (currently old version is used — https://aadvikpandey.com)
The Kevlar v3 (https://github.com/aadv1k/kevlar/tree/kevlar-v3) here is all that it includes; more spec compliant markdown AST-based parsing; A better .ini config parser (right now it’s literally strtok on ‘=‘ and generally very hacky) as well as name spacing; more powerful templating tags like IF, FOR with lisp-like configuration
Of course staying true to the spirit of “from scratch” :)
Honestly I did scope creeped a little since I mainly wanted to fix a memory leaks issue in the markdown compiler lol; anyway I will share it once it gets completed on hacker news :)
An annoying little laptop charging reminder utility that does the job.
---
There are times when I am deeply involved in a focus-work session, a meeting, OR watching some sort of engaging video content, and don't pay timely attention to the standard low battery notifications from my MacBook.
After the laptop shuts down suddenly, what follows is the most annoying walk to find the charger or the charging outlet. It's frustrating at times, sometimes embarrassing because you have to say, "Sorry, my battery died down" as you join back the session after 2-3 minutes.
Over the last 3-4 weekends, I have been building Plug-That-In, which has floating notifications. Essentially, a notification that follows my cursor movement, so I get a stronger nudge irrespective of what I am doing.
There are a few other critical features, such as Reminder Mode and Do-Not-Disturb Settings.
- Reminder Mode: On critical/lower battery levels, it will keep beeping like a car's seat belt alert for some time (configurable) when the battery is really low.
- Do-Not-Disturb settings: Configure what sort of alert/sound it will generate when I have system audio playing or video playing, or the camera is active.
It has addressed a personal need and has already proven useful a few times over the last weeks.
Obviously, anyone here who has read my posts knows I know how to write code, but having a bunch of built in connectors that are agnostic to each other with the Oauth and the like being somewhat plug and play allows me to iterate on some ideas a lot quicker.
I installed an n8n instance on my server, and have become kind of addicted to making different Discord bots, and I'm having more fun with this than I thought I would. 95% of the stuff on there is basically drag and drop, and when I need more elaborate logic then I can easily drop into JavaScript. I am looking into writing new nodes for different services, and I keep having new ideas for different stuff I want to build.
I recently shipped an MCP server thst can delivered broken link results to Cursor so they can rapidly be resolved.
It runs on a Raspberry Pi 2 with an AudioInjector sound card, a small LCD screen, a rotary encoder, and even an old hard-drive platter as the “deck.” The goal is to make a simple, open, and affordable way to experiment with scratching and mixing — no fancy gear required.
It’s still in progress, but it works pretty well and has been a fun way to explore DIY DJ tech and embedded audio.
I’ve always wanted a typing application that’s both more than typing random words and is data-focused so I built this.
The more you type, the more the analytics system learns about your typing patterns and generates natural text to target those weakpoints (SmartPractice mode).
There’s a lot of variety as well; you can practice typing code in any programming language, or type text of various topics, use custom text, etc).
- An AI RSS feed summarizer (https://feeds.carmo.io)
- A PyObjC replacement for the bloated StreamDeck app (https://mastodon.social/@rcarmo/115498602604176483)
- A new keyboard, mostly to get back into SMD soldering (https://mastodon.social/@taoofmac/115521815709828495)
- A bunch of small MCP servers for other projects (https://mastodon.social/@taoofmac/115315732816298110)
- A case for a little server (https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/11/09/1930) that will eventually run at family's out in the countryside and manage a few ESP32 boards scattered around
Users can create their own sub-communities, and within them, set up different categories and boards. Posts can be voted on, and board types can include regular posts, Q&A, or live chat. It's like a hybrid of Reddit and Discord but leans more towards a traditional web community. It also supports server-side rendering, making it SEO-friendly. This project is an extension of my previous Hacker News clone, dizkaz (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43885998).
A STUN server that lets people test what type of NAT they have uses two IPs. For such a server you have to manually specify the addresses to bind on to make for sure its setup right. As it goes, writing network software to do simple things like "bind on all local addresses", "bind publicly", "bind on all", is harder than it sounds. There are edge cases on different OSes and address families, so manually managing IPs is hard to do.
My network software lets devs easily manage NICs and routes they support without guessing about addressing. Additionally, I've written a bunch of software with the library already to do things like NAT traversal. So its really my own redesign of how to do networking on the Internet. Designed to hide a lot of the messiness. I'm still improving code quality so it's not ready yet. But I've been dog fooding with a lot of software written in it and smashing bugs every day.
Project page: https://github.com/robertsdotpm/p2pd Built this recently with it: http://ovh1.p2pd.net:8000/servers (server monitor for public STUN, TURN, MQTT, and NTP servers. Only checks every 4 hours to avoid spamming them though.)
Really happy with it as I wanted exactly that for myself.
---
The next idea I am going to work on is the audio player. I already wrote a Rust library to read TOC + raw track data from audio CDs (https://github.com/Bloomca/rust-cd-da-reader) and a CLI tool to do so + convert to FLAC and embed metadata from MusicBrainz (https://github.com/Bloomca/audio-cd-ripper).
I've been researching this topic and while my background is related to digital signal processing, I think I will use a library, there seem to be too many edge cases to work with WASAPI and such directly.
Windows does not natively support rendering thumbnails for 10-bit videos, which are commonly produced by cameras like the Sony A7IV.
When I started working on a short film the video clips were piling up on my hard drive. Opening them one by one to find what I was looking for was tedious.
I could not find a reputable solution to this problem, so I started a company and built one. I went through the process of EV Certification to have the installer and executable code signed.
I hope to be in the Microsoft Store soon.
I'm also building other utilities with similar purpose.
https://github.com/Fingel/gelly
I've been enjoying rebuilding my music collection from both old hard drives and ripping old CDs. Jellyfin is great but I wanted a native application focused on music, not video. Thus Gelly. It's been really fun to work on.
You just need to pay for a fixed monthly upfront cost rather than PAYG, giving small developers a good save of their money.
In other words, this is similar to self hosting with K0S/K3S/OpenShift, except you don't have to own servers to begin with, in other words, it is a little similar to serverless K8S.
Well, all you those you can actually do with a VPS today, heck why do I have to do it if EKS/GKE/LKE/OKE/DOKS exists? That's because it takes a lot of time to properly setup VPC/EBS/S3/EC2, you need to pay an insane amount of premium and overheads to those while an ordinary user just don't want to hassle too much.
I want to undercut the big clouds by saving people's money and time. I have had enough of seeing a ludicrous EKS billing. I just want K8S to be the control panel of everything.
Deploy, run and scale later, simple as that
The main question is which P2P overlay network to use, if any: the prior incarnation used Pinecone (a variant of Yggdrasil), whereas this time we're pondering keeping it simpler and more scalable and using Matrix itself as the backbone to connect together smallish local P2P meshes - so by default you try to route via Matrix, but failing that you look on your LAN or BLE to see if you can talk directly to whoever you're addressing. Time will tell if this works :)
Career Skills AI Coach. Sharpen how you think and speak by debating AI
We are clearly on the verge of the largest white-collar skills dislocation ever. Our goal at Socratify is to make skill building and reskilling for interviewing, onboarding, promotions, and career change as effective as possible with an AI coach and sparring partner.
https://edwin.genego.io/blog/lpa-studio
https://edwin.genego.io/blog/ai-branding
It's not something I am looking to commercialize, but I actually did drop out of film school (with semesters in creative storytelling) to pursue software 15 years ago. And I feel like this will open up a whole new way of visual storytelling as well as personal and product branding. I have gotten quite some emails about it, from interesting people in different industries, as some more strongly worded (not so nice) emails from someone in the VFX industry since I started. Its by far one of the most interesting tangents I have ever went on.
AgentOS is a lisp-machine inspired runtime where agents can safely propose, simulate, and apply changes to their own code, policies, and workflows, all under governance, with full audit trails. Every external action produces a signed receipt. Every state change is replayable from an event log.
One project is for building rhythm games in multiple game engines and multiple platforms. Currently, it works in Unity, Unreal, Godot, SDL (or any C++ game engine), and MonoGame (or any C# game engine), and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. I'm working on adding Love2d (or any Lua game engine) and Bevy (or any Rust game engine). I have a few local prototypes of it working in Unity and Godot, but nothing public yet. Still trying to figure out what kind of game I want to make with it.
https://github.com/neogeek/rhythm-game-utilities
The other is a general purpose game engine in C++ with SDL. It's far enough along that I'm building games in it, but it's more of an exploration into how games are made than a replacement for Unity or Godot. I suppose it could be eventually, but I'm trying to be realistic with what it can do. One thing I'm pretty happy with regarding this engine is that one of the demo repos will automatically build to WebGL and publish to itch.io when changes are pushed.
[1] https://m.facebook.com/groups/5251478676/permalink/101664026...
When people think about Civil 3D, they often assume it requires BIM modelers (in a sense, just glorified drafters) to create all the necessary catalogs and styles, and to assist with their use.
My Civil 3D plugin will:
1. Make standard, market-compliant catalogs and polished styles available to engineers at large. Think of it as the WordPress theme provider equivalent.
2. Make the entire process easy and painless through the plugin, with prominent buttons for quick access.
If the plugin is done well, there will be less need for BIM modelers, since for a fee, engineers could simply purchase catalogs and styles that are so easy to use they require no technical training.
As a side benefit, I also get to explore how LLMs can help me write code. It has been a while since I last updated my AI usage policy [0], and I look forward to revisiting it.
https://share.icloud.com/photos/00ajYWxKpZmYrh6KmlHOxW4tA
I was able to get the original 15khz CRT monitor up and running by recapping the board. I decided that the control panel was unsalvageable, and insufficient for what I wanted to do, which was make this cabinet compatible with most any game that would have run on a cab like this.
I decided to use RGB lit buttons, so I could change the color's depended on which game was loaded. I used an ESP-32s2 to emulate a keyboard, and accept serial messages from the host computer that changes the button colors.
I also incorporated a Stream Deck in the control panel for auxiliary functions. I was able to write a node application to run the stream deck (with the help of a library) since there is no OEM software for linux.
By far the most challenging part was getting a suitable signal to the CRT. The first thing I tried was using the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins through a VGA666 board, but this limited my colors to 16bit, which makes 3d games look pretty awful.
Next I tried using a downscaler. This got me 24 bit color, but resolution switching doesn't work with this method.
I'm trying an AMD system now. Apparently the linux driver lets you set custom resolutions, and output 15khz (and 25khz for that matter) right from the VGA port.
I plan on doing a writeup after I near completion.
I am almost done with flappy bird (2nd challenge)
Why? I love the old arcade and game boy games, and I want to recreate them to my liking. I also love mechanical systems and space rovers, and I want ro build worlds to explore and simulate these things
---
Backdoor: https://github.com/tanin47/backdoor
A self-hosted database querying and editing tool for you and your team. Modern and elegant UI. Supports Postgres and ClickHouse. It can be embedded into any JVM app or runs as a standalone.
---
Embeddable Java Web Framework: https://github.com/tanin47/embeddable-java-web-framework
A lightweight production-ready Java web framework that comes with batteries (e.g Svelte, Tailwind, Github Actions, browser testing).
It is packaged into a single fat jar with no external dependencies. The starting size is 350KB. This is great for embedding into your larger JVM app or runs a lightweight website.
---
PlayFast: https://github.com/tanin47/playfast
An opinionated production-ready PlayFramework that comes with batteries (e.g Svelte, Tailwind, Github Actions, browser testing).
Open source, drop-in replacement and self-hosted alternative for Firebase
Using Node.js, Express.js, BetterAuth and PostgreSQL (JSONB)
I'm working on a man in the middle proxy for BGP, which can fix and inspect routing sessions on the fly. Like a firewall for the BGP control plane.
- Scan wine labels (it analyzes the label automatically)
- Add structured or unstructured tasting notes
- Create lists (shared or not) to keep wines organized
- View information about the regions/grapes
It's called Cork Club: https://corkclub.app/
Create video game sprites and animations via prompts.
Pretty excited because I've started to get high volume, repeat customers.
I open-sourced the RAG boilerplate I’ve been using for my own experiments with extensive docs on system design.
And I have bunch of LLM+RAG blogs I post frequently last 2 months : https://mburaksayici.com/blog
It's mostly for educational purposes, but why not make it bigger later on? Repo: https://github.com/mburaksayici/RAG-Boilerplate - Includes propositional + semantic and recursive overlap chunking, hybrid search on Qdrant (BM25 + dense), and optional LLM reranking. - Uses E5 embeddings as the default model for vector representations. - Has a query-enhancer agent built with CrewAI and a Celery-based ingestion flow for document processing. - Uses Redis (hot) + MongoDB (cold) for session handling and restoration. - Runs on FastAPI with a small Gradio UI to test retrieval and chat with the data. - Stack: FastAPI, Qdrant, Redis, MongoDB, Celery, CrewAI, Gradio, HuggingFace models, OpenAI. Blog : https://mburaksayici.com/blog/2025/11/13/a-rag-boilerplate.h...
You can have a look at https://simcarlo.com. The tool allows you to see the full spectrum of potential outcomes instead of just a single guess.
Once you sign up and connect your Google sheet, it generates a template (using AI) based on your data, which you can edit in a Notion-like editor. You can then generate PDFs for your entire sheet or a for a range of rows.
Some use cases I'm seeing:
* Certificates for students or course completions
* Monthly invoices for all your clients (https://sheetstopdf.com/use-cases/business/invoices)
* Personalized reports with individual client data
* Event tickets or conference badges
* Contracts, offer letters, or any personalized documents
* Really anything where you have rows of data that need to become individual PDFs
Would love to hear what you think or if you have use cases I haven't thought of yet!
I wanted something that would allow us to record members, games, etc., and also allow us to be assigned a local club rating. Anyway, after doing some searching and only finding paid software, I decided to just build something. That lead to https://openchessclub.org
You can check it out on GitHub: https://github.com/OpenChessClub/openchessclub.
I plan on building a QR code generator that allows club members to check-in during meetings, which will then allow players to be matched, and some other features, although it is primarily aimed at smaller chess clubs, so don't know how far it'll go.
Lately I’ve worked on a chat history based memory feature that can recall information from every conversation you’ve ever had with ChatGPT and Claude. It’s been particularly useful and also technically fun to implement. Speed has been very important as I do just in time summarisation and a multi stage RAG pipeline, and most LLMs have unacceptable performance. I ended up going with GPT-OSS on Groq due to its ultra low latency often completing full generations before Gemini or ChatGPT APIs return even the first token.
The ability to recall details from conversations going back years makes tasks where I want personalised plans or feedback like 10x more useful, at times I get the AI to ingest tens of thousands of tokens of context to help me better.
I built it because I work across multiple machines and often worry about which projects are on which computer or whether I’ve left any files in unique locations. Now I can diff the summaries between devices to see what’s out of sync, which repositories have uncommitted changes, and which folders have been modified.
I avoid using cloud sync services, and most of my files are already in git anyway. I find that having clear visibility is enough, I just need to know what to commit, push, pull, or sync manually.
I would be glad if it proves useful to someone besides me.
I am building better dev tools for firmware and PCB developers.
For example, we have GitHub Action workflows that allow you to push builds to the connected EmbedHub project. Your EmbedHub project has fine grained release management - so for example only the git tagged releases will be shared with the customer, but the testing/QA team will get access to builds from regular commits on branches as well.
I am also building a physical device (called HAL) similar to the now discontinued EtcherPro[1] - which will connect to your EmbedHub account and have access to your releases. This will let you offload tasks like long term testing, mass flashing and provisioning of devices, and more.
My backhand is OK but my forehand sucks. Grip styles for standard handles usually end up favoring one side or the other. I'm making a handle shape that's easier to get the blade angle right on both sides. Hopefully a couple more iterations on the 3D printer and then I can have a functional prototype made.
Early use case is replacing API keys with identity tokens that expire, delegate, and prove possession and then can be used for easy step up to fine-grained authorization. There's some pretty interesting authorization stuff you can do, like having multiple parties sign off before a token is valid or requiring a series of micro-services sign a token for it to be valid.
And the repo is here:
https://github.com/igor47/csheet
If you play DnD, I would love feedback! Feel free to leave it as GitHub issues or discussion.
If you don't play DnD, you might still find the repo interesting. It's hono on bun, I render jsx server side and client side is all htmx. I use vercel's ai toolkit for the LLM interactions, which are super fun and work really well. I think this is a great use for AI actually. I've structured the code so the same services can be called either by the user via forms and routes, or via LLM tool use, so for every action in the code you can do it via either LLM or "manually".
I think I got all of the important bits in place, now just working on improving the quality of life experience and bug hunting.
I have a lot of devlogs at https://www.slowrush.dev/news though at this point I am quite behind showing off the latest graphical improvements there.
Here is some more up-to-date gameplay footage: https://bsky.app/profile/slow-rush.bsky.social/post/3m523ft2...
It is a recipe app but better, and way more technically capable than anything out there. The goal is to make the best recipe app ever made. With bulletproof easy to follow recipes and smart features to make cooking simple. Everyone deserves good food at home, but good food is complicated and time consuming. An experienced cook can make good food quickly, cheaply and make it look easy. The idea is that Kastanj will have the knowledge you don’t so you can cook like a pro without having to spend years learning everything.
Backstory: I have a note where I write down practical problems I experience in life. I noticed over time that the amount of notes related to food and cooking was growing faster than anything else. I then began searching for a solution. I tried over 50 recipe apps, always the premium version if possible. There are some good apps out there but even the best ones only solved something like 50% of my issues. After enough frustration and search I just decided to start working on my own app. That was 4 years ago... It turns out that solving some of these problems where technically complicated to do, so now I understand why no other app could solve my problems. None the less, after 4 years of work, starting over from scratch 5 times, I have now landed on a solution that technically solves all my problems.
Going forward: Now I am working on filling the app with data and make it easy to use for normal humans. I am on purpose limiting myself to only perfecting the core functionality of what a recipe should be. I intend to launch sometime in 2026. The UI will be small and limited at first, but it is perfect for my needs. Therefore I hope it will also be perfect for someone else. Over time I will enable more advanced functionality and build it out based on user feedback. I know the backend can support 100% of my needs, but I don’t want to make it bloated. Therefore the UI is on purpose focused on only the most important things and then we will build it out with time, together with the recipe creators and end users.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.radarlove....
Just launched last month.
https://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2025-11/msg0...
This will add an iCalendar library to GNU Emacs, allowing packages in core and third-party packages to work with the format. More on the decisions I made and what I learned here:
Most shoppers spend hours to find the rights product. We’re fixing that with intent-based search that understands descriptions, images and personal preferences.
We’ve hit 25K+ searches in 4 months, growing 50% MoM, and built our own scraping system that makes product data collection 100× cheaper than existing tools.
Still early, but live. Would love feedback on search quality and result relevance.
PS! There are some products out of stock, this is expected, fixing it right now.
1. Agents become far more capable when they have access to a CLI and can create or reuse scripts, instead of relying solely on MCP.
2. Multi-agent setups are often overvalued as “expert personas” but they’re incredibly effective for managing context, A2A is the future.
3. Agents are useful for more than just writing code. They should be easy for non-engineers to create and capable of providing value in many domains beyond software development.
If that sounds interesting take a look! https://github.com/brycewcole/capsule-agents
- Calendar sync
- Photo upload
- post/comment/reactions
- Recurring events
- SMS notifications
- Greeting card maker
(and a lot more)
We started working on this all the way back during the Covid lockdown when we wanted to capture that "facebook events" experience without the facebook.It's grown into something much more than our original idea. Most of the features are free and we have a fair pricing model that doesn't nickel-and-dime you like many of the competing apps do. Would love your feedback!
It's intended to be a sort of social network focused on IRL groups/communities and finding others with the same interests in the same area, and just building local communities in general.
It's currently still a part-time venture, but I'm planning a launch on HN soon to get input/gauge interest in the latest iteration. FWIW, I posted the initial version on HN just over a year ago and got a ton of amazing feedback, much of which I've incorporated over the last year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398
We’re building Ward, a security browser extension that uses Gemini Nano, an on-device LLM, to scan for phishing, scams, and other threats from the DOM.
Think of an antivirus for everyday web users, like young children, older adults, and less savvy individuals.
We recently participated in the Google Chrome Built-in AI Challenge 2025 and have submitted to the Chrome Web Store.
We’re looking to meet people who may know someone Ward is good for and would want to provide feedback. Alternatively, we’d love to chat with any IT Managers/Directors of Security/Google Apps Admins who would be interested in piloting us as an anti-phishing enterprise solution.
You can DM or hit me at fitzgeraldcedric(AT)gmail.com :)
1. hn comments are valuable, I've spent a lot of time going through hn comments. I think there are valuable comments buried in the threads with fewer points, so it's not enough to just read top3 threads.
2. Sometimes a good post is ignored due to a bad title, sometimes I still have no idea what the post's theme even after I read a few paragraphs.
3. I want to filter out some posts I'm not interested in, but I realized I need read some other posts it's not a simple yes/no problem, so I gave every post a interesting score based on my own preference
so I want a tool to save my time while not missing out too much on hn
Currently have two binge-able mini courses on How to Start a Startup (could be relevant to folks in here)
Here it is: https://opencademy.com/
Now I'm working on a few changes to the app, most notable is moving any plants marked as 'for sale' out from the main section because it turns out people are more greedy than I anticipated and it's getting in the way of sharing the free stuff, cuttings etc.
There's also some demand for a web front end so I might work on that next. (currently only android and ios)
I had an initial boom of downloads in South Africa but lately most new downloads are in USA.
I also started a Substack to document it - here's a recent post on using Gemini to screen inbound emails with prospective acquisition targets via a Google Apps Script that evaluates the listings in those emails daily: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/screening-inboun....
Can check it out at https://dailybaffle.com
I'm still working on growing the audience. App coming soon!
- It's a personalized newsletter for you
- All data aggregated from sources around the web
- News, weather, newsletters, social media posts, reddit, youtube, etc. all appear in your digest.
- Launching a mobile app as well now but this will be slightly different than the web app. It will use AI to automatically prepare your daily digest based on preferences/settings you give it during onboarding. Each day when you wake up you'll receive a notification of digest being ready, and it will contain all the content you care about for the day ahead (meetings, weather, health data, commute data, news, etc).
I'm also automating more stuff around bookmarks management -> I used to manage an awesome list as a repository on GitHub for myself and over a couple of years there are relatively many stars on this repository. However I lost interest in maintaining this repo manually as I prefer to save my bookmarks on Shaarli. I'm coding a CLI tool to automate the work of syncing my shaarli links to my public "popular" (+500 stars) repo at https://github.com/SansGuidon/bookmarks
Myself and other users complain a lot about the "native" Plex -> Ombi watchlist integration being broken, I coded some sync tool to workaround the app malfunctions, by using Ombi, Plex and TMDB (The Movie Database) APIs and ensure Ombi is always up-to-date based on Plex watchlist. This works very well and allowed me to put a stop to the complains from my family members :-D
I'm also automating most of my email/linkedin interactions thanks to userscripts. And I keep automating more of the work I do around Cloudron, which is a very fun and stable platform to manage apps on VPS without the pains.
https://github.com/addpipe/webcam-tester
Live demo @ https://addpipe.com/webcam-tester/
Is there a cadence for these threads? I had in mind to "be prepared" to post in November's with what I'm working on, but I expected it to come around on the 15th (mid-month).
What I'm working on:
- skuilder - (skill builder) - https://github.com/patched-network/vue-skuilder - an AGPL framework / toolkit for SRS++ based interactive tutoring systems
- https://letterspractice.com - a low cost, hopefully high quality early literacy acquisition app, targeting ages 3-5.
- https://flutor.app - an app to learn the flute
(The proprietary apps are built with the toolkit).
I've struggled to pitch or articulate the vision here, but my latest pithy attempt is: scaling self-actualization by mechanizing the nested loops described by Anders Ericson's 'deliberate practice' - Inner loop: individual learners maximize their skill uptake velocity and performance peak by adhering to domain specific best practices - Outer loop: domain specific best practices get refined according to innovation or serendipitous discoveries from the inner loop (eg, someone is observed to beat out prior best practices)
As mentioned, I'm flat-foot posting here, so the pages aren't all prepped. https://flutor.app/dbg and https://letterspractice.com/dbg show some of the innards. Not linked, but I'm especially fond of https://letterspractice.com/dbg/juggling - the premise here that as child practices the letters, the letters exemplify the principles of effective practice in alliterative skill domains (juggling Js, batting Bs, flossing Fs (it's hard ok?))
All-in-one router/nas/firewall/adblock/app server (each piece optional)
Declarative and reproduceable as it is built off of NixOS, but administered through a UI, so the user doesn't have to know this.
All state managed in a backup bundle, so it can be hosted at home or in the cloud.
Goal is to have a box you plug just like a wifi access point into your modem, follow a simple web-based installation flow, then you are running a personal cloud.
Website is self-hosted by HomeFree, but installation instructions are very out of date, which I'm working on right now. There are now installation ISOs that I will soon add a link to.
I recently added FSRS (besides also having Anki integration). Now I'm working on replacing the need for reviewing flashcards by having reading activity automatically mark flashcards (current and future) as reviewed, so that you can get many of your reviews in just by reading native materials that interest you instead of sacrificing most of your study time to contextless flashcard grind.
I'm also working on a manga mode using a new manga OCR tech I have licensed out of academia that is ahead of state of the art alternatives.
This project now sustains my full-time focus.
Open Source Vacuum Robot firmware
OpenRun runs as a web server, which does GitOps driven app deployments. You can currently deploy apps on a standalone machine, on top of Docker/Podman. Working on adding support for deploying on top of Kubernetes. On Kubernetes, OpenRun will replace your build jobs (Jenkins/Actions etc), CD (ArgoCD etc) and IDP (Backstage etc). The same declarative config which works on a standalone machine will work on Kubernetes, with no YAML to maintain.
I've done this with C++ in the past, but ran into substantial friction with the CMake toolchain, specifically w.r.t:
- cross-platform compilation with large dependencies (vcpkg ports)
- running multiple compiler chains in the same build step
That second point is necessary if, for example, there's some AOT asset processing work that uses a native tool, and you're building for web. Expressing that some targets should use the emscripten toolchain while others should use the native toolchain, and interleaving between them, was a mess. TBF, I haven't done that with cargo or build.rs yet and it may prove to be equally frustrating.
Other features:
- undo/redo using a stack of swappable states
- serialization to disk (native) and LocalStorage (web) with some integration tests in progress but I am not satisfied with the correctness of my implementation: I want to *guarantee* that all information is preserved round-trip, but I also want a Patek watch.
- OBJ, GLTF, GLB models are loaded as "blueprint scenes" which are distinct from the "world scene." I made this distinction at the type-level because "scenes" are groups of entities that use newtype IDs (`LightId(u64)`, `MeshId(u64)` etc.) as primary and foreign keys to refer to each other, and I wanted to make it impossible for an entity in scene A to hold an ID for an entity in scene B. Instantiating a blueprint requires creating new IDs for every object.
- W.I.P. Alpha rendering, depth sorting, overhauling the material system to support multiple shaders (tough) that may be compiled after the engine itself (even tougher, a lot of runtime dynamic state and schema validation stuff), physics, scripting - oh yeah!
- Scripting using JS on both web (runs in browser itself) and desktop (uses a packaged JS runtime `Boa`) but Boa doesn't perform well on desktop in debug mode so I'm exploring other options.
[2] https://msp.ucsd.edu/techniques.htm
[3] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262014465/the-audio-programming...
- Search campaigns: - automatically crawl website, find the offerings and generate new campaigns - Provide qualitative recommendations such as, relevant terms to include/exclude, e.g. including typos as keywords, improvements on landing page
- Shopping campaign: - Smart labeling of all products to allocate the budget among Top performers, Rising and Ghost products to avoid draining the budget. E.g. instead of a campaign with 10k products with one budget , turn it into 5 campaigns with different budgets doubling down on what works.
Feel free to reach out for a demo
It's an open-source iOS voice agent that uses the OpenAI Realtime API (bring your own key).
Current connectors: Hacker News (check demo in readme!), Google Drive, GitHub, and web search.
I got frustrated with the limitations of the OpenAI Realtime Voice iOS app—for example, it can't even connect to Google Drive.
Arty is self-contained except for the OpenAI model and any third-party services you connect to. Uses local tools—no MCP support yet.
If you'd like additional connectors, feel free to open an issue.
Website: https://statisticaldrafting.com
Turns out to be a small niche, but I enjoy it!
Apart from that I have a personal SaaS idea I want to release soon. Its something that started as a joke but the joke is still not finished
Idea came from one of my clients, where they wanted to use AI agents throughout the organization but at that moment there was no centralized governance or security concepts. This pulls everything at one place and tries to solve the security concept with per-user credentials, which can be provided out-of-band through the MCP protocol (generated a one-time link end-user can use to sign in to the underlying MCP server with OAuth or provide API key)
In October I finished the PDF parser. It was a big challenge extracting PDF contect with correct paragraph breaks on user's computer locally. I'm gonna write about this soon.
Now I'm working on a web extension that talks to the app that run locally on your system so you can use WithAudio in your browser with very good performance, 100% local and private.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/console-dock/biplbp...
I’m responsible for product research, analysis, design, development, and promotion. Most of the workflow was powered by AI tools — more than 60% of the research, design, and coding involved AI assistance. Initially we used Bootstrap for responsive design, but later switched to a lighter TailwindCSS framework.
Right now traffic is very low (just a few dozen users per day), and I’m trying to figure out whether that’s a product issue or simply a lack of promotion. Honestly, it’s a bit discouraging, but I’m hoping to learn from feedback and iterate.
Curious if anyone here has experience growing early-stage products with niche financial data — how did you approach the balance between product refinement and marketing?
But thanks to LLMs, I finally decided to give it a go and got something basic working in a short time, hurrey for AI assisted coding!
Feels empowering to be honest. No idea if I will really implement the main ideas, that I have since a long time, but I know that I can now if I want to.
==> Here is a photo of the Editor : https://ibb.co/FC9Hzj2
==> website with an example of a FPS visit https://free-visit.net
Please be honest, tell me why I don't have traction.
Too many things I wanted to analyse went to nothing because I was too lazy to fetch information and the put it inside a spreadsheet cell by cell. So I developed this to help me extract docs into spreadsheets while also having access to the web.
Now working on a vibe-coded version of it where instead of showing a spreadsheet, it will be able to generate data-focused tiles and apps
Decided to pivot and start learning about databases and their internals more. Currently pulling down Clickhouse and reading some code along with the reading the book Database Internals by Alex Petrov.
So I'm technically not "working on" an app...I am working on myself to branch out and attempt to specialize a bit more as I progress in my career.
Any advice/papers/books to read is very welcomed!
Building native applications for iOS, Android and Huawei devices in Haskell.
Working on an app that helps me (and other people) do household management on autopilot. It helps me manage things, food, expiration dates, shopping, chores, and I get notified periodically to review my lists. I waste way less food and I actually do my chores instead of procrastinating. https://okthings.app
Yeah I'm not gonna touch it and I'm going to actively encourage people to disable it. Use signal instead.
https://github.com/mrkev/webgpu-waveform
Made some updates to this open-source library I wrote to render audio waveforms using the GPU on the browser (WebGPU).
Example on the site. Works without enabling flags on Chromium browsers. There's an example to scrub and zoom in real time on some audio. Feedback welcome!
Have been down a rabbit hole ensuring the stairs are realistic and that grid connects properly. Lots of fun and frustration with AI coding tools trying to solve that (they mostly don't/can't). Some fun detours learning a little Prolog to help out as well.
I've been building it for several months now and enjoy the learning process, I also wrote a blog post and learnt a ton about terminal, ANSI processing. The learning has been immense for me, I now have working knowledge of ANSI escape codes, grapheme clusters, terminal emulators, Unicode normalization, VT protocols, PTY sessions, and filesystem operations, all the low-level details I would have never think about until I were implementing them. [1]
[0] https://github.com/vinhnx/vtcode [0.1] https://deepwiki.com/vinhnx/vtcode [1] https://buymeacoffee.com/vinhnx/vt-code
Like grouping statements together within a rule with heavier emphasis on keywords that starts each of its statement.
Even has the easiest Vim installer, `make install`/`make uninstall`; none of that funky Vundle, or other relatively unknown Vim packagers.
Has over 2,500 semantic nodes, 15,000 syntax match statements, and under 5ms rendering.
This is a purely deterministic LL(1) full semantic parser.
https://github.com/egberts/vim-syntax-nftables
Skip the release (I cannot delete it), go full repo clone.
Is it ready? Yes, almost entirely, unless you are a firewall expert using few remaining nftables-supporting but esoteric features like ‘synproxy’. Gotta master that first before I can highlight it properly.
It's a honeypot system that uses AI to mess with attackers. When someone tries to hack your app, it detects them and serves up fake responses based on attack type.
The system learns from attackers behavior and creates convincing decoys to waste their time and frustrate their efforts. It's basically a trap that gets smarter the more attackers poke at it.
https://share.combo.cc/-Z7hBzNbaCc
(work in progress prototype, design is not final)
Intentionally made simple and centered around plain text files and editing speed. I've spent a week on the prototype, now it's good enough to dog-food. Would like to eventually distribute it as a multi-platform app.
Also... would it be crazy if services and social media were text-based applications too?
Not necessarily through telnet, but with some kind of standard so that instead of the web/browser, we use a CLI(s).
I dunno, maybe I’m just bored.
It’s mostly free with only old Reddit features gated behind a one time $5 fee. The app has a few hundred thousand users on the Apple platforms but recently it was invited to join Mozilla’s Recommended Extensions program so I’m hoping to grow the non-Apple user base.
https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids
Basically, I'm building tooling and providing these to community run clubs that help turn kids from consumers into creators. I'm focusing on game development initially, but have plans to expand into other areas of creativity.
We're using Godot + GodotJS (which I'm a maintainer of): https://breaka.club/blog/godots-most-powerful-scripting-lang...
I've much experience building software for creators. I'm a (core) developer of Tabletop Simulator. I worked at a now defunct startup which allowed people to create and distribute their own interactive fiction stories using partner third-party IPs.
I have a background in EdTech. I used to be Head of Engineering at Ender, where we ran custom Minecraft servers for kids: https://joinender.com/ and prior to that I was Head of Engineering at Prequel / Beta Camp, where we ran courses that helped teenagers learn about entrepreneurship: https://www.beta.camp/. During peak COVID I also ran a social emotion development book subscription service with my wife, a primary school teacher.
But of course the programmer in me needs to make my own software to design patterns with code. Enjoying using paper.js to do all the complicated math to calculate lengths and angles.
I write almost daily article about libGDX - my most favorite code-centric game framework. There are now over 100 articles covering topics from basics to advances. I plan to post more because this is more or less a passionate project.
In the future I hope it evolves into a definitive resource for learning game development with Java and libGDX.
It does some neat things to match instructions while avoiding location dependent references, then creates a hash that can be used to used to search binaries in linear (or faster!) time.
Still a WIP, but being used on at least one decomp project.
I should be able to do it with my various personal apps, but one app I've written, was done in concert with a professional graphic designer, and he is not happy with LG, so I expect that app to be a pain.
These are my apps: https://littlegreenviper.com/AppDocs/
First use case is hello@ email addresses for fellow founders. Free for founders!
Because of the well bound nature of the problem space, we are able to unlock a lot of power from LLMs and put together a good end-to-end product that delivers the promise.
Still early days. I know there are lot of folks who care about a11y. I would love to chat and learn from your experience.
It looks at your spending across all your accounts, categorizes, identifies patterns, trends, runs predictions and sends weekly/monthly summary email.
No apps or dashboards, just insight.
Plug in once and forget. Takes 5 minutes to keep track of your spending.
We are still at early stages but you can check it out here
https://pennypost-landing.vercel.app/
Appreciate any feedback you might have!
I am using hugo to build suckless static pages. LLM helped me so that I don't need to read all their docs. I haven't finished it yet nor posted a single blog. But there will be one soon.
https://github.com/entomorph/reverse-engineering
I started the project when ChatGPT 4 was first released, using it as a way to explore what LLMs could actually do. I also find working on it very relaxing, there is something cool about uncovering secrets hidden in code for more than twenty years.
I made a viewer on my website to build intuition for my preferred perception algorithm which is entropy filtering + correlation. Pretty neat to check out the heatmaps for random tasks, there is a lot of information inherent in the heatmap about the structure of the task: https://synapsomorphy.com/arc/
The game has a farily simple frontend, but there is a fairly complex constraint solving algorithm as part of the puzzle making process. What makes the puzzle quite unique is that you can't "guess". You can only make guesses that are provable by logic. The algorithm ensuring this has worked flawlessly for months now (though I've manually inserted some silly mistakes once or twice).
Today's puzzle is one of the hardest to date. The difficulty resets on Mondays, and then gets harder again towards Sunday.
It mimics the official USCIS forms but autosaves locally, validates inputs, and lets you download a ready-to-submit PDF - no signup, no uploads, no tracking.
It’s meant for travelers and immigrants who just need to fill a form once, and as a side effect, it’s become a great acquisition funnel for my paid B2B product, VisaSimplify, which helps immigration lawyers automate client intake and PDF mapping.
https://github.com/alganet/PHL
---
Bootstrapping from an x86 image that is mostly source text (based on live-bootstrap):
https://github.com/alganet/abuild
---
Image with many shells, for testing script for portability:
https://github.com/dfrankland/envoluntary
This helped me bridge the gap between installing packages declaratively via NixOS / home-manager and defining them for each project being worked in via flake.nix / direnv / nix-direnv; which was needed since most projects don't use Nix.
Weighing the tradeoffs of doing this calculation server or client side. That'll be an architecture shift away from my current set of background jobs fetching state and towards something more functional and on-demand.
But a lot of what I work on is my classes giving me less time to open source nowadays, but I have also worked in implementing and mashing new Papers coming out in Robotics. Anyone who wants to talk more should please connect!
Completely bootstrapped online counseling platform focused on affordability ($25/week!), accessibility and doing the right thing by clients and therapists. Currently only available in NY, FL, TX and Singapore with plans to expand as budget allows.
Document translator that keeps layout intact.
A law professionals helper - aggregates judicial case info into a single place, gives visibility and notifications - asistentul.ro
A scheduling platform for self-employed professionals that offer services (think hair-cutting, nails, psychlogists). (Not yet live)
Aaand something in compliance that I want to keep a bit stealthy right now.