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

I learned how to weld (MIG) and built a giant mushroom to house a mannequin I dubbed "the mushroom man" over about 100 hours in the last 4 weeks. I covered the outside with thick foam panels cut to size, cementing them in place with copious amounts of spray foam. I shaved the outside to a nice shape with a sawzall and the inside I covered in chicken-fenced, then attached a painters tarp to that (so it could be painted on).

To fit on a trailer (the mushroom's cap is 11.5ft wide) the cap comes off the stem and the edges of the cap are two half-moons which have fixed mounting points where threaded rod sticks through some welded washers, and a nut is put on in place. I was too last minute to install the 200 WS2811 pixels and have them run some cool patterns, before the music festival I brought it to came time, but even just a lantern on top (another painters tarp covered the cap's metal-frame, and everything was spray painted) looked great.

Super fun project. Expensive, but I learned a lot, got to be creative, and I'm happy to try out new things and make the best of my before-children time. Also, it was such a joy seeing people croud around the mushroom (and site beside the mushroom man inside) at night during the festival.

I spent a week building a website that is a repository of timeless content. It generally consists of old magazine articles (though not exclusively) that you can pick up at any time and will bring value to your life. I notice most of what we consume on daily basis is ephemeral and not all that valuable outside of the moment, whereas ever-present content is always valuable.

The unique angle here is that each article includes a hand-written summary explaining why the article was meaningful to the curator. This gives you a quick window into the piece without being overwhelming.

Since this is a free website mostly to be shared with friends and family, I implemented user login via "phone number" to save and submit articles, but without a one-time token. So it's "password-less" for now; a trust-based system.

It's basically 'done' - but I'm not sure that I want to share it publicly for the aforementioned reasons. I've been using it on my subway rides to read more interesting stuff. So far so good.

screenshot - https://i.imgur.com/8kIrgBt.png

I got so upset with Docusign being too expensive and unfair, that I quit my last startup to build a new one.

I built a complete platform over the past 3 years, that doesn't require a subscription and you only pay for what you send. Give it a go if you need to send a document that needs to be signed.

https://goodsign.io

my wife and I have a new side project: we're opening a bookshop! the last local store is closing due to retirement and we figure the community demand is still there. we're negotiating the lease, sorting out how to order a lot of bookshelves, and source the initial inventory. i'm currently figuring out how to connect our point of sale system to our accounting software. good times. :)

Building algorithmic trading models. So far results continue to be good with every model outperforming the market on both absolute and risk-adjusted basis since going live.

Since launching https://grizzlybulls.com in January 2022:

Model | Return | Max drawdown

-------------------

S&P 500 (benchmark) | 21.51% | -27.56%

VIX TA Macro MP Extreme | 64.21% | -16.48%

VIX TA Macro Advanced| 59.13% | -19.12%

VIX TA Advanced | 35.20% | -22.96%

VIX Advanced | 33.39% | -23.93%

VIX Basic | 24.29% | -24.23%

TA - Mean Reversion | 22.30% | -19.92%

TA - Trend | 27.07% | -24.98%

This is an unleveraged, apples to apples comparison. These are not high frequency trading models. Most of them only change signal once every 2-4 weeks on average. During long signals, the models are simply long the S&P 500 and during short signals, they go to cash.

One of the pros of this macro swing-trading/hedging style is high tax efficiency, by holding a core ETF long position that never gets sold and then selling S&P 500 futures (ES or MES) of equal value to the ETFs against the long position. This way your account will accumulate unrealized capital gains indefinitely and you'll only pay tax on the net result of successful hedging. The cherry on top is that the S&P 500 futures are section 1256 contracts that are taxed at 60% long term / 40% short term capital gains rates regardless of the duration they are held.

The models use a variety of indicators, many of them custom built. Most important are various VIX metrics (absolute level, VIX futures curve shape/slope, divergences against S&P 500 price, etc), trend-following TA metrics (MACD, EMV, etc), mean-reversion TA metrics (Bollinger Bands, CMO, etc), macroeconomic (unemployment, housing starts, leading composite), and monetary policy (yield curve inversion, equity risk premium, dot plot, etc). They've been backtested very cautiously to avoid overfitting to the best of my ability.

I've been working on https://wut.dev in my spare time.

It's essentially a simpler, read-only, AWS dashboard where everything is a filterable, searchable, exportable-to-CSV table, with some extra features like multi-region mode, saved notes, and a debugger for access denied errors.

It uses the AWS SDK for JavaScript, so everything is run client-side from your browser. I'm not 100% sure what direction I'm taking it yet, but it's been fun to hack on!

There's a live demo here: https://wut.dev/?service=ec2&type=instances&demo=true if you want to try it out.

I'm working on https://nuenki.app/, a language learning tool. It teaches you a language while you procrastinate by inserting translations of appropriate-difficulty sentences into webpages as you browse HN etc.

Currently trying to reduce costs by switching from using DeepL (high quality, low latency, high cost) everywhere to a hybrid that also uses Claude (high quality, high latency, low cost) for text that is far from the user. Also experimenting with Gemma 2 9B via Groq to go in between them, but it's bad at following instructions and I don't quite trust the quality numbers I'm seeing for it (they're benchmarked with gpt-4o as a judge).

I'm also trying to work out marketing. I'm not good at it, and I dislike it, but I need to get good at it. Currently considering Reddit ads for awareness, some content marketing going over the technical details (there's some fun language processing and performance optimisations), and... I feel that's not enough, but I'm not sure what to add to that.

I'm running on very little budget (I just left school and I'd rather not go into my limited savings over this), so I can't afford to just throw money at ads.

Building a web app that lets me do math and chemistry problems on an infinite canvas with a drawing tablet. After finishing the problem, I can open up an integrated text editor (with vim bindings) that lets me create Anki flashcards about the problem, letting me copy different portions of the handwritten/hand-drawn stuff onto the flashcard.

I developed a very simple compiler to specify flashcard content. Anything inside brackets is considered the "back" of the flashcard (cloze) in Anki. The @n references the nth group in the canvas, and copies those svg paths into the flashcard.

Example card:

  How do you solve for x in this problem?
  @0 // handwritten text of 2x = 4
  
  [ 
  Divide both sides by 2, them simplify
  ]

This project was a response to the lack of systematic review in my college's STEM classes. I would practice a lot, but forget how to approach certain problems on exams. The hope is to have a digital space where I can be reasonably productive in solving practice problems, but also lets me easily integrate with SRS tools.

I wish educators and educational institutions would make an attempt to incorporate SRS into classes. I think it would help a lot of students, especially for cumulative final exams.

Edit: Here's a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/Yaq7vBx

I've been trying to work on things that aren't necessarily economically valuable but that are on my mind and I want to share.

For example, a carbon footprint calculator that pokes fun at the idea of the individual being to blame for climate change. https://a.mancato.nl/climate-calculator

And after seeing my dad struggle to find stuff online because he was seeing so many ads, I made an adblocker ad. https://a.mancato.nl/adblock

I'm going to be a dad next year, so I've been thinking about how to baby-proof areas of my house while allowing my cat freedom of navigation.

My wife is an English teacher, so I've been building little educational games for her to try in the classroom. My latest attempt is a proof-reading game https://frogs.cool Currently I'm using wikipedia articles but I'm working on adding a variety of age appropriate texts in different genres.

Just uploaded the most complete and fine-grained dataset of Parliamentary election results for my country, Namibia. (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi...)

Official data sharing practices are poor - results are are often in the wrong format or not available at all. I had to be quite resourceful to put this all together. As I transition out of academia I hope this sort of data helps others do interesting work.

I am working on Buckaroo[1] - the data table for jupyter/dataframes that I have always wanted. Buckaroo combines a performant table capable of scrolling through 1000s of rows, with summary stats and histograms. All configurable and extensible by users. never type df.head() again. give it a try, I'm eager to hear feedback.

Recently I have been working on the low-code UI. I find myself looking up and typing the same pandas (and polars) incantations over and over again to explore and modify data. The low-code UI allows simple transforms of data (search, remove column outliers, show only outliers of a column, group by) to be perfromed with just clicks. You can also view the generated python code. This is powered by a json-flavored lisp interpreter, but users never have to type lisp code.

[1] https://github.com/paddymul/buckaroo

Maintaining a database of Canadian grocery prices. (Reach out to me if you're passionate about rising food prices and/or have economic analysis skills!)

Writing articles about & archiving Victorian-era "Artistic Printing" - like the examples at [2]. (Reach out if you're knowledgeable about letterpress printing, brass rule art etc. and want to share your insights)

[1] https://jacobfilipp.com/hammer [2] https://www.sheaff-ephemera.com/list/artistic_printing_album...

I designed an electronic board game, very similar to Settlers of Catan.

There are some electronic Catan builds out there, but I found them really expensive -- e.g. opting for a smartwatch screen + microcontroller for every game tile (of which there are 19). Beautiful, yes -- but not my style.

Instead, I went for 8-segment displays for numeric tile values, and RGB LEDs to display terrain types. It adds up to 342 LEDs to control for the full board, from a single central microcontroller. When you turn it on, it sets up the board for you. Pressing a central button "rolls the dice", and it will flash the tiles that produce resources as per the game rules. Or cue special actions on certain rolls.

I really enjoy cost-optimizing prototypes, so this was good fun. I got it down to about USD 20 for a single, ready-to-play unit, including solid brass game pieces (it helps that I'm in Asia). I still use the deck of cards from Catan for now, but plan to replace it with something sci-fi themed. Maybe "Asteroid Miners".

The only thing I'm not 100% satisfied with is that the board is a little cramped -- it's a bit over half the size of the original Catan board. The PCBs had to fit within 100mx100mm -- I used a bit of a weird PCB geometry so that the board is composed of 3 identical subunits, rotated a few degrees to maximize it's surface area within a 100mm square.

I'm not planning to sell it. I just had a slow month, so it's a good time to learn to do new things. I never make any money with hardware, but I love how whimsical electronics can brighten someone's day. Sometimes that earns me a client -- and if not, it's cheap entertainment for me that keeps my skills sharp and my morale high.

I'm working on my hobby operating system written in Rust. It is completely text-based, but the console was lacking a scrollback buffer until this week. It's a simple feature, really, but having to redirect anything that outputs more than one screen to a file to read it was a pain. I'm happy to finally have it!

This weekend, I also made good progress on user-space memory and found a workaround for some issues I had. I still need to implement it the right way, though. After a few years on the project, the thing that is giving me the most trouble is grokking the concept of page tables.

https://moros.cc

https://github.com/vinc/moros

Getting my historical fiction novel published. I finished writing it a couple of months back. Extremely short plot summary: guy deserts from the Roman XI legion, goes back home only to find that his entire province is about to revolt against the Roman Empire at the height of its power. It's one of the most spectacular feats of collective self-immolation in human history and it had a large effect on human history. I think not enough has been written about the role of abject stupidity in human affairs. This book is an attempt to correct that.

I built an English-speaking website that helps immigrants settle in Berlin.[0] It has been my full time job for a while. Most English speakers know about it, but it's nearly invisible to Germans, who would also benefit from the content and tools I have worked on.

I'm currently adding an automated AI translation feature to my custom static site generator, so that I can translate the website to multiple languages and reach more people. I'm trying to make the process as seamless and automated as possible, because I'm running this website solo, and there are only so many hours in a day.

It's a surprisingly tricky endeavour! As usual, the first 80% are easy. It's getting the last 20% right that requires a lot of work. There are so many small hurdles. For instance, translating the URL structure and translating the URLs within the content, getting the translations to be accurate, getting the SEO right, translating the templates and the JS tools I've built, keeping the costs low.

[0] https://allaboutberlin.com

When I was a child, my best friend and I were dreaming of making our own game. We got as far as writing (parts of) the story for a Lucasfilm Games-style point and click adventure, but my programming skills as a young teenager were too poor to actually make that game.

That idea has actually never left my mind though, and now, a few decades later, I've started to realize that if I don't get on it soon, I probably never will.

So I've started writing a game for the Commodore C64, 30 years after they stopped making them, and that's what I've been working on lately.

I'm building a greenhouse. The frame is done, and I've got plastic and a door on it. Next, I'd like to build boxes to hold soil and allow for easy watering.

I'm working on JSON BinPack (https://jsonbinpack.sourcemeta.com), a binary serialization format for JSON (think of it as a Protobuf alternative) with a strong focus on space-efficiency for reducing costs when transferring structured data over 5G and satellite transceivers for robotics, IoT, automotive, etc.

If you work at any of those industries and pay a lot for data transfer, please reach out! I'm trying to talk to as many people as possible to make sure JSON BinPack fits their use case well (I'm trying to build a business around it).

It was originally designed during my (award-winning!) research at the University of Oxford (https://www.jviotti.com/dissertation.pdf), and it was proven to be more space-efficient than any tested alternative in every single tested case (https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12799), beating Protocol Buffers for up to ~75%.

While designing it was already difficult, implementing a C++ production-ready version has proven to be very tricky, leading me to branch off to various other pre-requisite projects, like an ultra-fast JSON Schema compiler for nano-second schema validation (https://github.com/sourcemeta/jsontoolkit) (for which I'm publishing a paper soon).

Working on a next-gen Java build tool, Mill https://mill-build.org/mill/Java_Intro_to_Mill.html

There's been a lot of innovation in build tools for other languages recently: turborepo, nx, poetry. Also Monorepo build tools like Bazel, Pants, or Buck. Mill aims to bring a lot of those innovations to the JVM ecosystem which is currently dominated by old stalwarts like Maven (circa 2004) or Gradle (2008), which although improving definitely have the weight of legacy holding back their potential

Mill brings things like automatic task caching, side-effect-free build tasks, automatic parallalization, automatic detection of task dependencies, task sandboxing/isolation, and other things that are table stakes in modern build tools, along with a concise strongly typed build language with excellent IDE support to make condiguring your build easy and safe (no more yaml!)

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

- Ride Sustainably with the World's First Repairable Battery

- Refillable in 5 minutes (just buy $150 worth of new cells every 3 years or so, when they're depleted)

- Be Worry-Free thanks to the Fireproof Casing! There's been waaaaaay too many lithium fires!

It's launching as an IndieGogo in one week and there is an offer for early-backers here https://get.gouach.com/1 for a 25% discount on the battery!

Building a little CLI tool that stores API requests and spins up a small REST server that allows them to be pinged. This stemmed from being on a flight, not wanting to buy WiFi, or the WiFi being slow and I just want to build something around an API.

I called it gofaux: https://github.com/tjb/gofaux

I'm implementing a Scheme interpreter in Rust as a way to learn and get bettet in both of those languages (but mainly Rust). I picked the R3RS specification of Scheme as it looked like the simplest one, but I've been surprised by the complexity of numbers in Scheme.

This is the most excited I've been about a programming project in years, and I'm looking forward to the fun and the learning. And I'm really curious to see how slow my intetpreter is going to be compared to the industrial-grade ones.

https://bauble.studio/ is a programmatic 3D art playground that I've been working on for a while now, and I'm pretty excited about it! It's based around signed distance functions, which are a way to represent 3D shapes as, well, functions, and you can do a lot of like weird mathematical distortions and operations that give you cool new shapes. Like average two shapes together, or take the modulo of space to infinitely repeat something... it's a really fun and powerful way to make certain kinds of shapes.

SDFs are very cool in general, and widely used in the generative art communities, but kinda hard to wrangle when you're writing shader code directly. They really are functions, but GLSL doesn't support first-class functions, so if you want to compose shapes you have to manually plumb a bunch of arguments around. So Bauble is essentially a high-level GLSL compiler that lets you model SDFs as first-class values, and as a result you can make a pretty cool 3D shape in just a few lines of code. And then 3D print them!

I need to do some actual work to promote and publicize it once I'm done with the documentation and implement a few more primitives, but it's very close!

The docs have lots of examples of the sorts of things you can do with SDFs: https://bauble.studio/help/

And for examples of some "art" that I've made with it recently:

https://x.com/ianthehenry/status/1839061056301445451 https://x.com/ianthehenry/status/1839649510597013592 https://x.com/ianthehenry/status/1827461714524434883

I'm building Nottawa (https://nottawa.app/), a free and open source C++ live video and VJ app for macOS. The VJ space is pretty built up with expensive and professional level software (TouchDesigner, Resolume, etc.) - Nottawa is aimed at the non-technical, hobby artist who wants some cool, simple, and audioreactive visuals without hiring a pro. Long term vision is a community powered repository of presets which can be loaded in-app. Still optimistically aiming for a 2024 release.

Much of the GLSL is Creative Commons fragments from ShaderToy written by brilliant artist coders from around the world. ImGui and an associated node editor library for the GUI, OpenFrameworks handles the graphics APIs. This is my first serious foray into shaders, C++, and OpenGL, meaning if I can ship a product and it helps one single artist then I'll walk away very happy.

I'm standing on the shoulders of giants with this one. Huge gratitude and respect for Inigo (IQ), Omar (ocornut), and Michal (thedmd).

I'm working on a production version that allows for the cloning of identification cards with or without RFID using a 7 color epaper display I call psychic paper. Raw BOM is ~$100 I presented it at skywalks and defcon 32.

The hardware and software is really all built out the real thing is to find the right epaper display (4.01 inch 7 color display) and an easy way to display the badge. I moved to a pimoroni instead of waveshare due to an easier way to program the system . See https://github.com/zitterbewegung/psychic_paper

If you want to follow the development see https://discord.gg/xE4TmkSc

I'm working on my scifi novel. I had started writing it when LLMs started taking off - I had been doing AI for two decades and I was well-placed to be in a good position to profit with the rise of LLMs, but I ended up gaining nothing much and I was depressed about it - so I started writing instead. Been picking at it for about a year before befriending an editor who encouraged me to keep writing. He's helped me developmentally edit it to a point I am now ready to work on my second draft.

It's a hard scifi novel with mild existential horror tones that is borne mostly of maths jokes. At one point the main character tries to escape the matrix (reality). But the matrix is defective, so the best way out was to orthogonalize the subspace and reduce the matrix to its eigenbasis instead. Most of the scenes are based on similar maths jokes.

Tentative name is Diagonalization of the Meta (I had previously called it The Metaverse).

I'm writing a book publicly: Automated Agents [1]. When I first joined a startup building a chatbot for customer service, there was a lot of noise and hype. We built a decent product and our company went from 3 people to 30 in 2 years. We resolved millions of customer service issues. The book I'm writing is the guide I wish existed when I was getting started.

It's still a draft, but the main goal is to serve as a guide for both technical and non technical folks.

[1]: https://github.com/ibudiallo/automated-agents-book

Ps: I shared it in the previous thread last month as well

I've been working on an audio DSP language and IDE https://ravescript.com and a DAW https://ravescript-next.deno.dev/ - both are in a good condition but still require a ton of work to be complete. Trying also to combine the two projects into one. Key features (especially in the DAW) are that the audio engine and the graphics engine are made from scratch and utilize WebAssembly/WebGL in a very efficient/performant architecture.

I recently switched jobs, and as I've become more comfortable in my new job, I realized that my old job completely sucked the creativity and fun out of programming for me. I did not have any energy for any projects in my spare time while working in my previous job, so the 1,5 months I've been focusing on taking small ideas and running with them.

This weekend I got an idea to create a 2D-pattern from a 1D initial pattern. I put it on https://ige.land/, and I find it very fun and satisfying to play around with. It's not so elegant and pretty, but it's fun for me, and that's all I was looking for! Click any cell to change that color in the pattern. Right click or long press to set the length of the 1D pattern. It's also fun to first create a pattern and then resize the browser window to see how it looks like.

So, what I'm working on is not really an interesting project or product. I'm working on my creativity, playing with code, and in general having more fun with programming. Making it magical for myself again.

I'm not sure if it's 100% in line with the spirit of the thread, but it's what I'm most excited to be working on! :-)

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

I cofounded a remote startup in 2021 that I ended up leaving after a few years because I found the remote culture to be very isolating and I didn't feel like it would lead to a successful company. Many companies have started implementing return to office policies that unfortunately don't make sense for a lot of employees. I wanted to build this site to give people the power to find good jobs, companies, and teams that are convenient for them. Let me know if you have any feedback or want to post a job on it!

I’m working on an Anki Addon that streamlines the hell out of the card generation process using LLMs. You can define a schema of prompts for your note type & fields, where each prompt can reference other fields, and use it to generate things like translations, example sentences, mnemonics, for tens of thousands of cards in batches or in the fly as they’re reviewed. These generated fields can reference other generated fields so it’s actually a fully fledged DAG under the hood! It also supports TTS in 50+ languages. Soon adding image generation support.

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1531888719

It’s a paid service at $5/mo with a free trial. Just cracked $50/MRR! Baby steps, but the value is clearly there. Need to tighten up a couple things, especially the web presence and onboarding, before I start marketing more. The tragic irony is that I’m spending all my language learning time building this (alas there can be no other way).

Real estate search for homes in Ireland where you can travel by bike, train, and walking. Most Irish (and other) property websites just give you a road map, this starts off with a public transport and biking map, and has color-coded rail commute times, etc.

It was something I built for myself years and years ago and then ignored, but when I put it online so my wife could use it, other people started to as well. I lost my job a few months ago and decided to overhaul it. It's how we got a house on a few acres a 15 minute bike ride from the train an hour from Dublin with gigabit fibre under €100,000 in 2019.

www.gaffologist.com. Let me know you saw me on HN!

Working on https://shepherd.com/ and trying to help readers find books they will LOVE (not just like).

In a few days, launching user accounts + our first user feature using our new Book DNA review system that is trying to help narrow in on the type of books you love and why. The goal is to serve better recommendations going forward and get more people excited about reading.

It is fun :)

I'm currently finalising a Security Operations app that centralises triage for security alerts (North / https://north.sh) into an intuitive interface that better helps Security Operations teams, MSSPs & SOCs.

It tries to deal with alert fatigue via some nice de-duplication techniques (via customisable aggregation and correlation rules), manages and runs detection rules against different logging platforms (Elastic, Splunk and ALA/Azure) with Validation and Simulation testing, and will lower the time that it takes to determine malicious activity by presenting as much relevant information per security alert as possible.

Hopefully to launch sometime before end-of-year. If you're interested, I'm always free to talk via alex@sinn.io, or sign up to the newsletter.

https://north.sh/

Started my masters at Georgia Tech [1] this summer. Still in the first semester, but really enjoying so far. Just not much spare time on nights and weekends, but it helped me cut down the time spent on social/news/etc.

[1] https://omscs.gatech.edu/

Hi everyone!

I’m currently enhancing the documentation for my project, PGQueuer.

About PGQueuer: PGQueuer is a minimalist, high-performance job queue library for Python, leveraging PostgreSQL’s LISTEN/NOTIFY for efficient job management. It’s perfect for handling background tasks and managing workflows with simplicity and reliability

https://github.com/janbjorge/pgqueuer

CV pipeline to get some additional realtime stats for an annual Mario Kart 8 LAN tournament my friends and I run, hoping to be able to get real time race position tracking and other stats like boost/drift %, per-player item distributions, average time to 10 coins, and whatever else we can think of (and make work)

I built a service that lets you bolt an oauth/oidc provider onto your app with a single callback. https://github.com/poundifdef/connectivly

It lets you use whatever you’re already doing for auth, and lets you become an oauth provider, or issue tokens instead of people passing API keys, on top of that.

The more interesting aspect of that you could use it to bolt on an entire app store or ecosystem on top of your existing product or api.

(ping me if you want to look at this more seriously from a business perspective!)