Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)

Hi teleforce, thanks! Your project sounds very interesting as well.

That actually reminds me, at one point, a researcher suggested looking into geophone or fiber optic Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) data that oil companies sometimes collect in Alaska, potentially for tracking animal movements or impacts, but I never got the chance to follow up. Connecting seismic activity data (like yours) with potential effects on animal vocalizations or behaviour observed in acoustic recordings would be an interesting research direction!

Regarding data access:

Our labeled dataset (EDANSA, focused on specific sound events) is public here: https://zenodo.org/records/6824272. We will be releasing an updated version with more samples soon.

We are also actively working on releasing the raw, continuous audio recordings. These will eventually be published via the Arctic Data Center (arcticdata.io). If you'd like, feel free to send me an email (address should be in my profile), and I can ping you when that happens.

Separately, we have an open-source model (with updates coming) trained on EDANSA for predicting various animal sounds and human-generated noise. Let me know if you'd ever be interested in discussing whether running that model on other types of non-stationary sound data you might have access to could be useful or yield interesting comparisons.

Hi d_burfoot, really appreciate you bringing that up! The idea of pre-training a big foundation model on our raw data using self-supervised learning (SSL) methods (kind of like how GPT emerged in NLP) is definitely something we've considered and experimented with using transformer architectures.

The main hurdle we've hit is honestly the scale of relevant data needed to train such large models from scratch effectively. While our ~19.5 years dataset duration is massive for ecoacoustics, a significant portion of it is silence or ambient noise. This means the actual volume of distinct events or complex acoustic scenes is much lower compared to the densely packed information in the corpora typically used to train foundational speech or general audio models, making our effective dataset size smaller in that context.

We also tried leveraging existing pre-trained SSL models (like Wav2Vec 2.0, HuBERT for speech), but the domain gap is substantial. As you can imagine, raw ecoacoustic field recordings are characterized by significant non-stationary noise, overlapping sounds, sparse events we care about mixed with lots of quiet/noise, huge diversity, and variations from mics/weather.

This messes with the SSL pre-training tasks themselves. Predicting masked audio doesn't work as well when the surrounding context is just noise, and the data augmentations used in contrastive learning can sometimes accidentally remove the unique signatures of the animal calls we're trying to learn.

It's definitely an ongoing challenge in the field! People are trying different things, like initializing audio transformers with weights pre-trained on image models (ViT adapted for spectrograms) to give them a head start. Finding the best way forward for large models in these specialized, data-constrained domains is still key. Thanks again for the suggestion, it really hits on a core challenge!

Hi Caleb, thanks for the kind words and enthusiasm! You're absolutely right, audio provides that crucial omnidirectional coverage that can supplement fixed field-of-view sensors like cameras. We actually collect images too and have explored fusion approaches, though they definitely come with their own set of challenges, as you can imagine.

On the labeled audio data front: our Arctic dataset (EDANSA, linked in my original post) is open source. We've actually updated it with more samples since the initial release, and getting the new version out is on my to-do list.

Polli.ai looks fantastic! It's genuinely exciting to see more people tackling the ecological monitoring challenge with hardware/software solutions. While I know the startup path in this space can be tough financially, the work is incredibly important for understanding and protecting biodiversity. Keep up the great work!

Hey thePhytochemist, cool tool! Yes, spectrograms are fundamental for us. Audacity is the classic for quick looks. For systematic analysis and ML inputs, it's mostly programmatic generation via libraries like torch.audio or librosa. Spectrograms are a common ML input, though other representations are being explored.

Enhancing frequenSee for scientific use (labelling/analysis) sounds like a good idea. But I am not sure what is missing from the current tooling. What functionalities were you thinking of adding?

Our labeled dataset (EDANSA, focused on specific sound events) is public here: https://zenodo.org/records/6824272. We will be releasing an updated version with more samples soon.

We are also actively working on releasing the raw, continuous audio recordings. These will eventually be published via the Arctic Data Center (arcticdata.io). If you'd like, feel free to send me an email (address should be in my profile), and I can ping you when that happens.

Thanks! Appreciate it. Your work looks very interesting too, especially in the distributed systems space. Cheers!

Nice work, this looks better than the established players in this space! You've got some customisation options in yours that I'd love to implement in mine as soon as time permits. Huge props for not forcing people to sign up for an account to use it!

If you could add custom templates, you could let the community add the country specific things

Thanks for the feedback, a notes section is a great idea!

Yeah it'd be cool to consider this approach for some other domains. Sometime soon I'll make it so you can change the word in the top-left from "INVOICE" to "QUOTE" or "RECEIPT". The nice thing about an invoice is you know there's going to be a relatively small amount of data, so storing the state in the URL is a plausible approach (even if it looks obscene to discerning users ).

It looks nice at a glance, but there's just no way I can justify $15/mth for the few times a year I need to send an invoice. If https://bestfreeinvoice.com gains some amount of traction I'd love to extend the feature set to justify a paid tier, but the basic experience (i.e. what's currently live) will always be free and genuinely useful.

I have been using simpleinvoices.io for a few years too. It's great. (Just checked, 10 this year).

Currency selection is on the roadmap but the need for deductions wasn't on my radar - thanks for the tip!

You found the easter egg!

By default, href values of <a> tags are removed, because they add significant token length without adding more context. Coming soon, you can specify a request header to set whether or not you want links removed from the response. Those underscores you mentioned are from the italics.

Thanks! Still a work in progress :-)

Much appreciated!

Flaresolverr most probably

With AWS Athena, you can query the contents of someone else’s public S3 bucket. You pay per read, but if you craft your query the right way then it’s very inexpensive. Each query I run only scans about 1MB of data.

Since I was just looking at this accidentally, here are some examples of how to query at a ~cent-per-query cost level (just examples but quite illustrative): https://commoncrawl.org/blog/index-to-warc-files-and-urls-in...

https://pure.md/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4353323...

Wait 3 months for me to finish.

So far it's basically just a Django server. You're responsible for self hosting ( although I imagine I'll put up a demo server), you can define your own cards.

You can play the game by literally just using curl calls if you want to be hardcore about it.

I *might* make a nice closed source game client one day with a bunch of cool effects, but that's not my focus right now.

That's really cool, Elias. I keep seeing people try to put LLMs into the role of the GM. But I think you're doing something new and important by working to have the rules available to it.

Is your project available anywhere? Best of luck!

If you're interested, because I kept seeing "LLM as GM" projects, I got curious about how well it would work to have LLMs as players instead. So I made this:

https://github.com/maxwelljoslyn/gm-trainer

It's a training ground for GMs to practice things like spontaneous description, with 4 AI players that get fed what each other say so they act in a reasonably consistent manner. It's not perfect, but I've gotten some good use out of it.

I feel the same way about Tailspire as I feel about pretty much every other VTT. They might do okay, even pretty well, at combat maps and/or character sheets, but I want is the whole game world in the computer. Maps are just a fraction of what I need as a GM. I need data on economics and population numbers and power structures. And I need computation over all those things.

For instance, my game rules include an economic subsystem, which takes in the production of goods and services at hundreds of in-game cities, and computes prices for over a thousand player-purchaseable goods. The "second app" that I referred to above allows players to (among many other things) purchase stuff at the market nearest their current location and have those items go straight into their character sheet. If the "item" is actually an animal, a hired mercenary, etc. then a different subsystem generates a new NPC with the right statistics and attaches the player to it as owner/liege.

I could write an extension for a VTT that talks to my economic system over an API, and throws items up on screen, lets players purchase them, moves them into their character sheet using the right function calls in the VTT's extension library, etc. But every step of the way, I would be fighting to cram this subsystem into the VTT's conception that gameplay begins and ends with maps and char sheets.

That's sweet! I think LLMs have incredible potential for descriptions and for NPC behavior, and I really like that you have this bridge between freeform intent and a rules engine. I'd like to pick your brain about it - I'll send an email.

:D

We’re hooking up to the APIs - the goal is to alert you of mentions as quickly as possible, so waiting for Google to index results would introduce (much) too much lag.

Interesting feature request! I’ll have a think on it.

Thanks! I haven't used Pulsar, but the general answer is that mentions.us is focussed on sending you alerts for notifications, whereas more sophisticated social listening tools provide a lot more analytics (e.g., sentiment analysis).

If your company just wants alerts when their keywords are mentioned on social media then mentions.us should work great for them. If you work for Coca Cola then you likely need something very different from your social listening tool!

Hey Julien! I’ve seen you advertising KWatch in lots of places, assume you’re connected to it / know the founder?

For LinkedIn monitoring we use the voyager APIs. It’s not perfect because it gets posts but not comments, but it’s pretty good.

I put more details in a reply to another comment, but basically I think the number of people willing to pay for email alerts is small, so I’ve made the service free for them. It’s only teams who want Slack notifications who have paid plans.

I’m not optimising to extract every possible $ from the market with that pricing strategy. Instead I hope it will maximise the number of users whilst breaking even on costs.

Thanks for the feedback! For saved terms we show you the number of matches we’ve notified you about, which always starts at zero, whereas during creating we show you how many you would have matched. That’s a confusing UI and I should improve it

I think most of the people who sign up for email alerts would never pay. Lots of them are indie hackers or folks with a side project - I've been there, and know how price sensitive those communities are. I'd rather they use the service for free than not at all - I get valuable feedback from that, a marketing boost if they tell others about it, and the validation of having built something other people use.

I do have a paid plan for people who want Slack notifications, and I think those folks ought to be happy to pay. My hope is that I'll eventually get a few paid signups and that those will cover the costs of the service (which are minimal).

I know I lose a bit of revenue with the above approach, but it's a tradeoff I'm happy to make.

Thank you. Yes she’s been enjoying them a lot now that we don’t have to repeat the same stories every night :) I’ll share on here once I’m done and also the right up.

There is nice list url shortener API https://publicapis.dev/category/url-shorteners and worth try it.

Will do. Hn has no way of tagging people or following up though so I’m not sure how to share once I go live. But if you shoot me a message I’ll update you once done. amrangaye at gmail dot com.

Not yet as I’m still finessing it to her needs. She has a problem getting rid of thumb sucking, and finally asked for a fairy tale with a thumb sucking princess who eventually stops sucking her thumb lol. It’s a fun activity and also letting me learn about LLMs.

I have! It was one of those "I should have moved when I had the chance" moments. But such is life as a developer.

Interesting to hear. One big thing I had to address was the fact that she lives in a rural area with very slow internet access and I don't. So I built in and option for us both to select a movie and a time for the date and it would pre-download a high-quality version.

That’s a great insight. I totally agree that early Facebook’s ability to surface actual connections was valuable before it turned into an endless recommendation machine.

The challenge is figuring out how to offer just enough discoverability that doesn't creep users. I like your idea of an opt-in, time-limited, depth-1 search, it keeps things intentional while reducing friction. Definitely something to think about.

Curious: would you see value in a simple "import contacts" option, or do you think that would risk overstepping?

Thanks for the feedback!

1. The bottom nav links are fixed now, really appreciate you pointing that out.

2. > ...an About page with screenshots great suggestion! We’ll work on adding that soon to better showcase what Aponlink is about.

Glad this resonates with you! That’s exactly the goal—keeping the useful parts of social networking while removing the noise and AI-driven manipulation.

> How do you envision onboarding? Do I join, and then try to convince a handful of people to join as well?

Yes, that's been the idea so far for onboarding. But we’re also exploring ways to make the platform more organically discoverable and valuable from day one (without AI).

In my case, it's been easy to convince my network to move and I found they shared a similar level of dismay towards traditional networks.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions on the onboarding process

Thanks for trying it out! That particular error usually happens due to a temporary network issue or if third-party cookies are blocked. Could you try refreshing or using a different browser?

I’ll also check on my end to make sure everything is running smoothly. Appreciate the heads-up!

We don't support LFS at the moment. Everything is in Go.

Thank you means a lot :)

Not taking payments yet, ETA was Q1 but it's slipping to Q2 as my day job has kept me busy

You can sign up interest and I will send you an email when it's ready.