Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

https://bauble.studio/ is a lisp-based procedural 3D art playground that I hacked together a while ago. It's fun to play with, but it's a very limiting tool: you can do a lot to compose signed distance functions, but there's no way to control the rendering or do anything "custom" that the tool doesn't explicitly allow.

So lately I've been working on a "v2" that exposes a full superset of GLSL, so you can write arbitrary shaders -- even foregoing SDFs altogether -- in a high-level lisp language. The core "default" raymarcher is still there, but you can choose to ignore it and implement, say, volumetric rendering, while still using the provided SDF combinators if you want.

The new implementation is much more general and flexible, and it now supports things like 2D extrusions, mesh export for 3D printing, user-defined procedural noise functions... anything you can do in Shadertoy, you can now do in Bauble. One upcoming feature that I'm very excited about is custom uniforms and embedding in other webpages -- so you can write a blog post with interactive 3D visualizations, for example.

(Also as a fun coincidence: my first cast bronze Bauble arrived today! https://x.com/ianthehenry/status/1827461714524434883)

I’m a tech nerd rare coin & currency dealer! I took my two hobbies and combined them into a real business and I’m having the time of my life. Just launched a proper retail site here:

https://www.rarity7.com/

About 50% of my days are spend doing the coin dealer stuff - hunting for inventory, buying collections/doing appraisals, going to coin shows and buying and selling in person, etc.

The other 50% I’m writing code and building out the tech stack for this business. I’ve written the whole backend for the retail site myself, which includes my own inventory management system, sync with eBay and other marketplaces, etc.

I’ve also built out a research tool which includes an ML price prediction engine engine (which sounds fancy but is really just a tabular regression model).

Backend is written in Crystal because I love the language and there’s nobody stopping me from using it :) Frontend is all Svelte and they’re glued together using a mini framework I wrote:

https://github.com/noahlh/celestite

I probably have 5 years worth of ideas I still want to build and I wish I could spend even more time building it all, but it’s super fun actually using it in the real live marketplace so I’d never give that up.

Happy to chat about this stuff with anyone who’s interested or vaguely interested in numismatics.

I’m working on a collaborative ebook reading app. The idea is that you can create a reading group, invite people and then share comments and highlights and see each other’s reading progress.

It’s something I’ve been wanting for a while, for example to read a book with a group of friends or with a work team, but there’s lots of other possibilities including author reading parties, proofing and education. Got the basics of it working now, need to polish the UI and add the commenting and highlighting features.

I’m using Next.js and Supabase, neither of which I’ve used before so it’s been a fun but often frustrating process. Claude has been an amazing assistance, fixing my mistakes and countless type errors.

I am working alone on https://tree-of-knowledge.org

This is a hierarchical representation of any given piece of knowledge.

It starts with a tree root node that you specify (let's say Kung fu), then it branches out into multiples subcategories (techniques, styles, philosophy, weaponry, ect...) and then you can click on these subcategories to branch out even more into the graphical tree.

This is all generated on-the-fly with Claude 3.5. There is no limit to what knowledge you might explore.

The killer feature is that it is totally free and does not require to login. Just click the link and have fun. I'll keep it free like that, as long as I can.

I hope you like it guys because it is the best project that I have up my sleeve.

Enjoy!,

Pierre

I have this creative writing website where writing friends can write branching fiction novels together. Sorta like choose-your-own-adventure, but more literary - third person past tense, actual characters and narrative arcs. Configurable number of choices at the bottom of every chapter, and as you're reading, if the choice label doesn't link to a chapter yet, you can write it. It's been floating around since 1996 or so, so my big project lately has been upgrading it. v1 was perl and gdmb files. v2 was php and codeigniter, and it's been limping along there for several years. When ChatGPT came out, I rewrote the whole thing for scala/play and that was super fun. Moved from ubuntu14 to ubuntu20, mysql5.5 to 8.0, etc. I'm done with the rewrite now but am still messing around with launching it, upgrading to ubuntu22 (done today), figuring out if I want to update jvm/scala/play before launching, etc. All this for only a group of six writers (so far)! But collectively we've written more than 425 chapters across a handful of stories, 450,000 words, and had a lot of laughs. I even wrote a snazzy graph visualization thing that animates the structure of the story maps. After I finish launching the thing on hardware/software that actually isn't EOL, I might open up membership to others.

I noticed my 2.5 year old niece likes zooming into photos of bugs on her mom's phone. I'm making her a little "game" where she can flip over rocks and find different bugs and other weird surprises.

A few months back, I posted an essay here about how I think we are entering an age where the personal library will become an asset class unto itself [1]. This is due to a combination of the advent of semantic search and the revival of personal knowledge management in the deluge of our age.

As such, I’ve been working on the software to bring this vision to life, which is called Your Commonbase (a portmanteau of Commonplace Book and Vector Database).

In short, the purpose of the work is to create a data structure that works the way humans store, retrieve, and share information. By making these three elements as close to zero stress as possible, you catalyze creativity through remixing and augmentation of memories. My hypothesis is a lifetime building a Commonbase creates an idiosyncratic system, filled with the interpretations of an individual or a group. This individualized structure then creates demand that others want. I.e, a curation of all of the books you have read, organized by the marginalia you have added to them. This is a system people would pay for, and also a system that becomes more valuable over time.

I’ve been “working in public” by posting updates on my site [2], and am just beginning a small waitlist alpha testing phase (email me if you want in!)

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40192359

[2] - https://www.bramadams.dev/

I've been working on a kind of strategy game called Fall of an Empire (https://fallofanempiregame.com), it's a bit like a mix between Crusader Kings, Total War, Mount and Blade type games (just the overworld, not the battles), but rather than expanding you're trying to prevent an empire from collapsing.

It's a ton of work, especially with the number of systems - you've got combat, resource management, settlement development, food managment, espionage, diplomacy etc - these all need to play together well. And then you've got to add in the storyline, graphics, marketing -but I think I'm making pretty good progress.

I'm still using Unreal Engine 4 because I started work on that version and I haven't needed to upgrade to 5 since it's been released. I've got a free prologue that I'm releasing on October 1, so now until then is a lot of polishing to make it work well.

Right now I'm mostly thinking about AI. Right this minute I'm sitting in a cafe reading a book on Multi-Agent Oriented Programming with a framework called JaCaMo[1], and later tonight when I get home I'll probably spend some time getting my Fuseki[2] server loaded with some base schemas (SKOS, FOAF, etc) as I slowly start working on getting things set up to explore some ideas around integrating symbolic logic with LLM's.

And I took my new quadcopter drone out and did some flying last night for the first time. As in, my first time flying a drone, ever. The results were... predictable. Let's just say, I bought a cheap (< $100) drone for a reason. This thing will wind up destroyed. In less than an hour I managed to crash it into fences, walls, bushes, cars, dumpsters, the ground, an armadillo, Elvis Presley, a 1974 AMC Gremlin, and Nickelback. Well, more or less.

It brought to mind this famous scene[3] from the movie Days of Thunder:

Harry: I want you to go back out on that track and hit the pace car.

Cole: Hit the pace car?

Harry: Hit the pace car!

Cole: What for?

Harry: Because you hit every other god-damned thing out there and I want you to be perfect.

[1]: https://jacamo-lang.github.io/

[2]: https://jena.apache.org/documentation/fuseki2/

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xll0VOsiE84

Making fingerboards. Little skateboards you can do tricks with. I'm always fingerboarding at work when I take a break from programming.

It's a ton of fun, especially writing Fusion 360 scripts to do all the parametric modeling of decks and molds. Then 3D printing molds with different parameters, pressing decks with veneer, making art for the decks, packaging, etc. It's an incredibly niche hobby but I've always found fingerboarding and making fingerboards to be infinitely creative.

I'm working on a web app that helps you discover books, movies, TV shows, video games, and songs that you'll like. The app makes it super easy to describe what you're looking for and then gives you a unique set of 10 suggestions on each run.

It's the first solo project I've done in many years and I'm having a great time learning. I've also been able to get some great recommendations for myself and it's fun to use!

https://www.yogurrt.com/

For the past year, I've been working on a CSS Masterclass: https://cssmasterclass.io/

It's going to have online text courses with interactive examples and coding exercises, but I'm also in the process of adding video tutorials. These videos will be of 2 types: ones where I teach you the theory, and ones where we actually build a project from scratch.

I feel like CSS has always been something that was made to look harder than it actually is. In its essence, the syntax is very simple, and the vocabulary is quite basic. There are only a few things you need to know to be able to code an attractive and flexible responsive web page. For comparison, I find programming backends much more difficult.

Even though I've been working on this project for almost a year, I decided that next month will be the day I finally launch it.

I'm working on FreeInChicago, a site for finding all the free activities to do in the city.

I love Chicago and the incredible wealth of free festivals, museums, public art, music, parks, workshops, and so many more activities available to appreciate. I've found there isn't a good way to discover them though so I'm building the tool that I've always wanted. Right now I have a landing page up, have done some work on sourcing data, and I'm working towards defining a discovery interface.

https://freeinchicago.com/

I recently created a custom 220gsm pre-washed cotton fabric by twisting thrice a 60s yarn (60/3 Ne) into 20s before knitting. It could never be commercially viable so released something similar.

Essentially combining the softness of fine count cotton with the weight and durability of a heavier garment.

https://www.marchtee.com/

Also a lot of ERP, warehouse, UI work and fun with Cursor.

I am building an Excel extension that lets me use LLMs in formulas. For example, I can write =PROMPT(A1:E1, "Extract keywords") in a cell to extract keywords from a row and drag the cell to apply the prompt to many other rows. I find this useful when I want to use AI for repetitive tasks that would normally require copy-pasting data in and out of a chat window many times.

I actually built it for my girlfriend who was writing a systematic review paper. She had to compare 7.500 papers against inclusion and exclusion criterias. She obviously did this manually because she cares about scientific integrity, but it sparked the idea to make an AI tool to automate repetitive tasks for people like her who would rather avoid programming. Now I just find it useful myself for a lot of ad-hoc analysis tasks like prompt engineering, rag tuning, and comparing model outputs from anthropic, openai, and google.

The recent relicensing of Redis to a non-open-source license bothered many in the community. But the groundwork for the relicensing was laid much earlier. I've been working on relicensing monitor to track various projects attributes that can affect the ease of relicensing a project.

https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/

A new CI/CD platform. Local CLI (run without git push), remote debugger, automatic content-based caching, DAG-based definition, and dynamic tasks. It’s taken a lot of work to build it, but I’m really excited about how well it’s working. https://rwx.com/mint

I’m working on a new game. I’ve been trying to get back to the basics of the adventure genre. A fun and engaging story, choices, strategic combat and a simple, straightforward approach.

No microtransactions, no advertisements. No networking! The game is meant to function completely off line. The game will start with a mobile release in probably October and should be available on Steam shortly after.

I’ve been using Flame, Flutter’s game engine to develop my app. My artists are amazing and have been providing fully animated sprites using Spine. I’ve used Flutter before but this is my first time getting into Flame.

If you’re curious how it’s going, hop on the mailing list at https://danger.world to learn more. I’ll be looking for my initial playtesters here in the next few weeks.

I haven't been working on much at all lately, struggling from bore-out at work. 8 hours of boredom a day is surprisingly exhausting, and it's spilling over into the rest of my life. Starting a new gig next month, hopefully things will pick up again.

I'm writing a book. A novel. By hand (this is, no AI involved, just me and vim).

Sometimes I feel I'm loosing the time, because nowadays there is a lot of AI generated content and even more competence in self-published books.

After a long walk against myself, of about 10 months, it's nearly finished (in my native language, Spanish). It still needs a few more reviews and retouching.

I got recently unemployed after +20 years as Linux sysadmin, and my wife is now unemployed too (after +20 years in HHRR), fortunately we have still a few savings.

I dream that it will (economically) work, but most of the time I intuit there will be less than a few sales from family and friends.

Depending on how it goes, I've already the script for the second and third parts.

In parallel I'm researching different ways to generate cash flow without working for another person. I would like to avoid going to search for a job in the current market of cloud, docker and kubernetes, as I'm more a hardware/colocation guy, and 99,9% of job offers request for docker/kubernetes.

I am working on improving a system to inform citizens about the public benefits for which they are eligible [0]. It's hold by Barcelona City Council.

It analyzes the social situation of a person, or group of people that live together, and forecasts those benefits that they could access. It is an old base code that uses OpenFisca for the back, and React for the front. However, it's quite fun though. Currently I'm working on make it more stable as there are still some parts that could break the process.

[0] https://lesmevesajudes.barcelona.cat/

I’ve been working on Don’t Double Book Me (https://dontdoublebookme.com) the past few weeks out of frustration with keeping my personal and work Google Calendars in sync.

Previously used Reclaim but found $10 a month to keep 2 calendars in sync was excessive and the software was increasingly becoming more team oriented, no longer for individuals. Felt like I was paying for a product and also the product. I just needed to keep 2 calendars in sync, not smart meetings, analytics, integrations, etc. ideally I set it up and forget about it.

I really needed a way to sync my calendars privately, without all the extras. Now that Dropbox has purchased Reclaim, it's even more important I feel like my calendars are not spied on. I knew I could provide a similar service.

Here’s what makes me excited about it as a user:

Affordable: Just $20/year with a 7-day free trial. Cancel at any time for a pro-rated refund.

Privacy First: No need to store events on a servers enabling unlimited calendar syncs.

Working Hours: Adaptive feature that adjusts if an event falls outside your specified working hours.

Round Event Times: Opt to round event start and end times to the nearest 15 or 30 minutes for cleaner scheduling.

Invitations: Block time between calendars when you receive a meeting invitation that you haven't responded to yet. Decline it? The time block on your other calendar is removed.

My plan is to keep it small and focused, while also listening to user feedback for how you'd like to manage your personal and work calendars more efficiently.

Thanks for checking out my new project.

I've mentioned my project a few times around HN, but might as well reiterate :)

I took some time off from work to teach myself Rust and to build a WASM colony simulation game. You've got a colony of ants, they're in a cold, foggy crater, and you help them grow and survive. The simulation runs 24/7, like a Tamagotchi, but a bit more complex, like a simplified RimWorld or Dwarf Fortress. I am hoping to design game play systems which focus on mental health, self-care, addiction, motivation, and personal growth and to use the gameplay as a means of encouraging awareness in the player.

https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants

I haven't added any features in a while, unfortunately, but it's on my mind. For a while I was just adding whatever popped into my head, as a means of learning Rust, and I naively thought the full idea would crystallize with time, but it hasn't. So, I'm trying to take a step back and figure out how to actually make a coherent game that does justice to the mechanics I want to see in my simulation. I've spent a lot of time thinking rather than coding, but I'm optimistic that I'll get through this phase sooner or later. I will admit, though, that trying to take a novel approach with game design is overwhelming at times. That's okay, though! I'm enjoying the process of tinkering with the project and will likely continue tinkering on it for many years to come as a creative outlet for self-actualization.

Officially retired. Managing the money I saved to retire on, which is more time-consuming and stressful than expected. Working on yet another static site generator but stymied by my terrible Git/GitHub skills. Studying historical Western secular music. Jazz guitar too.

Hi! This year I quit my corporate job to work full time on https://crucialexams.com/. This month I am working on expanding our new offerings at https://pmpready.com/ and https://vitalnursingexams.com/. Our platform provides a fun way for students to test their readiness for industry certification exams like the PMP, BCEN, CompTIA, AWS and more. Written in ASP.NET, MySQL as backend and good old Javascript/Bootstrap for the frontend. Nothing fancy, works great!

Making swim baits. I started carving and paints fishing lures during Covid. It’s easy to knock out something that looks like a lure, but it’s surprisingly nuanced to make something that behaves in the water as you want it to. Mass production is absolutely the correct way to go about this, but - you know - it keeps my hands busy in the evening and I’m improving my carving, airbrushing, weighting/buoyancy, etc with each one.

I’ve been building a personal finance app that runs fully in the browser (using the automerge crdt and sqlite) for over a year now at https://tender.run.

Recently I’ve been taking more of being able to flexibly run sql against this data, and this past week I’ve been working with d3 to make fancy sankey graphs to show income/expense flows. Quick preview here: https://demo.tender.run/reports/sankey

I recently bought a used Seadoo and discovered the dirty little secret of personal watercraft that they don't want you to know. Unlike cars with their standardized ODB2 ports, those aren't a requirement for PWCs. And the diagnostic scanner hardware/software costs hundreds or thousands of dollars. Major affront to the right to repair, so I'm ending up doing some CANbus hacking.

I'm trying up standup comedy this summer -- open mics for now.

I thought it would be absolutely terrifying to be in front of a bunch of strangers and try to make them laugh, but it turns out if you're prepared, it's not that hard. Open mic crowds are benevolent and don't expect you to be the next Richard Pryor or George Carlin anyway, and I don't "engage" the public at all; I just tell my jokes.

I try to come up with new material each time so there's some work to do, but it's fun.

Working on Kviklet: http://github.com/kviklet/kviklet

My first job was in a FinTech and the way production access was managed scared me. This is my approach at streamlining the process. Basically a PR review flow for SQL queries, enforcing the 4-eyes principle so you never accidentally can do a Delete * form users, forgetting the where clause.

Working on adding better phrase matching for Marginalia Search.

The way position used to be stored in the search engine was approximate, using something like a bloom filter. With this change, they'll be stored in an exact fashion using a gamma coded positions list instead.

In the phase of dotting t:s and dashing i:s at this point. Hope to have it in production in September.

Compared to the majority of what I read below, I'm a rank amateur and have no right to post.

I'll do it anyway, as I need to learn to own where I'm at and have a backbone. :)

I'm learning the Zola static site generator and using to to build my blog at https://jeff-mitchell.dev. The focus is my mis-adventures learning the Rust language.

I've found it a challenge to get off my feet with Zola, but I'm slowly figuring things out. Little victory this evening, finally figured out how to get images linked in posts to render properly.

A graphic novel about a future world run by benevolent AIs who have found that the best way to get humans to behave in easily-predictable ways is to manifest as extremely unctuous clowns.

http://egypt.urnash.com/npol/

I've been working on a site that helps you find in-person work in NYC that is actually convenient: https://walkablework.com

I recently left a startup I had cofounded after a few years because we were a remote team and I came to the conclusion that we weren't going to be successful without working together in person. I wanted to make this site to help people like me use location as an early filter to find good companies and teams to work with. Let me know if you have any feedback!

I built a simple teleprompter web app to help record talking head videos with the front camera of my MacBook this week.

Link: https://camprompter.app

The insight is that if you read text from a tiny enough box right below the front camera on the MacBook, it appears as if you're talking to the camera.

Boom! Easy Eye Contact With Camera.

I scrunched up the Notion app and placed it as well as I could in the safe area to test it out for a couple of videos, but then I just wrote a web app because it seemed like the next logical step.

Once you paste the script and hit play... you can only see the text in the safe area so your eyes don't wander.

Fire up PhotoBooth and try it out!

PS: Press F for fullscreen.

Hey guys! We're engineers/designers from France, and we've built the Ultimate DIY Battery that you can repair and refill!

It works with 90% of the bikes/motor brands on the market, so I assumed that some people here might be interested, if they got a non-functional batteries but they still want to use their e-bike?

We believe that everybody should have control about stuff they own, and we should fight against planned obsolescence!

Here are a few videos about our founder on the battery itself, why we built it, and how to assemble it:

- What is the Gouach Battery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsuW1NPkvNk

- Presentation of the pack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLoCihE0eIA

- Presentation of the fireproof and waterproof casing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDJpt7RDbRM

Here are the juicy bits: https://docs.gouach.com

We'd love some feedback from the e-bike DIY builder community

Oh, and it's launching as a Kickstarter in September and there is an offer for early-backers here https://get.gouach.com/1 for a 25% discount on the battery!

You can follow us on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/gouach.batteries to get the latest news!

I'm building MemFree, https://www.memfree.me/

The open source project: https://github.com/memfreeme/memfree

An Open Source Hybrid AI Search Engine: Instantly get accurate answers from the internet, bookmarks, notes, and documents. Obtain the most precise answers in the shortest time. With one click, AI indexes your personal knowledge base, eliminating the need to remember or manage it.

Helping others with their mental health (after my own struggles).

Worked as a software dev/manager for a decade, went through workaholism, burnout, then alcoholism, depression, all that. Doing a ton better now, and taking some time off to write about what I went through and hopefully help out others going through the same thing some: https://depthsofrepair.com/

I and a friend are working on Elixir Emporium [0], a single-player crafting RPG that uses layers of generative AI to create and inject new game data as you play.

It started out as just a prototype asking what happens if you task an LLM with generating crafting recipes for every combination of items in a game (which was already super fun), but it's exploded into all kinds of crafting, harvesting, and item manipulation systems that literally weren't possible in games just 5-10 years ago.

Now we're working on NPC simulations based on last year's Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior [1] paper. Dialogue and persistent memory are obvious, but we're also using the ReAct pattern [2] to give NPCs an influenceable decision loop that dictates what actions they take throughout each game day. And there's some other fun stuff like quest generation and using LLMs as a decision engine to determine if certain player actions complete these dynamic quests.

There's still a lot of work to do to make it feel more like a polished game, but we've been focused on the underlying systems and getting them feeling great and I'm really excited to see the game come to life.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3039840/Elixir_Emporium/

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442

[2] https://react-lm.github.io/

I'm working on an invite-only, personalized medical education platform called MedAngle, particularly for emerging economies. I started it in my third year of medical school, and we're now at 90,000 doctors/medical students, along with over 100 million questions solved and billions of minutes spent studying and excelling.

I get to lead a team of 175 doctors and students across premed, medical, and dental education. I am the first doctor + full stack technologist in the country. It's super rewarding. No funding, just off our immensely low price point that things are still growing quickly. All software written in house.