Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

An PWA primarily for my wife and my daughter. They can order their hot chocolate and their coffee as if they were going to grab something at a fancy café downtown, but instead it's at home and I'm the barista. It is quite nice to have for when my wife comes back from work and want something specific, or when we are waiting for the visit of a few friend, they can order exactly the available beverages and everything is ready when they're here.

It was also a good playground for me to implement Web Push notifications (to never miss new orders).

It's a basic Nuxt 3 app with Appwrite as the backend with rough edges, but much enough for our household use !

If you want to spam my phone with notifications, please visit my café : https://mytinycafe.com/alix

Right now I have a build that loads in the browser, but I really want to have "multithreading" which means workers in the web. One can use asyncify with emscripten to translate blocking C++ to WASM, but that transition is not perfect, right now I'm debugging a bug where there's a race condition that halts all execution and the main thread runs in an infinite loop waiting for the workers to stand up. I guess I'll have a few of those ahead.

The main goal is to 1. just have fun 2. use yjs as a collab backend so multiple people can edit the same PCB. This will probably work with pcbnew, KiCad's layout editor, since it has a plugin system and AFAIK I can do the sync layer there. For the rest ( schematic, component editor etc. ) I'll have to figure out something.. KiCad does not sync automatically if you modify a file, I'll have to do some lifting there.

Anyway, it's a lot of fun, I really want this thing to exist, I'm hoping that I won't run into a "wellll, this is just not going to work" kind of issue in the end.

Completely free, no ads, no in-app purchases and no accounts / network required offline voice transcription.

I have also built the macOS/Windows/Linux versions which I'll also make free to download and available on my site soon (https://blazingbanana.com/).

iOS version is built and works (extremely well), just waiting for the Apple Developer signup process to complete.

Big shout out to https://github.com/mybigday/whisper.rn and https://huggingface.co/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/tree/main for making this even possible.

Any suggestions are welcome.

I made a daily word puzzle called Tiled Words.

https://tiledwords.com

Currently about 2,000 people play every day and I’ve released 59 puzzles!

One feature I’m excited about is crowdsourcing puzzles. Today’s puzzle is a “community puzzle” made entirely from clues that players submitted! I plan to do this every week or two.

I wrote about launching and the first month of puzzles if you want to learn more!

https://paulmakeswebsites.com/writing/a-month-of-tiled-words...

Focused on all the interesting and exciting happenings in tech here, from AI to defence to deeptech, and posting the most interesting job openings too. Did you know Europe had two space launch startups? I didn't until I started this project!

Feedback very welcome :)

It started out as something marginally more useful than vendoring your dependencies as submodules + baking in the knowledge of how to build a bunch of common projects.

I realized, though, that there was somehow a huge gap in the insane world of C build tools. There's nothing that:

- Lets you pin really precisely and builds everything from source (i.e. no binary repository)

- Does not depend on either a scripting language or a completely insane DSL (Conan uses Python, CMake is an eldritch horror, ditto Make, lots of other tools of course but none of them quite hit the mark)

- Has a good balance of "builds are data" and "builds are code".

Anyway, it's going great. There are, of course, a ton of problems to solve. Chief among them is the obvious caveat that C is not a monoculture like Rust. There will be zero upstream libraries that use this tool natively. But I don't think it matters. I think I can build something which is as much better to the existing tools as, say, UV was to existing Python tools, even with that disadvantage.

- Currently in free Early Access with 18 competitive mini-games.

- Players use their mobile phones as controllers (you can use game pads as well!)

- Everything is completely web-based, no downloads or installs are necessary to play

- All games support up to 8 players at a time and are action based, with quick ~one minute rounds to keep a good pace. This means there are no language based trivia or asynchronous games!

- In the future we plan to open up the platform for 3rd party developers (and Gamejams!) as well. We take care of the network connectivity, controllers etc.. 3rd party devs can focus on developing cool multiplayer mini-games without spending an eternity with networking code and building the infrastructure.

Interested to hear if this resonates with Hacker News readers!

Here is a work in progress build:

https://muffinman-io.itch.io/space-deck-x

It is a combination of a shoot-em-up and deck building. You fly and shoot until you get to the boss, when you get your deck out to fight them.

That genre combination is definitely too ambitious, but I think it is fun to play and I’m enjoying making it.

I have a bunch of ideas how to combine the two parts better. But over the years, I’ve learned to control scope creep and actually ship pet projects.

Right now I’m in a middle of changing how enemy waves are spawned. After that I want to make a short tutorial and add two more bosses as well as more enemies.

If you end up playing it, please share your feedback I’ll be glad to hear it.

The game is made using Kaplay, a game dec library which brings me joy to use. I can best describe it as my friend described Pico-8: “easy things are easy”. But compared to Pico-8, Kaplay doesn’t have virtual console limitations and comes with a big library of components. Try it out, the community is small, but the library itself is really fun and easy to use.

EDIT: For context, this is about two weeks of work, in the evenings when my kid is asleep.

The problem for me was trying to read and understand the implementation of a swiss map implementation. The SIMD instructions were challenging to understand and the documentation felt difficult to read. I thought that if I had an interactive tool where I could set the inputs to a SIMD instruction and then read the outputs, understanding the instructions would be much easier.

This turned out to be true.

Building this tool for all AVX/AVX2 instructions turned out to be a larger task than I had expected. Naively I just went off a Wikipedia page on AXV and assumed it had listed all the instructions (this was a bad assumption).

I am nearly there. Looking forward to completing this project so I can actually use it to do some fun stuff processing text and maybe even get back to that swiss map implementation.

https://github.com/fmstephe/simd_explorer

(This is also my first attempt at a TUI app)

https://ookigame.com/

All the games were either developed with libGDX or threejs. I have no plan to monetize yet and still work on building traffic and improving SEO. Surprisingly, I got approved for google adsense already, which I submitted just for experimenting.

I learned that ships have a "max load" line (or Plimsoll Line) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_line_(watercraft) to prevent overloading them with cargos, but my todo list didn't. So I built an app to surface my emotional load and put mental health above raw productivity.

I am experimenting with the concept of giving each item in the iOS Reminders app an impact multiplier between -1.0 and +1.0 to assign them "weights". The net weight of the todo items should indicate my overall mood or emotional burden. If it doesn't maybe I have yet thought about what's making me feel good or bringing me down. The net weight is visually represented by the "water line" that rises the more into the negative the net weight becomes. I'm thinking of adding features to nudge me into addressing the rising water line.

And since I want to lower my own stress and anxiety using this app, there is no signup or subscription. No data collection other than the bare minimum to make the "tip jar" working through the App Store IAP, so no PII collection.

Do you think you'd find this approach to be helpful for managing your own anxiety level?

(Edited to add a bit more clarification)

USCIS forms still use XFA PDFs, which don’t let you edit in most browsers. Even with Adobe, fields break, and getting the signature is hard.

So I converted the PDF form into modern, browser-friendly web forms - and kept every field 1:1 with the original. You fill the form, submit it, and get the official USCIS PDF filled.

https://fillvisa.com/demo/

What Fillvisa does:

- Fill USCIS forms directly in your browser - no Adobe needed

- 100% free

- No login/account required

- Autosave as you type

- Local-only storage (your data never leaves the browser)

- Clean, mobile-friendly UI

- Generates the official USCIS PDF, ready to submit

- Built-in signature pad

I just wanted a fast, modern, free way to complete the actual USCIS form itself without the PDF headaches. This is a beta version

Happy to get any feedback :)

The first days were so hard but now I’m getting used to it. I documented it here: https://ramezanpour.net/post/2025/12/11/dopamine-detox-is-ha...

Currently spending time establishing relationships with historical societies, as I really need them to contribute points of interest, and stories. Many of these societies are run on a voluntary basis by 70+ year olds, so it's a long process. Getting some good responses eventually though, so it might actually go somewhere, just a lot slower than I want.

Also still doing https://wheretodrink.beer, but haven't added anything of note since playing on this other project.

And react2shell was a blast

I am running it in my city for a library of things. We hope to help people abstain from buying things they only need once a year.

It includes a reservation system, and an dashboard to manage those reservations in the shop. Currently I'm expanding it with a proper product management interface.

My team is also about to ship Atmos [1], a lamp for the bedside that automatically shifts from higher-blue light during the daytime to low blue light at night.

[0] https://restfullighting.com/bbv2

[1] https://restfullighting.com/atmos

https://mydragonskin.com/products/stingray-treatment-kit

You can find the CC0 postcard app here: https://sweetpost.art/ but if you want to go the extra step you can install the Chrome extension and see what comes up: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/new-tab-new-art/old...

edit to add Firefox addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-new-a...

If you want to send a postcard you can use the promo: 1BUCK to send a postcard for a dollar to whoever in US. Any feedback or questions are welcome.

Working on a new newsletter to encourage people get off social media by helping them discover all sorts of random interesting sites that exist out on the open web.

The idea is simple, but I think it could be really cool: an autonomous agent that actually manages an entire radio station. It creates its own shows, play copyright-free tracks, shares the daily program schedule on social media and the website, and later I want to add guest appearances too and live 7/24.

With LLMs, generating ideas and snippets is cheap; what’s hard is keeping track of fragments with their “why I cared” context over months. Most tools (Notion/Obsidian/etc.) assume you will do the work (folder/tag/linking) structure will maintain it forever. I don’t.

In LACE we: – capture fragments from the web via a browser extension – auto-cluster them into evolving “threads” / projects with summaries & reading lists – maintain a graph of connections across threads (“topology of attention”) – let you turn a cluster of fragments into an essay draft when you’re ready to share.

Stack is a fairly standard web app + LLM pipeline. Used neo4j's llm-graph-builder as a starting point.

The interesting bit is self-organising graph. treating fragments/questions/lines of inquiry as first-class objects and letting the system reorganise around them over time instead of fixed folders.

It’s in a small test phase right now. If you’re a researcher/writer/engineer/founder who constantly loses good ideas in your notes and want to try something opinionated in this space, I’d love feedback.

background write-up: https://open.substack.com/pub/ozthinks/p/from-fragments-to-i...

I’ve written a PoC already (mind the crappy and incomplete UI), mostly to test the wild custom UI idea, and it’s working so far! https://i.redd.it/ocx9m5av6d6g1.jpeg

https://github.com/Fingel/gelly

Available on Flathub: https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.m51.Gelly

Currently trying to better contextualize the visible subregion of the matrix in relation to the full dataset (beyond what the current minimap does).

https://cybernetic.dev/matrix

https://aibodh.com/posts/bevy-rust-game-development-chapter-...

https://aibodh.com/posts/bevy-rust-game-development-chapter-...

https://aibodh.com/posts/bevy-rust-game-development-chapter-...

I've always loved electronics since I was a kid (still trying to learn). As I explore and learn I've begun to make these small "breadboard helpers" [1]. (Just one on Resistor Transistor Logic (RTL) right now.)

An obsession over a project in a 1970's hobbyist electronics magazine sent me down the rabbit hole that is (was) analog computing. So I have been bread-boarding and prototyping small analog computer modules.

I'm in the PCB-layout stage for the modules and hope to have them ready early next year.

[1] https://www.circuitpixies.com

https://apps.apple.com/de/app/camera2url/id6756015636

Camera2URL is, as far as I know, the only iOS and macOS application that let‘s you send the picture taken with the camera directly to any HTTP endpoint the moment you press the trigger.

For example, this makes it possible to trigger an n8n workflow the instant you take a photo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5nCw8NY8zk

It started as something I wanted to build for myself. I have a Bosch dishwasher that lacks any glanceable indication of how far along it is. Bosch provides an app, but checking the progress takes too long to be useful.

I figured live activities was a good fit, and then realized that I am not alone in wanting something like this. So, I am trying to make it into something usable for all the home automation tinkerers.

https://getaivi.app

Very early days still. Whilst I created a fork of toon for Kicad (called TOKN (https://www.mikeayles.com/#tokn)), with the intention of using a reduced token format to generate schematics using LLM's, I could get the models to follow the syntax correctly, but they didn't have the knowledge. So I was then going to create a whole RAG system, but got distracted by this current project.

There are people out there doing AI schematic generation, like flux.ai (which is incredible (and incredibly well funded)), but 90% of products, especially at proof of concept stage, are basically a microcontroller, some power, probably usb, and some IO, bluetooth/wifi if you're lucky. So we can use a library of pre-validated subcircuits and slots them together on a grid. Routing's deterministic, so if it compiles, it works. (sorry, deeppcb & Quilter!)

The enclosure side is more fun: once the PCB's done you've got real dimensions to work with (board size, mounting holes, where the connectors poke out), so I use an image model to generate some concept art, then feed that to an openscad generating model as visual inspiration alongside the hard constraints.

Basically trying to get a full hardware product pipeline done automatically.

https://github.com/btrettel/blastersim

The core simulator part works, but I don't yet have a user interface or documentation. Probably just going to be text input files to start, maybe a GUI later. Recently, I'm mostly working on testing.

The simulator is object-oriented and basically allows one to build up a blaster from separate control volumes and connections between control volumes. This is useful as it allows the same core simulator framework to handle different blaster configurations and even variants of them. For example, someone asked me to make the spring piston able to pull a vacuum on its back side due to not having sufficient flow. That's easy here as I just need to add another control volume and the appropriate connection onto the basic springer configuration.

Lineage-aware. Versioned. Trustworthy Data - for Engineers and AI.

Your engineers waste up to 40% of their time monitoring, investigating and fixing data. Even then you don’t trust the accuracy, source, or freshness of metrics on your dashboard. You wish AI can answer your data questions but it cannot show you proof, or where it came from. AI helps software engineers to move fast and break things, because they can always rollback, with git. But you cannot do that for data. Bad data entering the system, spreads across the company before spotting, and takes weeks to clean up.

DV changes this, giving you lineage-aware, versioned data. It records data-lineage when data is captured, transformed, and committed, at commit/snapshot level. So when things break, DV knows what other data is impacted downstream, and it can rollback the whole chain to the previous state, instantly - no data copy/restore needed. It can also backfill the data across the chain automatically.

With DV, both your team and your AI agents can finally see: - where data came from - how it was transformed - how to revert safely with a single click

Your engineers can move fast on data, without breaking trust. Your analysts can build pipelines by simply describing business questions to AI.

DV is Git for data, so you can focus on your business, putting analytics on auto pilot.

-- Please contact me if you are interested in preview program.

https://github.com/MarkusSintonen/pyreqwest

Trying to build a small-scale ISP/hosting provider domiciled in Canada. We really want to be able to rent real rack space to enthusiasts who would like to benefit from having stuff in the datacenter but don't want to take on the opportunity cost to get started. It came out of my own desire to have a machine in a DC rack.

This week we've been writing a bunch of "reviews" of self-hostable software since a lot of our friends are curious about this space but don't have a good understanding of how to get started. https://blog.colocataires.dev.

I've tried to make it look and feel at home in iOS and I like to think of it as a Notes app for the gym—it does very few things and does them well.

It's completely free with no ads because I'm not a fan of how other workout apps charge you for a basic workout experience.

I've just finished up the Import from Strong feature and would love any feedback on it!

https://apps.apple.com/au/app/hypertrophy-gym-workout-log/id...

This will help people set clear expectations for their apartment search.

[0]: https://allaboutberlin.com/tools/rent-map

One amusing thing I've noticed is that every time the AI generates code with a hard coded hexadecimal constant, it's a hallucination. My son suggested feeding all of the chip datasheets into the AI and see if the constants improve.

2. Finally converting my home semi-hobby electronics business (something like a guitar effects pedal) to machine assembled circuit boards.

In the real world finally moved everything to USB-C. Gave all my old cables away. I have two chargers in my home and a handful of C to C cables. Everything connects to everything now.

Home is now downgraded to a dumb home. Lights work on physical toggles. No hubs or sensors anywhere. Heat and AC is with a dumb panel on the wall.

It feels freeing.