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Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
What are you working on? Any new ideas which you're thinking about?
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1401 comments
Currently a one-man side project:
Last year PlasticList discovered that 86% of food products they tested contain plastic chemicals—including 100% of baby food tested. The EU just lowered their "safe" BPA limit by 20,000x. Meanwhile, the FDA allows levels 100x higher than what Europe considers safe.
This seemed like a solvable problem.
Laboratory.love lets you crowdfund independent testing of specific products you actually buy. Think Consumer Reports meets Kickstarter, but focused on detecting endocrine disruptors in your yogurt, your kid's snacks, whatever you're curious about.
Here's how it works: Find a product (or suggest one), contribute to its testing fund, get detailed lab results when testing completes. If a product doesn't reach its funding goal within 365 days, automatic refund. All results are published openly. Laboratory.love uses the same methodology as PlasticList.org, which found plastic chemicals in everything from prenatal vitamins to ice cream. But instead of researchers choosing what to test, you do.
The bigger picture: Companies respond to market pressure. Transparency creates that pressure. When consumers have data, supply chains get cleaner.
Technical details: Laboratory.love works with ISO 17025-accredited labs, test three samples from different production lots, detect chemicals down to parts per billion. The testing protocol is public.
You can browse products, add your own, or just follow specific items you're curious about: https://laboratory.love
This is really cool - it'd be great to test for other chemicals like heavy metals.
Specifically, rice seems to contain a good deal of arsenic (https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/01/how-muc...) and I've been interested for a while in trying to find some that has the least, as I eat a lot of rice.
> the FDA allows levels 100x higher than what Europe considers safe
I thought it was an exaggeration so I checked. It's actually even worse:
EU is 0.2 ng/kg body weight and US is 50 µg/kg body weight. So the US limit is 250,000 times higher.
Seems odd that two different flavors of the same product would have different phthalate content? Would that mean that shelf life could have an impact?
Vanilla (high): https://laboratory.love/plasticlist/59 Strawberry (medium): https://laboratory.love/plasticlist/60
>All results are published openly.
Where can I find the link? Do I need to submit my email to see the "openly published results"?
Is the identity of those who make donations protected in any way? Could a company seek legal damages against all or some crowdfunders for what they might deem as libel (regardless of merit)? I doubt people who donate $1 here or $2 there have the capability of warding off a lawsuit.
Super compelling project. When I saw PlasticList, my first thought was how to get the results to create pressure on the food companies. The interactivity and investment of your project might do that. Best of luck.
This is a great idea! It could also expand to testing non-food items for dangerous chemicals (lead, heavy metals, etc). Many products keep a certification on-hand confirming that the product has been tested and found not to exceed the threshold, but I always am suspicious of (1) how thorough the initial testing actually is and (2) how well these results hold up as manufacturing continues. I realize I'm just plugging my pet-peeve though, not sure if others are as concerned about this.
Really cool, definitely donating to a few products!
How do you hold the money for up to 1 year? Does it go into escrow until the project is funded?
Repo: https://github.com/mochilang/mochi
I'm building Mochi, a small programming language with a custom VM and a focus on querying structured data (CSV, JSON, and eventually graph) in a unified and lightweight way.
It started as an experiment in writing LINQ-style queries over real datasets and grew into a full language with:
- declarative queries built into the language
- a register-based VM designed for analysis and optimization
- an intermediate representation with liveness analysis, constant folding, and dead code elimination
- static type inference, inline tests, and golden snapshot support
Example:
type Person {
name: string
age: int
}
let people = load "people.yaml" as Person
let adults = from p in people
where p.age >= 18
select { name: p.name, age: p.age }
for a in adults {
print(a.name, "is", a.age)
}
save adults to "adults.json"
Happy to chat if you're into VMs, query engines, or DSLs.
Still working on: an enclosure-compatible open-source version of the 2nd gen Nest thermostat. It reuses the enclosure, encoder ring, display, and mounts of the Nest but replaces the "thinking" part with an open-source PCB that can interact with Home Assistant.
- The encoder ring which works like an LED mouse, but in reverse: Fully reverse-engineered and on its own demo PCB
- The faceplate PCB, which does the actual control of the thermostat wires, has been laid out, but the first version missed a really-obvious problem involving the behavior on power-on with certain of the GPIO pins from the ESP32, so I've got rev 3 on order from the PCB manufacturer.
Nest Thermostats of the 1st and 2nd generation will no longer be supported by Google starting October 25, 2025. You will still be able to access temperature, mode, schedules, and settings directly on the thermostat – and existing schedules should continue to work uninterrupted. However, these thermostats will no longer receive software or security updates, will not have any Nest app or Home app controls, and Google will end support for other connected features like Home/Away Assist. It has been pretty-badly supported in Home Assistant for over a year anyway, missing important connected features.
I made a film called "Searching For Kurosawa". This short documentary chronicles the story of Kawamura, a man who worked with legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa on the set of his opus "Ran". Kawamura was working in the BTS crew, but his footage got confiscated. It took almost 40 years to recover the footage and present that as his feature film.
My film got screened at the Academy Award-qualifying Bali International Film Festival and the Marina Del Rey Film Festival in the past month. It will be screening next month in New York City at the Asian American International Film Festival.
I've been working on a 3D voxel-based game engine for like 10 years in my spare time. The most recent big job has been to port the world gen and editor to the GPU, which has had some pretty cute knock-on effects. The most interesting is you can hot-reload the world gen shaders and out pop your changes on the screen, like a voxel version of shadertoy.
https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai
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.
After 2+ years of maintaining the FOSS lightweight Reddit frontend Redlib [0], I realized that my niche but extremely detailed knowledge and experience of using Reddit's endpoints might be useful. After reverse engineering the mobile app and writing code to emulate nearly every aspect of its behavior, plus writing a codegen framework that will auto-update my code from analyzing the behavior from an Android emulator, I can pretty easily replay common user flows from any IP around the world, collecting and extracting the data. Some use cases:
* OSINT (r00m101 just beat me to it by launching...)
* Research into recommendation algorithms, advertising placement algorithms, etc
* Marketing (ad libraries, detailed analysis of content given data not even exposed to the mobile app due to some interesting side channels, things like trend analysis, etc)
* Market research for products
* Sales teams can use it to find exact mentions of other products. Eg: selling crash reporting software? Look up your target accounts' brands and find examples of complaints.
Plus a few more with more imagination.
So I'm working on a site that allows user access to some of the read-only functions available here. Coming soon :tm:. Been really fun building it all in Rust, though :) If you're interested in anything here, email in profile.
After 10 years in defense tech, watching missile attacks in Ukraine and the Middle East made it clear how little most people really get about air defense. So I'm builiding this simulator which drops you into the operator’s seat. You can test out different scenarios and build an air defense network against various types of threats (stats from real world). Also have Ukraine, Israel-Iran scenarios.
I'm working on a new app for creating technical diagrams - https://vexlio.com. It's an area with some heavyweight incumbents (e.g. Visio, Lucid) but I think there's good opportunity here to differentiate in simplicity and overall experience. I'm still in the fairly early phase, and I suspect I haven't quite found the best match of features to customers yet.
From a dev perspective this area has a ton of super interesting algorithmic / math / data structure applications, and computational geometry has always been special to me. It's a lot of fun to work on.
If anyone here is interested in this as a user, I'd love for any feedback or comments, here or you can email me directly: tyler@vexlio.com.
Some pages the HN crowd might be interested in:
* https://vexlio.com/blog/making-diagrams-with-syntax-highligh... * https://vexlio.com/solutions/state-diagram-maker/ * https://vexlio.com/blog/speed-up-your-overleaf-workflow-fast...
This weekend, my modified Android/mobile Point of Sale (POS) app was used to celebrate the 100th anniversary of our village's volunteer firefighting organization.
The standard fiscal POS app was adapted to support a sort of low-trust swarm of waiters who used the app to collect orders. These orders were then transferred to a few high-trust cashiers by scanning QR codes generated on the waiters' apps.
After receiving payments, the cashiers' apps printed invoices and multiple "order tickets" categorized by "food," "drinks", "sweets"... This allowed waiters to retrieve items and deliver them to customers.
The system was used by around 40 users, with new waiters joining or leaving throughout the event. They used their own phones, and the app functioned without internet or Wi-Fi, gracefully downgraded (If a waiter didn't use the app due by choice or due to technical problems, they could manually relay orders to cashiers), Customers also had the option to approach cashiers directly, receive their order tickets, and pick up items themselves.
This is not that technically interesting, but I liked how the old manual system, the 70+ year village firefighting org. main cashier had, got digitalized in non-centralized way. (and I took this chance in trying to explain it, as I will have to, to maybe find more users for it)
I'm cleaning up a 25-30 year old bicycle. First time I've stripped one almost right back to the frame.
Strongly recommend the rust remover described by Backyard Ballistics[0] on his second channel[1]; 1 liter water, 100g citric acid, 40g washing soda, generous squirt of dish soap. He claims the acid and alkali cancel out so there's nothing to attack the normal metal surface, but they leave citrate ions which dissolve rust by chelation, which makes it better than just citric acid, vinegar, or soda alone, which all pit and dissolve the clean metal surfaces, and easier/better than wire wool scratching. He also claims it's as effective as EvapoRust but much cheaper and can do more rust dissolving per litre than EvapoRust.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@Backyard.Ballistics - restoration of old and very rusty guns
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVYZmeReKKY - "The Ultimate HOMEMADE Rust Remover (Better than EvapoRust)", Beyond Ballistics channel
Ideas are coming way too fast to work on them all at the moment.
* Expect/snapshot testing library for F# is now seeing prod use but could do with more features: https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Expect
* A deterministic .NET runtime (https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.PawPrint); been steaming towards `Console.WriteLine("Hello, world!")` for months, but good lord is that method complicated
* My F# source generators (https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Myriad) contain among other things a rather janky Swagger 2.0 REST client generator, but I'm currently writing a fully-compliant OpenAPI 3.0 version; it takes a .json file determining the spec, and outputs an `IMyApiClient` (or whatever) with one method per endpoint.
* Next-gen F# source generator framework (https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Whippet) is currently on the back burner; Myriad has more warts than I would like, and I think it's possible to write something much more powerful.
A few months ago I launched SpiesInDC - https://spiesindc.com, a mail-based (as in the real mail) subscription service about Cold War history. Subscribers, ahem secret agents, receive packages every few weeks containing reproductions of famous documents, stanps from the USSR, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, coins, and other fun stuff. I keep refining the packages every week to make it better and it is so much fun.
I'm finally getting my online presence in order...
This week, I'll set up a Hugo blog with the Ed theme, love it, looks exactly what I'm looking for, and as a former LaTeX enthusiast, it's pretty close. It's readable, minimalist. I'll need to customize the theme, though. I plan to publish blog posts about anything I find interesting.
https://gohugo-theme-ed.netlify.app/
In parallel to this work, I'm setting up a simple system to keep my website + subdomains easy to build, rebuild, and deploy with Caddy on a cheap Scaleway compute server. In the past, I had some ideas I wanted to publish, but the system I went with made managing the sites dreadful.
Once that's ready, I'm back to learning Rust and crypto. It's fun, interesting, challenging, remote-friendly, and the salaries are usually 30-50% better. My current tech stack feels like a dead end: it has a low ceiling in terms of salary, the projects are generally not very interesting (I'm grateful for my current project, it's the best there is with this technology), and I believe the technology will see a slow and steady decline.
Apart from work, I'm building the playground for my 2 yo son, and planting blueberries, he loves them.
I am a PhD student and for a while now I'm designing and developing a distributed network protocol that enables dynamic resource allocation across heterogeneous nodes, to which I called Rank. It's designed to handle computational, network, and temporal resources in fully distributed environments without central controllers, but that could also handle a centralized environment.
Rank implements four core functions: discovery (finding paths between nodes), estimation (evaluating resource availability), allocation (reserving resources), and sharing (allowing multiple services to use the same resources).
What I think it makes it unique is its ability to operate in completely decentralized environments with heterogeneous nodes, making it particularly valuable for edge computing, cloud gaming, distributed content delivery, vehicular communications, and grid computing scenarios.
The protocol uses a bidding system where nodes evaluate their capability to fulfill resource requests on a scale from 0-1, enabling dynamic path selection based on current resource availability. I've implemented it in C++ and then also created a testing framework to validate its performance across different network topologies. This is still a work-in-progress and I am eager to publish results someday!
Working on a physical and digital archive of all American vintage print advertising. I've built the archival and database software on Lucee & MySQL to store images and automate, and I use OpenAI to analyze images and extra meta data. All of the full page ads are pushed to https://adretro.com.
I've gotten the process to fully catalog all of the advertisements in a magazine (about 150 on average) down from over a week to a few hours. I should be able to get through the material within my lifetime now :)
https://sewerreport.com
I am a dev/sewer inspector, done over 20k inspections for real estate alone. I built the ultimate, AI report generator based on my voice to text notes.
Reports, email notifications, stripe integration. Payments and invoices. Unlock reports when paid. Square appointments integrations. Pulls all appointments and fills outs new report fields for me. No copy pasting anything ever again. Very niche but saves me 3 hours a day. Next js, it’s really been life changing for me.
https://inlovingmem.com/ - is a tribute to my recently deceased mom that I vibe coded over the last week. I felt her life deserved to be celebrated widely but wanted to be sensitive to her privacy. I've also built in a number of interactive features for participation in funeral services etc, before, during, and after.
Folks have reached out about having an 'In Loving Memory Of' site for their loved ones, so I'm turning this into a side business to help out more with my (now widowed) father's retirement and care.
Not as exciting or big as some of the projects on here, but just a small personal one I’ve been wanting to do for a while.
I recently impulse bought an Epson receipt printer, and I’ve started putting together a server in Go to print a morning update every day. Getting it to print the weather, my calendar and todos, news headlines, HN front page. Basically everything I pick up my phone for in the morning, to be on paper rather than looking at a screen first thing. Very early days but hacking away and learning escpos/go! (Vibecoding a lot of it)
The last couple of weeks I've been building 'Recivo', a very simple way to receive emails programmatically. There are plenty of API-based services that can be used to send emails, but receiving them is harder. My service exposes a simple REST endpoint + event webhook that makes it a 5 min setup to start receiving. Attachments are included as well.
The main use-cases I'm thinking of right now is triggering agents using email or a very simple document upload flow to any SaaS (just forward an email to the SaaS).
I'm working on https://tickerfeed.net - a new kind of forum for stock market discussion.
After HashiCorp was acquired by IBM I decided to take time off from corporate life and build something for myself. For years I've also been a casual retail investor on the side.
Forums like /r/stocks and /r/wsb in the past have been useful resources for finding leads and interesting information. But meme-ification (among other factors) have substantially degraded sites like Reddit, to the point where interesting comments are much fewer and far in between. With TickerFeed I'm hoping to recapture what was lost - a platform where investors can discuss companies and all things stock market through meaningful long form content.
It's also a chance to build something with my dream stack - Go + HTMX + SQLite, and that's been fun :)
A homegrown Plex.
After a lot of grief trying to make Plex and jellyfish to work with my collection, and then some more with the community [1] I decided to make my own.
There's no selling point and clear pathway to monetize, as other solutions are way more mature and feature complete, but this is my own and serves my needs the best.
I've been working on it on and off for last 8 years or so, and it's been my personal benchmark for js ecosystem. The way it works, every now and then I come back to the project, look at the latest trends in js world and ask myself a simple question - what should I change in the codebase to make it online with the latest trends. And everytime it leads to full rewrite. Kind of funny, kind of sad.
In a nutshell I have a huge movie collection - basically I'm preparing for armageddon where all online streaming services cease to exist and I need both backend to fetch me detailed information about movies in the collection as well as frontend to help to decide what to watch tonight.
My next major endeavor will be trying to integrate RAG to take a bite at my holy grail - being able to ask a question like "get me a good gangster flick" and get reasonable recommendations.
[1] I think it was jellyfish where I was asking on their forums for how to manually create a collection, stating I'm a software engineer with 20+ exp and they kept telling me that I shouldn't touch the code... While having an online campaign asking for volunteers to contribute to the codebase.
https://spring-agriculture.com/
Autonomous robotics for sustainable agriculture. Based in the south of the UK. Prototypes of an autonomous mechanical farm-scale weeding robot currently beginning real-world testing. Still a huge amount of work to do though.
Hardware and software developed fairly much from scratch, not using ROS (for not entirely crazy reasons...); everything written in Rust which I find well suited to this application area.
The robot is built using off-the-shelf components and 3d-printed custom parts, so build cost is surprisingly low, and iterations are fast (well, for hardware dev).
On robot compute is a couple of Raspberry Pi 5s.
Currently using the RPi AI Kit for image recognition, ie Hailo 8[L] accelerators.
Not currently using any advanced robotics VLA-type AI models, but soon looking to experiment with some of it, initially in simulation.
Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to talk :) Contact details in my HN profile, and on our website.
Building https://www.typequicker.com
Long-term, passion project of mine - I'm hoping to make this the best typing platform. Just launched the MVP last month.
The core idea of the app is focusing on using natural text. I don't think typing random words (like what some other apps do) is the most effective way to improve typing.
We offer many text topics to type (trivia, literature, etc) where you type text snippets. We offer drills (to help you nail down certain key sequences). We also offer:
- Real-time visual hand/keyboard guides (helps you to not look down at keyboard) - Extremely detailed stats on bigrams, trigrams, per-finger performance, etc. - SmartPractice mode using LLMs to create personalized exercises - Topic-based practice (coding, literature, etc.)
I started this out of passion for typing. I went from 40wpm to ~120wpm (wrote about it here if you're interested: https://www.typequicker.com/blog/learn-touch-typing) and it completely changed my perspective and career trajectory. I became a better programmer and writer because I no longer had to think about the keyboard, nor look down at it.
Currently, we're doing a lot of analysis work on character frequencies and using that to constantly improve the SmartPractice feature. Also, exploring various LLM output testing/observability tools to improve the text generation features.
Approaching this project with a freemium model (have paid AI powered features; using AI to generate text that targets user weakpoints) while everything else in the app is completely free. No ads, no trackers, etc. (Hoping to have sufficient paid users so that we can run the site and never have to even think about running ads).
I've received a lot of feedback and am always looking for ways to improve the site.
Still on my sabbatical and continuing to build on things I enjoy rather than things that pay (for now).
Main focus is https://wheretodrink.beer, collecting and cataloging craft beer venues from around the world. No ambition of being exhaustive, but aiming for a curated and substantial list. After the last thread, a bunch of people added their suggestions, thanks! It helped add interesting new venues from cities I hadn’t covered yet.
I’m very slowly layering on features, and have a few spin-off ideas I’ll keep brewing on for later. The hardest problem thus far has been attempting to automate popularity rankings and automatic removal of defunct venues without breaching a bunch of ToS.
Also made https://drnk.beer, a small side project offering beer-related linkpages and @handles for Bluesky (AT Protocol). It's been on the backburner, but still very much live.
Probably looking for another small project for the next few months to focus on something else for a while. Always curious to see what others are building and doing. Thanks for sharing!
Working on two projects right now:
- LegalJoe: AI-powered contract reviews for startups, at the "tech demo" phase right now: https://www.legaljoe.ai/
- ClipMommy: A macOS tool to help (professionals who record a lot of videos | influencers) organize their raw video clips. Simply drag a folder of "disorganized" videos onto ClipMommy, and ClipMommy organizes the videos into folders / subfolders, adding tags, based upon some special statements that you can make at either the start or the end of your video (think audio-based "clapboard"). I'm expecting to release this within a week or two on the Mac App Store (Apple allowing...).
As an aside, I've been very impressed with Claude Code, it's (for me at least!) leading the way for how the next generation of business software might leverage AI. I plan to iterate on LegalJoe to make more "agentic" as a result of what I've seen is possible in Claude Code.
Working on RSOLV.ai - automated security vulnerability remediation. Currently a one-man shop.
The insight: Most security scanners find problems but don't fix them. Industry average time to fix critical vulnerabilities is 65+ days. We generate the actual fixes and create PRs automatically, including educational content on the nature of the vulnerability and the fix in the PR description.
Technical approach: - AST-based pattern matching (moved from regex, dropped false positives from 40% to <5%) - Multi-model AI for fix generation (Claude, GPT-4, local models) - ~170 patterns across 8 languages + framework-specific patterns; can grow this easily but need more customer validation first.
Business model experiment: Success-based pricing - only charge when fixes get merged ($15/PR at the moment). No upfront costs. This forces us to generate production-quality fixes & hopefully reduces friction for onboarding.
Early observation: Slopsquatting (AI hallucinating package names that hackers pre-register) is becoming a real attack vector. It's pretty straightforward to nail and has a lot of telltales. Building detection & mitigation for that now.
Stack: Elixir/Phoenix, TypeScript, AST parsers
I'm still working on Habitat. It's a free and open source, self-hosted platform for communities to discover their local area. The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet. I've made some good progress recently. I've added the ability to temporarily freeze user accounts, custom WYSIWYG editing for sidebar content and functionality that allows the administrator to set site-wide announcements to appear and disappear at specific dates/times. I also got some great feedback from users of my instance of it for my local town and so fixed some bugs.
- The idea: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-net...
- A build update and plan: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/
- The repository: https://github.com/carlnewton/habitat
- The project board: https://github.com/users/carlnewton/projects/2
I've been working on Splice CAD – an in-browser cable-harness designer.
Building cables for multiple personal and professional projects, I was frustrated by having to cobble together harness diagrams in Illustrator or Visio, cut snippets from from PDFs for connector outlines, map pin-outs, wire specs, cable constructions, mating terminals, and manually updating an Excel BOM.
Splice gives you:
An SVG canvas to drag-and-drop any connector or cable from your library to quickly route and bundle wires. Assign signal names to wires or cable cores.
Complete part data Connector outlines, pin-outs, terminal selections (by connector family & AWG), cable core colors & strand counts, wire AWG/color.
Automated BOM & exports parts-ready diagrams, wiring drawings, and a clean BOM in SVG, PNG, or PDF.
Connector & Cable Creators. Connectors or cables not in the existing library can be added with an optional outline and full specs (manufacturer, MPN, series, pitch, positions, IP-rating, operating temp, etc.), then publish privately or share publicly.
Demos & tutorials: Harness Builder → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfQVB_iTD1I
Connector Creator → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqDsCROhpy8
Cable Creator → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFdQaXQxKzU
Full tutorials → https://splice-cad.com/#/tutorial/
No signup required to try—just jump in and start laying out your harness: https://splice-cad.com/#/harness. If you want to save, sign up with Google or email/password.
I just took a fortnight off work with the intent of getting away from my laptop, but accidentally ended up making a listings site for London's independent / arts cinemas. As far as I can tell no such thing currently exists, and I feel like it should.
Obviously the main thing is getting the listings data, which as far as I know (mostly) isn't readily available any other way that scraping the cinemas' websites, for which I set this up as a separate-ish project[1]
Just built a last-mile logistics management solution to replace a SaaS solution for a delivery company I used to be involved with.
Handles everything from real-time driver tracking, public order tracking links, finding suitable drivers for orders, batch push notifications for automatic order assignment, etc.
Backend: Feathers.JS, Postgres + TimescaleDB & PostGIS, BullMQ, Valhalla (for multi-stop route optimization although most of our deliveries are on-demand)
Frontend: SvelteKit
Mobile App (Android only for now): React Native/Expo, Zustand, Expo push notifications, and two custom native modules for secure token storage and efficient real-time GPS tracking. The tracking was probably the toughest to get right to find the best balance between battery/data efficiency and more frequent updates.
Been testing it for a couple weeks and as of last week, that company moved their operations over to it with 50+ drivers and thousands of orders processed through it so far (in a country with pretty unreliable connectivity/infrastructure).
I built it initially as a favor but open to other applications for it.
I'm writing a decompiler for Turbo Pascal 3.0, to reverse engineer an educational game from the 80s.
Since TP 3.0 does no optimisations, and looking at the progress so far (~25% decompiled), it seems like matching decompilation should be achievable.
If/when I get to 100%, I hope to make the process of annotating the result (Func13_var_2_2 is hardly an informative variable name) into a community project.
I went Yak shaving.
For my 3D audio project I need an affordable way to make plastic cases. I felt like injection molding services are way overpriced, so I decided to make the molds in-house. Turns out, CNC milling is overpriced, too. As are 5 axis CNC mills. So in the end, we built our own CNC machine.
And like these things always go, I found an EMI issue with my power supply and a USB compliance bug in the off-the-shelf stepper control board. But it all turned out OK in the end so we now have the first mold tool that was designed and machined fully in-house. And I learned so much about tool paths and drill bits. Plus it feels like now that everyone has experienced hands-on how stuff is milled, my team got a lot better at designing things for cheap manufacturing.
* https://cijene.dev (HR, open source) - recently, Croatian retail chains were mandated to start publishing grocery prices online, but not how, so they made a mess of it; I've been building a crawler + unified API to avoid people duplicating the crawl/parse/cleanup effort (open source)
* https://trosko.hr (HR, Android/iOS app) - super-simple receipt/bill tracker (snap a photo of the receipt, reads it using Gemini, categorizes and stores locally - no accounts, no data gathering)
* https://github.com/senko/think (open source) - Python client library for LLMs (multiple providers, RAG, etc). I dislike the usual suspects (LangChain, LLamaIndex) but also don't want to tie myself to a specific provider, so chugging on my on lib for this.
I just quit my "day job" to work on a business I've built with some good friends! We make stingray-resistant booties -- ie, if you encounter stingrays in the shallows, these greatly reduce the chance you get stung (https://mydragonskin.com/). I'll be in charge of a couple marketing efforts, helping with Youtube, and other odd things that come up!
My day job required me to go into office frequently, and I'm really feeling the reduced social connection of being fully remote in a small company. Any suggestions how to deal with this? I'm planning to reconnect with old friends, surf a lot, go rock climbing, and maybe take dance / music / other classes. Would also love if anyone wants to work together in the same place (library, coffee shop, etc). I'm in Escondido California, but happy to drive ~30 min to meet folks.
Still working on my books site https://thegreatestbooks.org that I started in 2008. It's been a 1 man team the entire time. I recently made some major algorithm changes that I think greatly improves the rankings. My algorithm code is open source https://github.com/ssherman/weighted_list_rank
I do plan on open sourcing more of the code over time. I also have started working on other sites using the same algorithm implementation (music, movies, video games)
This has just been a side project over the year generating passive income. I get around 250,000 page views a day, and with ads, memberships, and affiliate links I make around $2,500~ a month.
Tech stack is ruby on rails 8, postgresql 17, opensearch, redis, bootstrap 5.3 hosting on 3 servers on linode.
I'm building (and have been for the last few years) an open source high-performance Wordpress alternative on Elixir. It aims to achieve 1:1 feature parity. One thing that Wordpress has built up over the years that will take a little long for me is the plugins eco-system. But, other than that, I think everything else should be on par. IF you're an enterprise, you should easily see over 30-40% in server costs just by switching from Wordpress. This has been tested and proven with one of our enterprise clients who just recorded 500 million requests on a fork of the CMS.
But, I'm determined to see its completion even if there is just one user. I didn't take the Wordpress fiasco and how they handled it, lightly at all and it only fueled my motivation even more. ETA is by end of this year right on time for Christmas.
If you'd like to read more, here's an article about my CMS: https://medium.com/creativefoundry/what-i-learned-as-an-arti...
If you'd like to get Beta access, my email is listed in my profile.
I made the same little Roguelike game with Raylib in Odin, C3, and FreeBASIC over the last few weeks. [0] [1] [2]
I started on a Zig one and nope'd right on out of that after a few hours of fighting the compiler.
I'm currently working on porting a bunch of my Rust mini-games to other languages. [3]
[0] https://github.com/Syn-Nine/odin-mini-games/tree/main/2d-gam...
[1] https://github.com/Syn-Nine/c3-mini-games/tree/main/2d-games...
[2] https://github.com/Syn-Nine/freebasic-mini-games/tree/main/2...
[3] https://github.com/Syn-Nine/rust-mini-games/tree/main/2d-gam...
I am implementing a single Rust process to which you can connect a zero-knowledge proof of identity, such as can be created with ZKPassword from a physical passport. Each user ends up with a keypair which is:
1) Highly Sybil resistant. Neither the keypair owner nor anyone else can re-use the same underlying ID to link to another keypair.
2) Very high anonymity. While the Sybil resistance requires a nullifier representing the underlying ID to be present in a database (or stored in a public, decentralized form for blockchain use), there is no way to connect that nullifier with the keypair. Even if someone were to use brute force to successfully connect the nullifier with a specific underlying ID, such as a passport, there is no way to connect that ID with the keypair. (In the passport case, even merely brute-forcing the nullifier could only be done by the issuing government, someone who has hacked the government database, or someone with physical access to the passport. This is due to the fact that other passport information than the passport number is included in generating the underlying zero-knowledge proof.)
I understand that other technologies may have similar end-functionality, but this has the advantage that most of the functionality is encapsulated in a single Rust executable that could be easily used in any context, whether distributed or decentralized. (If anyone would like to know more, my contact info is at garyrobinson.net.)
I've been working on a fully electric last-mile delivery company: https://hudsonshipping.co
Beyond the landing page (built with Astro), I've been building all of the route optimization, the delivery and warehouse management systems. A combination of go and java has allowed me to write a few microservices in the past 6 months to handle all of my logistical processes, and I'm just testing the mobile app in the field as we speak! I hope to make some of the code open-source one day!
I built a simple web app that helped make me more present during a family tragedy:
Brief backstory: While visiting us overseas, my in-laws were in a very bad car accident. Everyone involved is alive and going to be okay. But what followed was a series of emotional, physical and logistical challenges that pushed my wife and her parents to their limits.
During this time I found myself (shamefully) hiding on my phone. I was obsessively refreshing for updates from insurance/hospital teams, sending empty messages, and mindlessly scrolling feeds. My screen time was averaging 12 hours a day. Time I could have spent being fully present with my wife and her parents.
I finally accepted I have a serious phone addiction. I tried Apple Screen Time and a few popular screen time management apps, but found the blocks were too easy to bypass, and some apps were as useful as they were distracting depending on the context (e.g. YouTube). I didn’t necessarily want to use my phone less: it’s an incredibly useful tool, and the distractions were sometimes helpful.
What I really needed was intentional stretches of time spent away from my phone. I built touchgrass.fm as a simple way to record and incentivize those stretches of time. It’s not quite finished, but it’s been helping me stay present for hospital visits, meals and important conversations.