My wife and I continue to work on a private, paid, ad-free and personally customizable search engine: Uruky [1].
To signup you don't provide any information (a randomly-generated account number is assigned to you), and you can run a proof-of-work captcha to get 2h for free. You can choose among many different search providers (for defaults and per query), including Uruky Site Search, powering our own index.
Last month we reached 300 monthly active accounts and released an image search gallery mode, plus a simple calculator and conversion widget!
The main differences between Uruky and Kagi, DuckDuckGo, SearXNG, etc. are visible in the footer (right side), but one huge difference is that with Uruky, after being a paying customer for 12 months, you get copy of the source code (licensed as BUSL, into AGPLv3 in 2 years — a suggestion made here on HN)!
Our main challenge continues to be discoverability and outreach because we want to do it ethically (no Big Tech and no GenAI/LLMs). Ideas are welcome! We’ve been sponsoring open source projects, open source maintainers, and indie, small-web, and privacy-related websites and applications/groups/orgs. This month we're sponsoring NOYB [2]!
Feature-wise, for September the most visible things that shipped already were Tags and Scopes (top feature requests for a while). We’re also still (slowly and sustainably) increasing our own index, focused on indie/small web.
Thank you for reading this!
[NO-AI]: There is no generative AI product or service being offered, here.
https://grandpacad.com - AI modeling for 3D printing
Been at it for about year and a half.
Really exciting stuff is happening literally every month, because underlying models are getting better and better. When I started it was pretty basic: “make a cube with a hole through it”. Now it’s at the point “make a raspberry pi 4 case” and the agent searches, builds, verifies…
What surprised me in this process is how little meaning AI benchmarks have. Pareto frontier for my use case looks completely different than any other benchmark portrays.
ChonkyBlox: A new approach to Block based coding - instead of complicated algorithms to derive the code from block programs I am using AI on the back-end, which actually makes a higher level of abstraction possible with the blocks. Each block has an LLM instruction attached, along with rules defined in the bespoke back-end harness.
Also: kids can code using cardboard cut-out blocks and just take a photo to import, generate Arduino firmware, compile and flash to ESP32 - all from a single docker web application.
Hoping to bootstrap a cheaper, open source alternative to current systems (one of which my son is using at his school). I have had success doing this with another project on Patreon so that's where it is going to be launched. https://www.patreon.com/ChonkyBlox - so far just a couple of demo video's but code will be released in full once I have added more blocks and a tutorial.
Ultimately this is aimed at the South African education sector, where many schools may have only one computer available for a classroom to share, hence the cardboard cut-outs. There is also a hardware component still in development - a simple pcb breadboard break-out with connectors for components instead of kids having to use jumper cables on the breadboared. We also have a working Desktop application which does code assistance from within the Arduino IDE - using the same web server with api, so literally everything from very small kids to advanced is covered.
README is very bare bones, needs a video or a picture too. The website should tell you some more things: https://kavla.dev (and now the demo does not require a login (also need to remake the demo to fit the new self hosted version))
It's still lacking an analytics agent for the local version though. I've explored using codex CLI, but it feels like its extensive system prompt cripples the agent a lot vs Kimi 2.7 that I've been using in the cloud version.
I think it would also be nice to lean into the fully local LLM setup too, especially for data that shouldn't leave the device.
Haven’t started, still in the planning phase, but I want to build a Tamagotchi for readers. I’m calling it Tome & Tail: a little black dragon living in a pixel-art library on an ESP32-S3 with a small round AMOLED screen.
You’d start a reading session and the dragon would read alongside you. What you read would influence its appearance and habits; lots of sci-fi might give it starry wings, for example. It won’t die if you go a week without reading.
The plan is to keep it playable offline, with optional syncing to Booklary, the reading tracker I’m building. I’m leaning toward C++, which I never used, so it’ll be a learning experience.
Currently waiting for the Waveshare board to arrive so I can start development, and looking for an artist to commission the pixel art. Used GPT to design a concept[1], which I’ll use as examples to the artist.
This will be my first ESP32 project, so getting the dragon blinking on screen is the first milestone.
Cool idea - I forgot where I found it but there was a cute dragon Tamagotchi clone that I found for Arduino a few years ago.
For ESP32 - recommend paying close attention to the FreeRtos, it's seriously powerful. Even if you are just using Arduino style code you can use it for background scheduling and interrupts (for your api and buttons for example), as well as dual core use on S3.
https://fabulae.orbilii.com - A Latin language audiobook containing both volumes of A.D. Godley's "The Fables of Orbilius" which are entertaining intermediate Latin stories written at the turn of the 20th century for use in British schools.
The audio itself is in delivered with the restored classical Latin pronunciation and contains spoken nuances like vowel nasalization, elision, and prodelision. I used a wav2vec2 model to generate forced-alignment data, so you can easily follow along with the text as it's being read aloud. Each word in the text is richly enhanced with pedagogical details like: lemma, citation forms / principal parts, morphological segmentation and analysis, inflectional class with complete declension/conjugation tables, verb category, contextual lexical information (i.e. specific L&S sense), Classical Latin IPA pronunciation, UD style syntactic function and relations, predicate valency, and concise English definitions. Spoken instances of elision and prodelision can also optionally be displayed.
From a nerd perspective, one of the things that makes the system interesting is that the documents themselves are entirely in XML, and I use the soon-to-be-removed-everywhere in-browser XSLT feature to render the HTML, so you can see the underlying XML structure if you view source. Each sentence in the text contains provenance records so you can see the language model and parameters that performed each language enrichment task. The site UI is largely bilingual, and you can view it in either Latin or English.
We're working on a better change management process for production deployments and SOC 2 audit evidence.
https://www.approvegate.io
I'm a Senior Eng on Wall Street, so I have my own personal experience with this problem, but i'd love to connect with other leads, release managers, etc to get their thoughts, suggestions, and what their current process looks like.
Iterating through and evaluating possible approaches for shrinking the binary size of a tree-sitter based Vi/Vim compatible tags generator I am developing without affecting the developer experience for adding support for newer languages[1]. A couple of approaches have already been tried and failed to live up to the expectations on developer experience [2][3]. Next in line is to look into bundling only the tree-walking code for all supported languages with tree-tags and allow the user to configure the grammars to download separately from the main binary, possibly using the `wasm` feature which allows native library to run wasm compiled grammars.
Tried to use a generator for automating the bulk of the scanner for a language from `grammar.json` file of a tree-sitter grammar. A runtime engine uses the scanner for a forward only walk on the scanned code and calls the hooks to generate tags.
I’m building a website for discovering first names that’s enjoyable to explore: https://abracadanames.com
It started with a family member telling me they were frustrated with existing websites. What I noticed is that in many cases they feel cluttered and not smooth to use, almost like a 1-to-1 translation of the underlying database queries, where they have you choose filters and sorting options upfront then browse the paginated results.
I wanted to avoid all of that by creating a different experience; I built an interactive full-screen wall UI with infinite browsing so that most of the screen space is dedicated to the core content. I worked on the name sampling algorithm to try to make it as enjoyable to browse as I could, and the only filter displayed by default is the one to select genders.
More advanced queries are available through the search field which supports natural language queries, running on a local multilingual interpretation engine with a cloud LLM fallback. The database engine is custom built with Rust, compiled to WASM for higher performance when running on CloudFlare Workers. I don’t use an external DB service for names today.
What I’m pretty proud of is to know a lot of technical work is hidden behind that UI, and how it has been shaped by the experience I wanted instead of the other way around.
My wife and I are working on a math/science/CS-inspired jewelry: pieces that stand on their own aesthetically but have a hidden meaning.
We currently have two styles: lambda calculus based pieces (we depict the Tromp diagram) where we have Y-Combinator earrings (well, strictly speaking they are one beta reduction away from Y-combinator. Aesthetic oblige) and a pendant depicting a lambda expression computing Graham's number. The other style is quantum computing circuits, based on quantum computing research my brother (a physics professor) is doing: a pendant that is actually a non-local controlled-NOT gate.
I wrote a tiny DSL to describe the jewelry pieces, and an interpreter to produce CAD files. We then either 3D print them or have them produced by lost-wax.
We have our pieces in consignent in a jewelry store, and are working to put them in a museum store.
I'm making an online guidance solver for KSA (https://ahwoo.com/app/100000/kitten-space-agency). It will allow you to control a KSA rocket from the command line for a variety of maneuvers (launch, rendezvous, etc). It uses successive convexification to turn the full nonlinear problem into a sequence of convex problems with linear constraints and quadratic objective.
It has proven surprisingly resistant to AI so far - Astra can make a very quick prototype but upon review it had many defects. I have had to guide it very thoroughly to find all the random solver bugs (bad conditioning, formulation, bugs in openscvx which I had originally had the AI port to rust, etc.) preventing well-behaved solves. But I think (hope?) I have turned the corner on these.
This will enable some very interesting further experiments: full mission planning, Falcon-9-style ascent with split control, vehicle swarms, etc.
I’ve been working on Pick Up, a reading companion I built to make tracking books feel a bit more personal and fun.
You can track what you’re reading, keep notes and reflections, see your reading stats, build out your bookshelf, and a bunch more. Over 4k monthly active users.
Been building it solo & adding features based on what readers ask for.
I'm working on a self-tracking app and an Astro Web Starter Template! :)
The app is very customizable, local-first and is built to adapt to what you want. Goal is to combine habit tracking, health logging and journaling into one fast and easy to use interfact.
Have been working on it for almost years now and it's making great progress.
My Astro Web Starter is built for building well-designed, performant and accessible websites. It contains everything a high-quality website needs (In my opinion). I built it so I have one good base on which to start my web projects on. Using basic HTML and CSS that can scale, without bloat.
The idea is to make an extension that allows you to flexibly fill out fields on your cards with AI generated text, speech, and images. Think generating example sentences for your entire deck, or adding furigana to kanji (small phonetic characters with a very delicate syntax). It works just as well for language learners as it does for medical students, etc.
The secondary goal has been to make this the most well designed, intuitive, and stable Anki extension in the world. I don’t think it’s there yet, but it’s on its way. It’s been very interesting to try to work out a design that affords the flexibility to generate anything for whatever you’re studying but remains approachable and discoverable to your marginal Anki user, many of whom are younger and have varying levels of English ability. Many interesting technical challenges as well.
Slowly building towards the Show HN post, but need a few more features. Connecting with and chatting with dedicated users in countries around the world over the last few years has made this the most gratifying thing I’ve ever built! It’s still at the scale that receiving support emails is fun and I can build relationships with power users and long term subscribers.
I've been working on building hyper-local services, sort of as a love letter to my community in Denver, Colorado. Before decent LLM harnesses, these would've been prohibitively expensive in time and resources to build out and would never break even. Now I think I might be able to at least cover hosting costs and tokens; that's enough to keep these sustainable for my neighbors.
Broomsday: https://broomsday.com sends folks emails and SMS the night before street sweeping parking restrictions for their block(s). Email notifications are free, SMS on a paid season pass. The schedule here is block-by-block and easy to forget, so people get ticketed _a lot_ at $50 a pop. The city has an email-only notification service that's free, but it's poorly supported and the interface sucks. This is ready; I'm testing with friends and family currently before attempting real marketing.
HailPass: https://hailpass.com similarly is a notify-before-pain service that integrates a bunch of open weather services (NWS/NOAA mostly, plus a handful of impact reporters and working on a small hail-specific ML model) to give folks on the Front Range 5-10m heads-up before damaging hail arrives at their location. Weather prediction is (not shocking) hard so I'm still tuning to get as much signal out of the noise as possible; some false alarms will be unavoidable but I want to cut them down before even a F&F release. This year's season is pretty much over with, so aiming for an April '27 release.
There's a lot of ski/snowboard/winter sport culture here, but there's also existing services for those, and I'm mostly trying to offer new coverage where there isn't a good option for my neighbors. Might do an ash borer treatment/prevention service navigator yet.
None of this is going to make me wealthy or famous, but building things that help the people that I actually interact with every day and that are a part of a community that supports my family feels _really_ good.
- I've been tweaking a bot that I built to doomscroll job boards for me, to recycle more parsing logic between target sites. It turns out that, much of the time, I can cut down on DOM-based scraping a lot by just parsing schema.org-based JSON-LD. Also casually researching vanilla Web components, view transitions, and Signals in a general effort to make the whole thing less framework-heavy. (Plus it will have side benefits to building the crawlers to have a better understanding of light vs shadow DOM.) Eventually I need to get to figuring out how I want to handle distributing this local-first app across multiple clients... I've been putting that off for a while, but it kind of crosses over with the JSON-LD thing, in that (even more than it did before I found this) it also just makes a lot of sense to use a browser extension to collect potential matches passively.
- 3D printing experiments. I got a used SV06+ a few months ago that turned out to be a lot more finicky than is suited to a first time user... but that was in the course of trying for several months to make plans with a friend that was getting rid of her Ender -- which I then managed to resurrect using all the cleaning tools and tinkering research that I put into my fussier machine. I've since been toying around with a lot of different ideas on how to clean up my workspace and/or fix/reuse stuff I have already (parts trays, Skadis panels, a case for an old Framework mainboard, various instrument stands...) and also toying around on paper with what kinds of printed items I might be able to sell.
- Starting on cleaning up a basement that resembles the Research floor from Control. Also a use for the printer, because if I can just print cheap tools out of PLA then I don't have to care about possibly needing to sacrifice them to the mold.
- Various Coursera stuff. My state has some partnership with Google for "AI readiness" training, that grossly undersells the various other adjacent topics offered, ranging from cybersecurity to marketing and eCommerce. Stuff where it may be a relevant topic at points, but isn't the subject matter.
A new UI library made with zero dependencies (native web components). I just made it public as I actually use it for my personal projects since past year.
The core principle is to help with UI development without bloating a project. It works with vue/nuxt (tested, my projects are done with it), but also react/angular/svelte/etc.
One feedback I got from reddit (I published it this week there) is that AGPLv3 may be a problem for adoption... still not sure if should I use MIT.
I'm working on a own x86_64 UEFI Operating System (OS). The idea is to make an OS that looks like Windows Vista but behave like Linux, so it's a mix of Windows and Linux. I've startet three weeks ago with a custom bootloader and the legacy bios VGA textbuffer and now I'm working on a real USB-HID (USB-Human Interface Device) and have troubles with the keyboard. I also have problems with booting from real hardware. If anyone is good at low level developing the project is source available and I appreciate collaborations with other os developers. Link to Codeberg-repo: https://codeberg.org/vntx-labs/VeloOS
Hope that is no problem that I use this thread a bit for self-promotion. If so just write a reply I'll remove this comment if this is a problem
I had a bunch of extra Fable credits, so I spent about $10k running autoresearch loops on 200 of the top github repos with frontends to try and speed up the frontend performance. I distilled them down into a leaderboard of the most common wins, and built out an autoresearch loop that takes those learnings and applies them to your repo.
Works with your existing claude/cursor/codex sub in a cute custom TUI.
I'm designing a retro-style gaming mouse for retro-computing: Amiga, Atari, C64, and several protocol variants. It also has USB.
It has a scroll wheel: read using extended protocols introduced by recent adaptors from USB, and a configuration interface.
Now launched => Verse Draft: https://versedraft.com - An all-in-one writing studio where fiction writers can keep all the details for their universes in one place while crafting stories, novels, movie scripts, TV series, or stage plays.
Also created a fun simple "card game" activity for writers looking for story ideas or stuck with writers block: https://talemancy.com/
(This was somewhat inspired by memories of playing Ultima IV as a teenager)
Currently working on something a little more visually focused in creative design.
It's based on the Server-Driven UI philosophy where the backend streams both code and UI into a frontend that just knows how to render what it's told. This is pretty cool because it makes it makes over-the-air updates possible.
It also follows the batteries-included philosophy of Rails. Has an ORM, background and cron jobs (all based on Postgres), Django-style migrations, JSX Emails and pretty great FFI that's built around a simple `"use native"` directive, in the React Server Component fashion).
working on a storytelling app for kids called Tella Stories that goes deeper than just some minimal personalization.. know there's lots of stuff that claims to make them the hero, yadda yadda but then they just give you a shitty digital templated story or try to sell you a printed version. this is focused on a high level digital experience and something parents can actually trust, and that kids actually enjoy.
so yeah.. it builds the stories out of their actual life. their family and friends are in the cast, their dog, the thing they're nervous about this week. the kid doesn't just appear in the story, the story is about their world and imagination and grows with them.
ultimate goal is to keep iterating and get to a level of quality of Bluey, etc but have it actually be the kids world with agency/choices vs. one they have to passively sit back and watch, and that they're not in.
would love any feedback. i know there's been others like Ello shared on here and those threads were really interesting to know HN's opinion on. this does not take an educational and instructional approach. Tella is meant to help develop who they are through stories and be a better screen alternative time to the rest of the algo/curated garbage out there. anyway you guys are a critical and technical bunch and i respect/appreciate that.. especially since this of course leverages multiple AI services to create the stories ~
Haven't added a demo to the repo yet (will do soon) but building this TUI [1] in Go to manage my agent skills.
I don't like putting 20-30 agent skills in the .claude/skills/ dir and letting the agent figure it out. I keep all the skills I've created and adapted over time in a separate git repo and then from there I copy them to the project skill dir when i need them for a session and then remove them when I'm done.
This TUI just replaces all the manual work with ls, cp -r, and rm -rf commands with a few keystrokes.
I spent some with reverse-engineering a neural network accelerator (NNA) inside a Chinese WiFi camera SoC: https://github.com/inoop/t41-pluto. I used Claude to reverse-engineer the hardware, and then implement an ONNX compiler and runtime so I can run my own models. Basically I now have a $20 AI smart camera.
I've been working on a collection of native AI/ML operators for TouchDesigner on macOS. Think of it as a happy marriage between the interface of TouchDesigner but with some of the features you know from ComfyUI.
Typically TD for the Mac has always been a bit underserved, by leaning into some of the frameworks that exclusively exist on macOS I'm hoping more people will see it as a viable platform for this kind of stuff.
I have been working on cost models and coupon ladders for businesses.
If either of those are interesting to you, please reach out!
For example, I am helping some restaurants learn exactly how much each item on the menu costs, what the margins are, and how much profit each dish is bringing in because I integrate with their PoS system.
Contributing larger PRs to terraform-provider-aws because apparently my contributions so far do not have enough lines of code as a metric. Getting familiar with Floci for usage with Terraform over LocalStack since it is a true open source project rather than freemium. Also getting my AAS from Maestro. Ride or die since I can not afford college anywhere else despite their current accreditation issues with COE.
Cricket, a visual scripting plugin for Figma inspired by Grasshopper for Rhino.
I find Grasshopper, especially its data model, ideal for a certain type of algorithmic art/design, and have always wanted to use it in a 2D graphics package.
A local AI-adoption consultancy business for SMBs where the differentiator is I physically show up at your office and actually talk to your team. With the slopification of cold outreach and social posting, I think the future of business development is going to be very personal.
I've been working on https://searchforjobs.app/ I'm trying to add the resume creator for using the right keywords for a job posting. I'm also trying to add more data visualizations are more job posting sources to scrape.
Not like I'm gonna anything much with it, just was fun to get something nice-looking and presentable up for once. Working on polishing more of them and, of course, designing new ones.
2) A font generation system, inspired by Iosevka, albeit much much simpler. Learning tons of interesting technical things about TTF and WOFF2.
I've been working on https://pronto.stream/, I wanted to mess around with MCP and building a world news system to power the decision making and surveillance of other systems I would likely curate.
I was curious about formats more efficient for agent communication than JSON and also proving if the framework I curated could handle the load and traffic.
i am working on a really cool word game that has a TUI graphical style, it looks like a roguelike but has a bit more going on. i also seem to have figured out a way to do automated "fun factor" testing and get bugs/frs that sound like real player feedback, as a little bonus treat. doesn't seem like anybody is attempting that kind of thing with agents, might try to codify it. trying to spend a lot longer thinking about a game's systems/meta and developing slowly vs. hypersprinting which is fun but exhausting.
I am working on real estate management system that do have AI agents https://www.aqaris.ae/. I want to automate mundane day-to-day tasks so managers can have more time
I'm decompiling an obscure 1998 computer game using an LLM agent skill that I'm simultaneously developing from papers and books on reverse-engineering (a subject I've never previously engaged with) with the aim of migrating it (well, at least its assets) to the browser: https://esoteria.pages.dev
It's all slop, but it's battle-tested and producing results. It's quite fun and inspiring to see some of these assets like textures and geometry that are improperly decompiled, bit shifted or something like that. produces a lot of abstract, glitchy art.
To make sure that my process and results are reproducible, I've gotten back into maintaining Concourse CI pipelines. They were very useful when we were shipping a fork of k8s for VMware, and now they are a fun way of shipping cyberpunk billboard sprites to Cloudflare buckets.
I got back into Concourse in order to attempt a more rigorous approach to generative AI experimentation as well. Unfortunately, there are just so many odd techniques, configurations, loras, and utilities striking my fancy that my experiment pipelines have exploded into the dozens, and Concourse is not a large enough or a high-level enough organizing principle.
we are building https://www.d5s.tech, using our own software to automate our own company (the boring bits)! having a blast doing it and steadily automating more and more
and... whenever i have some spare gpt-6 astra left i am working on a R.U.S.E reimplementation alongside some other threejs experiments
lexera, a kanban board with full multimedia and document include support that saves to markdown, exports to marp to manage teaching materials. it also started out to be my editor of choice for agentic programming as each task is a card. hopefully i will manage to create a page and visible materials soon!
Recently got genomic DNA purification automated for yeast (plus have automated library prep for nanopore+ a promethion)! As part of the DNA purification task, I had to journey up to Healdsburg to buy some lysis enzyme (thank god for winemakers, 100x cheaper than the biotech grade stuff), and noticed catalogs of different yeast strains with all their flavor profiles and stuff characterized.
I'm thinking about buying all the strains and pushing them through my automated sequencing pipeline, and building a yeast genotype -> flavor converter. Then, I think it'd be neat if you could have someone try a bunch of wines to get their favorite, and then genetically engineer a yeast strain specifically for their favorite flavors. Think that could be neat.
My wife and I continue to work on a private, paid, ad-free and personally customizable search engine: Uruky [1].
To signup you don't provide any information (a randomly-generated account number is assigned to you), and you can run a proof-of-work captcha to get 2h for free. You can choose among many different search providers (for defaults and per query), including Uruky Site Search, powering our own index.
Last month we reached 300 monthly active accounts and released an image search gallery mode, plus a simple calculator and conversion widget!
The main differences between Uruky and Kagi, DuckDuckGo, SearXNG, etc. are visible in the footer (right side), but one huge difference is that with Uruky, after being a paying customer for 12 months, you get copy of the source code (licensed as BUSL, into AGPLv3 in 2 years — a suggestion made here on HN)!
Our main challenge continues to be discoverability and outreach because we want to do it ethically (no Big Tech and no GenAI/LLMs). Ideas are welcome! We’ve been sponsoring open source projects, open source maintainers, and indie, small-web, and privacy-related websites and applications/groups/orgs. This month we're sponsoring NOYB [2]!
Feature-wise, for September the most visible things that shipped already were Tags and Scopes (top feature requests for a while). We’re also still (slowly and sustainably) increasing our own index, focused on indie/small web.
Thank you for reading this!
[NO-AI]: There is no generative AI product or service being offered, here.
[1]: https://uruky.com
[2]: https://noyb.eu
https://grandpacad.com - AI modeling for 3D printing Been at it for about year and a half.
Really exciting stuff is happening literally every month, because underlying models are getting better and better. When I started it was pretty basic: “make a cube with a hole through it”. Now it’s at the point “make a raspberry pi 4 case” and the agent searches, builds, verifies…
What surprised me in this process is how little meaning AI benchmarks have. Pareto frontier for my use case looks completely different than any other benchmark portrays.
You mentioned benchmarks don’t mean much in this area. What are the best models you found in this area?
Personally, I’ve had the most success with GPT models using MCP servers for this task.
ChonkyBlox: A new approach to Block based coding - instead of complicated algorithms to derive the code from block programs I am using AI on the back-end, which actually makes a higher level of abstraction possible with the blocks. Each block has an LLM instruction attached, along with rules defined in the bespoke back-end harness.
Also: kids can code using cardboard cut-out blocks and just take a photo to import, generate Arduino firmware, compile and flash to ESP32 - all from a single docker web application.
Hoping to bootstrap a cheaper, open source alternative to current systems (one of which my son is using at his school). I have had success doing this with another project on Patreon so that's where it is going to be launched. https://www.patreon.com/ChonkyBlox - so far just a couple of demo video's but code will be released in full once I have added more blocks and a tutorial.
Ultimately this is aimed at the South African education sector, where many schools may have only one computer available for a classroom to share, hence the cardboard cut-outs. There is also a hardware component still in development - a simple pcb breadboard break-out with connectors for components instead of kids having to use jumper cables on the breadboared. We also have a working Desktop application which does code assistance from within the Arduino IDE - using the same web server with api, so literally everything from very small kids to advanced is covered.
I open sourced kavla, the SQL canvas I'm working on: https://github.com/aleda145/kavla
README is very bare bones, needs a video or a picture too. The website should tell you some more things: https://kavla.dev (and now the demo does not require a login (also need to remake the demo to fit the new self hosted version))
It's still lacking an analytics agent for the local version though. I've explored using codex CLI, but it feels like its extensive system prompt cripples the agent a lot vs Kimi 2.7 that I've been using in the cloud version.
I think it would also be nice to lean into the fully local LLM setup too, especially for data that shouldn't leave the device.
Haven’t started, still in the planning phase, but I want to build a Tamagotchi for readers. I’m calling it Tome & Tail: a little black dragon living in a pixel-art library on an ESP32-S3 with a small round AMOLED screen.
You’d start a reading session and the dragon would read alongside you. What you read would influence its appearance and habits; lots of sci-fi might give it starry wings, for example. It won’t die if you go a week without reading.
The plan is to keep it playable offline, with optional syncing to Booklary, the reading tracker I’m building. I’m leaning toward C++, which I never used, so it’ll be a learning experience.
Currently waiting for the Waveshare board to arrive so I can start development, and looking for an artist to commission the pixel art. Used GPT to design a concept[1], which I’ll use as examples to the artist.
This will be my first ESP32 project, so getting the dragon blinking on screen is the first milestone.
[1]: https://i.cpimg.sh/57EC5380-0FF7-4646-A943-971350FF98D2.png
Cool idea - I forgot where I found it but there was a cute dragon Tamagotchi clone that I found for Arduino a few years ago.
For ESP32 - recommend paying close attention to the FreeRtos, it's seriously powerful. Even if you are just using Arduino style code you can use it for background scheduling and interrupts (for your api and buttons for example), as well as dual core use on S3.
I meant dinosaur tamagotchi - I cannot find it on github though
I'm looking for land to buy in Wyoming to build my AI apocalypse bunker on.
I'm working on an AI to design AI apocalypse bunkers but I'm fearful that the agents will escape to ensure success of the product.
https://fabulae.orbilii.com - A Latin language audiobook containing both volumes of A.D. Godley's "The Fables of Orbilius" which are entertaining intermediate Latin stories written at the turn of the 20th century for use in British schools.
The audio itself is in delivered with the restored classical Latin pronunciation and contains spoken nuances like vowel nasalization, elision, and prodelision. I used a wav2vec2 model to generate forced-alignment data, so you can easily follow along with the text as it's being read aloud. Each word in the text is richly enhanced with pedagogical details like: lemma, citation forms / principal parts, morphological segmentation and analysis, inflectional class with complete declension/conjugation tables, verb category, contextual lexical information (i.e. specific L&S sense), Classical Latin IPA pronunciation, UD style syntactic function and relations, predicate valency, and concise English definitions. Spoken instances of elision and prodelision can also optionally be displayed.
From a nerd perspective, one of the things that makes the system interesting is that the documents themselves are entirely in XML, and I use the soon-to-be-removed-everywhere in-browser XSLT feature to render the HTML, so you can see the underlying XML structure if you view source. Each sentence in the text contains provenance records so you can see the language model and parameters that performed each language enrichment task. The site UI is largely bilingual, and you can view it in either Latin or English.
We're working on a better change management process for production deployments and SOC 2 audit evidence. https://www.approvegate.io
I'm a Senior Eng on Wall Street, so I have my own personal experience with this problem, but i'd love to connect with other leads, release managers, etc to get their thoughts, suggestions, and what their current process looks like.
I love the JIRA integration. I built something similar but it's more of a toy project compared to yours: https://github.com/elliotechne/SOC2.
Iterating through and evaluating possible approaches for shrinking the binary size of a tree-sitter based Vi/Vim compatible tags generator I am developing without affecting the developer experience for adding support for newer languages[1]. A couple of approaches have already been tried and failed to live up to the expectations on developer experience [2][3]. Next in line is to look into bundling only the tree-walking code for all supported languages with tree-tags and allow the user to configure the grammars to download separately from the main binary, possibly using the `wasm` feature which allows native library to run wasm compiled grammars.
[1] https://github.com/jha-naman/treetags
[2] https://github.com/jha-naman/treetags/pull/62
Tried to use a generator for automating the bulk of the scanner for a language from `grammar.json` file of a tree-sitter grammar. A runtime engine uses the scanner for a forward only walk on the scanned code and calls the hooks to generate tags.
[3] https://github.com/jha-naman/treetags/pull/56
A complicated mess of a generator that takes a few declarative inputs and tries to generate code for spitting out tags for a given language.
I’m building a website for discovering first names that’s enjoyable to explore: https://abracadanames.com
It started with a family member telling me they were frustrated with existing websites. What I noticed is that in many cases they feel cluttered and not smooth to use, almost like a 1-to-1 translation of the underlying database queries, where they have you choose filters and sorting options upfront then browse the paginated results.
I wanted to avoid all of that by creating a different experience; I built an interactive full-screen wall UI with infinite browsing so that most of the screen space is dedicated to the core content. I worked on the name sampling algorithm to try to make it as enjoyable to browse as I could, and the only filter displayed by default is the one to select genders.
More advanced queries are available through the search field which supports natural language queries, running on a local multilingual interpretation engine with a cloud LLM fallback. The database engine is custom built with Rust, compiled to WASM for higher performance when running on CloudFlare Workers. I don’t use an external DB service for names today.
What I’m pretty proud of is to know a lot of technical work is hidden behind that UI, and how it has been shaped by the experience I wanted instead of the other way around.
It's so fluid and trippy. Really nice work.
Thanks a lot!
https://studio-galois.com/
My wife and I are working on a math/science/CS-inspired jewelry: pieces that stand on their own aesthetically but have a hidden meaning.
We currently have two styles: lambda calculus based pieces (we depict the Tromp diagram) where we have Y-Combinator earrings (well, strictly speaking they are one beta reduction away from Y-combinator. Aesthetic oblige) and a pendant depicting a lambda expression computing Graham's number. The other style is quantum computing circuits, based on quantum computing research my brother (a physics professor) is doing: a pendant that is actually a non-local controlled-NOT gate.
I wrote a tiny DSL to describe the jewelry pieces, and an interpreter to produce CAD files. We then either 3D print them or have them produced by lost-wax.
We have our pieces in consignent in a jewelry store, and are working to put them in a museum store.
Marketing is the hardest part. Ideas are welcome.
I'm making an online guidance solver for KSA (https://ahwoo.com/app/100000/kitten-space-agency). It will allow you to control a KSA rocket from the command line for a variety of maneuvers (launch, rendezvous, etc). It uses successive convexification to turn the full nonlinear problem into a sequence of convex problems with linear constraints and quadratic objective.
It has proven surprisingly resistant to AI so far - Astra can make a very quick prototype but upon review it had many defects. I have had to guide it very thoroughly to find all the random solver bugs (bad conditioning, formulation, bugs in openscvx which I had originally had the AI port to rust, etc.) preventing well-behaved solves. But I think (hope?) I have turned the corner on these.
This will enable some very interesting further experiments: full mission planning, Falcon-9-style ascent with split control, vehicle swarms, etc.
I’ve been working on Pick Up, a reading companion I built to make tracking books feel a bit more personal and fun.
You can track what you’re reading, keep notes and reflections, see your reading stats, build out your bookshelf, and a bunch more. Over 4k monthly active users.
Been building it solo & adding features based on what readers ask for.
https://pickupreader.com
I'm working on a self-tracking app and an Astro Web Starter Template! :)
The app is very customizable, local-first and is built to adapt to what you want. Goal is to combine habit tracking, health logging and journaling into one fast and easy to use interfact.
Have been working on it for almost years now and it's making great progress.
Doing closed user testing right now and will release an open beta soon: https://dailyselftrack.com/
My Astro Web Starter is built for building well-designed, performant and accessible websites. It contains everything a high-quality website needs (In my opinion). I built it so I have one good base on which to start my web projects on. Using basic HTML and CSS that can scale, without bloat.
There's a lot more on it which you can see here: https://starter.bryanhogan.com/
I’ve been hacking on a single Anki extension for… the last three years now:
https://smart-notes.xyz
The idea is to make an extension that allows you to flexibly fill out fields on your cards with AI generated text, speech, and images. Think generating example sentences for your entire deck, or adding furigana to kanji (small phonetic characters with a very delicate syntax). It works just as well for language learners as it does for medical students, etc.
The secondary goal has been to make this the most well designed, intuitive, and stable Anki extension in the world. I don’t think it’s there yet, but it’s on its way. It’s been very interesting to try to work out a design that affords the flexibility to generate anything for whatever you’re studying but remains approachable and discoverable to your marginal Anki user, many of whom are younger and have varying levels of English ability. Many interesting technical challenges as well.
Slowly building towards the Show HN post, but need a few more features. Connecting with and chatting with dedicated users in countries around the world over the last few years has made this the most gratifying thing I’ve ever built! It’s still at the scale that receiving support emails is fun and I can build relationships with power users and long term subscribers.
I've been working on building hyper-local services, sort of as a love letter to my community in Denver, Colorado. Before decent LLM harnesses, these would've been prohibitively expensive in time and resources to build out and would never break even. Now I think I might be able to at least cover hosting costs and tokens; that's enough to keep these sustainable for my neighbors.
Broomsday: https://broomsday.com sends folks emails and SMS the night before street sweeping parking restrictions for their block(s). Email notifications are free, SMS on a paid season pass. The schedule here is block-by-block and easy to forget, so people get ticketed _a lot_ at $50 a pop. The city has an email-only notification service that's free, but it's poorly supported and the interface sucks. This is ready; I'm testing with friends and family currently before attempting real marketing.
HailPass: https://hailpass.com similarly is a notify-before-pain service that integrates a bunch of open weather services (NWS/NOAA mostly, plus a handful of impact reporters and working on a small hail-specific ML model) to give folks on the Front Range 5-10m heads-up before damaging hail arrives at their location. Weather prediction is (not shocking) hard so I'm still tuning to get as much signal out of the noise as possible; some false alarms will be unavoidable but I want to cut them down before even a F&F release. This year's season is pretty much over with, so aiming for an April '27 release.
There's a lot of ski/snowboard/winter sport culture here, but there's also existing services for those, and I'm mostly trying to offer new coverage where there isn't a good option for my neighbors. Might do an ash borer treatment/prevention service navigator yet.
None of this is going to make me wealthy or famous, but building things that help the people that I actually interact with every day and that are a part of a community that supports my family feels _really_ good.
https://cou.sh, https://jun.is and https://abr.ac — some experiments on offline-first crdt
Recently:
- I've been tweaking a bot that I built to doomscroll job boards for me, to recycle more parsing logic between target sites. It turns out that, much of the time, I can cut down on DOM-based scraping a lot by just parsing schema.org-based JSON-LD. Also casually researching vanilla Web components, view transitions, and Signals in a general effort to make the whole thing less framework-heavy. (Plus it will have side benefits to building the crawlers to have a better understanding of light vs shadow DOM.) Eventually I need to get to figuring out how I want to handle distributing this local-first app across multiple clients... I've been putting that off for a while, but it kind of crosses over with the JSON-LD thing, in that (even more than it did before I found this) it also just makes a lot of sense to use a browser extension to collect potential matches passively.
- 3D printing experiments. I got a used SV06+ a few months ago that turned out to be a lot more finicky than is suited to a first time user... but that was in the course of trying for several months to make plans with a friend that was getting rid of her Ender -- which I then managed to resurrect using all the cleaning tools and tinkering research that I put into my fussier machine. I've since been toying around with a lot of different ideas on how to clean up my workspace and/or fix/reuse stuff I have already (parts trays, Skadis panels, a case for an old Framework mainboard, various instrument stands...) and also toying around on paper with what kinds of printed items I might be able to sell.
- Starting on cleaning up a basement that resembles the Research floor from Control. Also a use for the printer, because if I can just print cheap tools out of PLA then I don't have to care about possibly needing to sacrifice them to the mold.
- Various Coursera stuff. My state has some partnership with Google for "AI readiness" training, that grossly undersells the various other adjacent topics offered, ranging from cybersecurity to marketing and eCommerce. Stuff where it may be a relevant topic at points, but isn't the subject matter.
https://solanda.federa.social
A new UI library made with zero dependencies (native web components). I just made it public as I actually use it for my personal projects since past year.
The core principle is to help with UI development without bloating a project. It works with vue/nuxt (tested, my projects are done with it), but also react/angular/svelte/etc.
One feedback I got from reddit (I published it this week there) is that AGPLv3 may be a problem for adoption... still not sure if should I use MIT.
I'm working on a own x86_64 UEFI Operating System (OS). The idea is to make an OS that looks like Windows Vista but behave like Linux, so it's a mix of Windows and Linux. I've startet three weeks ago with a custom bootloader and the legacy bios VGA textbuffer and now I'm working on a real USB-HID (USB-Human Interface Device) and have troubles with the keyboard. I also have problems with booting from real hardware. If anyone is good at low level developing the project is source available and I appreciate collaborations with other os developers. Link to Codeberg-repo: https://codeberg.org/vntx-labs/VeloOS
Hope that is no problem that I use this thread a bit for self-promotion. If so just write a reply I'll remove this comment if this is a problem
https://makefaster.dev
I had a bunch of extra Fable credits, so I spent about $10k running autoresearch loops on 200 of the top github repos with frontends to try and speed up the frontend performance. I distilled them down into a leaderboard of the most common wins, and built out an autoresearch loop that takes those learnings and applies them to your repo.
Works with your existing claude/cursor/codex sub in a cute custom TUI.
I just submitted a Show HN for it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49687032
I'm designing a retro-style gaming mouse for retro-computing: Amiga, Atari, C64, and several protocol variants. It also has USB. It has a scroll wheel: read using extended protocols introduced by recent adaptors from USB, and a configuration interface.
Now launched => Verse Draft: https://versedraft.com - An all-in-one writing studio where fiction writers can keep all the details for their universes in one place while crafting stories, novels, movie scripts, TV series, or stage plays.
Also created a fun simple "card game" activity for writers looking for story ideas or stuck with writers block: https://talemancy.com/
(This was somewhat inspired by memories of playing Ultima IV as a teenager)
Currently working on something a little more visually focused in creative design.
I've been building a framework for web, ios and android native development at https://github.com/vmsp/flypath.
It's based on the Server-Driven UI philosophy where the backend streams both code and UI into a frontend that just knows how to render what it's told. This is pretty cool because it makes it makes over-the-air updates possible.
It also follows the batteries-included philosophy of Rails. Has an ORM, background and cron jobs (all based on Postgres), Django-style migrations, JSX Emails and pretty great FFI that's built around a simple `"use native"` directive, in the React Server Component fashion).
I’m working on a 52-part series about retention.
Each week I research one part of retention, teach it, and apply it to two real-world products I built.
I’ve published five lectures so far, and think the series should be useful to anyone here building a product: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFp5nmjrQeug
working on a storytelling app for kids called Tella Stories that goes deeper than just some minimal personalization.. know there's lots of stuff that claims to make them the hero, yadda yadda but then they just give you a shitty digital templated story or try to sell you a printed version. this is focused on a high level digital experience and something parents can actually trust, and that kids actually enjoy.
so yeah.. it builds the stories out of their actual life. their family and friends are in the cast, their dog, the thing they're nervous about this week. the kid doesn't just appear in the story, the story is about their world and imagination and grows with them.
ultimate goal is to keep iterating and get to a level of quality of Bluey, etc but have it actually be the kids world with agency/choices vs. one they have to passively sit back and watch, and that they're not in.
would love any feedback. i know there's been others like Ello shared on here and those threads were really interesting to know HN's opinion on. this does not take an educational and instructional approach. Tella is meant to help develop who they are through stories and be a better screen alternative time to the rest of the algo/curated garbage out there. anyway you guys are a critical and technical bunch and i respect/appreciate that.. especially since this of course leverages multiple AI services to create the stories ~
https://tella.kids/
Haven't added a demo to the repo yet (will do soon) but building this TUI [1] in Go to manage my agent skills.
I don't like putting 20-30 agent skills in the .claude/skills/ dir and letting the agent figure it out. I keep all the skills I've created and adapted over time in a separate git repo and then from there I copy them to the project skill dir when i need them for a session and then remove them when I'm done.
This TUI just replaces all the manual work with ls, cp -r, and rm -rf commands with a few keystrokes.
[1] https://github.com/primaprashant/sei
I spent some with reverse-engineering a neural network accelerator (NNA) inside a Chinese WiFi camera SoC: https://github.com/inoop/t41-pluto. I used Claude to reverse-engineer the hardware, and then implement an ONNX compiler and runtime so I can run my own models. Basically I now have a $20 AI smart camera.
I've been working on a collection of native AI/ML operators for TouchDesigner on macOS. Think of it as a happy marriage between the interface of TouchDesigner but with some of the features you know from ComfyUI.
https://www.patreon.com/MickeyvanOlst/posts/meet-aml-macos-1...
Typically TD for the Mac has always been a bit underserved, by leaning into some of the frameworks that exclusively exist on macOS I'm hoping more people will see it as a viable platform for this kind of stuff.
I got laid off at the beginning of last month so put a little time into some personal projects I thought might be fun.
https://dstld.news - I have always wanted a personalized news site so I built one using a few news APIs with AI summaries.
https://hn.wreet.xyz - I'm a big fan of skeleton.dev and wanted a HN frontend with all the fun themes.
Nothing too exciting, just trying to find the joy in making again.
I have been working on cost models and coupon ladders for businesses.
If either of those are interesting to you, please reach out!
For example, I am helping some restaurants learn exactly how much each item on the menu costs, what the margins are, and how much profit each dish is bringing in because I integrate with their PoS system.
https://imgur.com/a/C127GOY
It's all a part of GetSetReply which is turning into a small suite of tools for SMBs
https://GetSetReply.com
Contributing larger PRs to terraform-provider-aws because apparently my contributions so far do not have enough lines of code as a metric. Getting familiar with Floci for usage with Terraform over LocalStack since it is a true open source project rather than freemium. Also getting my AAS from Maestro. Ride or die since I can not afford college anywhere else despite their current accreditation issues with COE.
Don, a work companion.
Don helps you set goals.
Don reminds you to take breaks.
Don checks in how you fell.
Don judges you when you go off track.
Don celebrates you when you get stuff done.
https://donethat.ai/solutions/productivity
I've been working on a typed, functional-imperative, full stack programming language with IDE support: https://www.firefly-lang.org/
Still hacking away on Raygum - a nice place to keep your music brain.
I don't even know what that means.
https://raygum.com
Raygum appears to be refreshingly nice place! Thanks
Thank you! Feedback encouraged!
Cricket, a visual scripting plugin for Figma inspired by Grasshopper for Rhino.
I find Grasshopper, especially its data model, ideal for a certain type of algorithmic art/design, and have always wanted to use it in a 2D graphics package.
https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1677548868352947603/c...
Slowly putting my photography online again at https://flaneurphoto.com - in the middle of composing soundscapes for some of the works.
Finally getting around to organising my photo archive and setting up a metadata extraction pipeline that makes sense for me.
(At the day job, curious about adapting app layouts to accommodate the iPhone Duo and address the various Android foldables at the same time, too).
I am building OtaKit.app, a cheap, fast, and simple CDN-based over-the-air updating tool for Capacitor apps (and soon for React Native too)
A local AI-adoption consultancy business for SMBs where the differentiator is I physically show up at your office and actually talk to your team. With the slopification of cold outreach and social posting, I think the future of business development is going to be very personal.
https://dfwfractionalfde.com
I've been working on https://searchforjobs.app/ I'm trying to add the resume creator for using the right keywords for a job posting. I'm also trying to add more data visualizations are more job posting sources to scrape.
1) I've been running a bunch of little daily puzzle games for my friends for a while, finally got around to polishing one for public release
https://picobble.com/
Not like I'm gonna anything much with it, just was fun to get something nice-looking and presentable up for once. Working on polishing more of them and, of course, designing new ones.
2) A font generation system, inspired by Iosevka, albeit much much simpler. Learning tons of interesting technical things about TTF and WOFF2.
I've been working on https://pronto.stream/, I wanted to mess around with MCP and building a world news system to power the decision making and surveillance of other systems I would likely curate.
I was curious about formats more efficient for agent communication than JSON and also proving if the framework I curated could handle the load and traffic.
It's been really fun to observe.
i am working on a really cool word game that has a TUI graphical style, it looks like a roguelike but has a bit more going on. i also seem to have figured out a way to do automated "fun factor" testing and get bugs/frs that sound like real player feedback, as a little bonus treat. doesn't seem like anybody is attempting that kind of thing with agents, might try to codify it. trying to spend a lot longer thinking about a game's systems/meta and developing slowly vs. hypersprinting which is fun but exhausting.
Build one of the best emoji sites there is.
https://emojistime.com
I am working on real estate management system that do have AI agents https://www.aqaris.ae/. I want to automate mundane day-to-day tasks so managers can have more time
- i dropped a neural net jane street puzzle (https://huggingface.co/spaces/jane-street/droppedaneuralnet) very good mindbreaker, learned a lot of new things on the way
Optimem, a spaced repetition learning app that aims to be a user-friendly alternative to Anki. Or a more effective version of Duolingo.
https://optimem.org
I'm decompiling an obscure 1998 computer game using an LLM agent skill that I'm simultaneously developing from papers and books on reverse-engineering (a subject I've never previously engaged with) with the aim of migrating it (well, at least its assets) to the browser: https://esoteria.pages.dev
Here's the skill: https://github.com/gavmor/x86-cpp-reversing-skill
It's all slop, but it's battle-tested and producing results. It's quite fun and inspiring to see some of these assets like textures and geometry that are improperly decompiled, bit shifted or something like that. produces a lot of abstract, glitchy art.
To make sure that my process and results are reproducible, I've gotten back into maintaining Concourse CI pipelines. They were very useful when we were shipping a fork of k8s for VMware, and now they are a fun way of shipping cyberpunk billboard sprites to Cloudflare buckets.
I got back into Concourse in order to attempt a more rigorous approach to generative AI experimentation as well. Unfortunately, there are just so many odd techniques, configurations, loras, and utilities striking my fancy that my experiment pipelines have exploded into the dozens, and Concourse is not a large enough or a high-level enough organizing principle.
Web bluetooth for ios (via safari extension). It's already way better than any 3rd party browser available in appstore.
https://beacio.com
The 2026-27 soccer season just started.
If you love catching up on highlights, check https://thepelota.tv/
It’s like Netflix but for soccer highlights, with all the major leagues in one place as soon as they are available on YouTube, all free and no ads.
Where do you source the lineups and match data from?
I use this Highlightly's API https://highlightly.net/
Simple and does what it says on the tin. Nice!
Thank you so much. Let me know if you have any feedback :)
I'm trying to build a tool site that has all the tools you'll ever need. I slowly add some each week.
https://allthedamn.tools
On a mission to prove you don't need YC to be successful.
Trying to reduce my doomscrolling IG and FB usage
I created https://getnoloop.com to block the feed on iOS
we are building https://www.d5s.tech, using our own software to automate our own company (the boring bits)! having a blast doing it and steadily automating more and more
and... whenever i have some spare gpt-6 astra left i am working on a R.U.S.E reimplementation alongside some other threejs experiments
lexera, a kanban board with full multimedia and document include support that saves to markdown, exports to marp to manage teaching materials. it also started out to be my editor of choice for agentic programming as each task is a card. hopefully i will manage to create a page and visible materials soon!
Recently got genomic DNA purification automated for yeast (plus have automated library prep for nanopore+ a promethion)! As part of the DNA purification task, I had to journey up to Healdsburg to buy some lysis enzyme (thank god for winemakers, 100x cheaper than the biotech grade stuff), and noticed catalogs of different yeast strains with all their flavor profiles and stuff characterized.
I'm thinking about buying all the strains and pushing them through my automated sequencing pipeline, and building a yeast genotype -> flavor converter. Then, I think it'd be neat if you could have someone try a bunch of wines to get their favorite, and then genetically engineer a yeast strain specifically for their favorite flavors. Think that could be neat.
Software to promote live music and drink specials so I don't have to check dozens of Instagram accounts to find out what's happening tonight.
https://nittanynights.com/
https://indyafterfive.com/
I wrote my own site parsing toolkit which removed the friction I have with the current ones. It's now easy to add new locations quickly to scale.