Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
403 comments
·June 29, 2025insaider
https://whatsyum.com - app/website for dish-specific ratings, as opposed to just the whole restaurant. Bali focused for now.
Tsarp
Low friction Markdown based voice journaling. Locally transcribed voice memos with whisper and write as markdown files (to any folder or obsidian vault).
Tsarp
https://github.com/srv1n/kurpod
Lets you create encrypted containers disguised as normal files. 1000s of images, pdfs, videos, secrets, keys all stuffed into an innocent look "Vacation_Summer_2024.mp4".
I've almost got true steganography working i.e to get the carrier file to actually open in any file system(currently with mp4, pdf, png and jpeg).
Things like this have existed in the past, but nothing with a simple UI,recent encryption standards.
z3ugma
Still working on: an enclosure-compatible open-source version of the 2nd gen Nest thermostat. It reuses the enclosure, encoder ring, display, and mounts of the Nest but replaces the "thinking" part with an open-source PCB that can interact with Home Assistant.
- The encoder ring which works like an LED mouse, but in reverse: Fully reverse-engineered and on its own demo PCB
- The faceplate PCB, which does the actual control of the thermostat wires, has been laid out, but the first version missed a really-obvious problem involving the behavior on power-on with certain of the GPIO pins from the ESP32, so I've got rev 3 on order from the PCB manufacturer.
Nest Thermostats of the 1st and 2nd generation will no longer be supported by Google starting October 25, 2025. You will still be able to access temperature, mode, schedules, and settings directly on the thermostat – and existing schedules should continue to work uninterrupted. However, these thermostats will no longer receive software or security updates, will not have any Nest app or Home app controls, and Google will end support for other connected features like Home/Away Assist. It has been pretty-badly supported in Home Assistant for over a year anyway, missing important connected features.
chunkles
Is this project online anywhere yet that I can watch for it to be ready?
ryandrake
Wow! Useful work, if that’s true about them planning to remotely nerf everyone’s product.
Yet another example of why not to buy a product that needs to be tethered to its manufacturer to work. Good luck. I’d be willing to beta test (I’d have to check what rev mine is)
stonlyb
https://inlovingmem.com/ - is a tribute to my recently deceased mom that I vibe coded over the last week. I felt her life deserved to be celebrated widely but wanted to be sensitive to her privacy. I've also built in a number of interactive features for participation in funeral services etc, before, during, and after.
Folks have reached out about having an 'In Loving Memory Of' site for their loved ones, so I'm turning this into a side business to help out more with my (now widowed) father's retirement and care.
jesse__
I've been working on a 3D voxel-based game engine for like 10 years in my spare time. The most recent big job has been to port the world gen and editor to the GPU, which has had some pretty cute knock-on effects. The most interesting is you can hot-reload the world gen shaders and out pop your changes on the screen, like a voxel version of shadertoy. https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai
I also wrote a metaprogramming language which generates a lot of the editor UI for the engine. It's a bespoke C parser that supports a small subset of C++, which is exposed to the user through a 'scripting-like' language you embed directly in your source files. I wrote it as a replacement for C++ templates and in my completely unbiased opinion it is WAY better.
aeve890
10 years? Man, I envy you. Seriously. You say you work on it in your spare time so it's no like is your life passion or something like that right? How do you keep momentum? I have hundred of never finished projects, and I really struggle to finish them or work on them enough to want to keep doing it. Teach me.
jesse__
Hah, thanks for the kind words <3
In all seriousness, I think I have the same propensity to have a hundred unfinished projects and have a hard time finding motivation to complete them. The difference might be that I have this 'big' project called a 'game engine' that wraps them all up into some semblance of a cohesive whole. For example, projects that are incomplete, but mostly just good enough to be serviceable (sometimes barely):
1. Font rasterizer 2. Programming language 3. Imgui & layout engine 4. 3D renderer 5. Voxel editor
.. etc
Now, every one of those on their own is pretty boring and borderline useless .. there are (mostly) much better options out there for each in their specific domain. But, squash them all together and it's starting to become a useful thing.
It just happened that I enjoy working on engine tech and I picked a huge project I have no hope of ever finishing. Take from that what you will
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me. --Hunter S. Thompson
0xb0565e486
Lately, I’ve been exploring a few interconnected ideas:
Local-first web applications with a compiled backend – After eight years working on web platforms, the conventional stack feels bloated. The client already defines what it wants to fetch or insert. Usually through queries. So why not parse those queries and generate the backend automatically (or at least, the parts that can be)?
Triple stores as a core abstraction – I’ve been thinking about using a triple-based model instead of traditional in-memory data structures, especially in local-first apps. Facts could power both state and logic, and make syncing a lot simpler.
Lower-level systems programming – I’ve mostly worked in high-level languages, but lately I’ve been writing C libraries (like hash maps) and built a minimal 32-bit bare-metal RISC-V OS.
It’s all still brewing, but I think these ideas tie together nicely. What if the OS didn’t have a file system and just a fact store? Everything could be queried and updated live, like a Lisp machine but built on facts.
Some other things I’ve been playing with:
A jQuery-like framework and element factory - You can pass signals that automatically updates the DOM.
A Datomic-like database on top of OPFS - where queries become signals that react to new triples as they enter the system. Pairs well with the framework above.
ress
https://foldwrap.com - animation editor
sodality2
After 2+ years of maintaining the FOSS lightweight Reddit frontend Redlib [0], I realized that my niche but extremely detailed knowledge and experience of using Reddit's endpoints might be useful. After reverse engineering the mobile app and writing code to emulate nearly every aspect of its behavior, plus writing a codegen framework that will auto-update my code from analyzing the behavior from an Android emulator, I can pretty easily replay common user flows from any IP around the world, collecting and extracting the data. Some use cases:
* OSINT (r00m101 just beat me to it by launching...)
* Research into recommendation algorithms, advertising placement algorithms, etc
* Marketing (ad libraries, detailed analysis of content given data not even exposed to the mobile app due to some interesting side channels, things like trend analysis, etc)
* Market research for products
* Sales teams can use it to find exact mentions of other products. Eg: selling crash reporting software? Look up your target accounts' brands and find examples of complaints.
Plus a few more with more imagination.
So I'm working on a site that allows user access to some of the read-only functions available here. Coming soon :tm:. Been really fun building it all in Rust, though :) If you're interested in anything here, email in profile.
Karrot_Kream
Is there any interest in factoring the Reddit parts out of the UI code? I've been thinking of taking a stab at that myself but figured this would be a good place to ask if you have plans :)
sodality2
Do you mean a way to have the Reddit app render content from some generic social media provider, while keeping the UI? I haven't thought about that yet. I'm sure it would be possible, but that would require tearing out a lot of backend code and replacing it 1:1. Most of my work has been on the network side of the app, and not much modification; just introspection and inspecting behavior.
My main question: why, do you like the UI? I honestly really hate the reddit app, I haven't seriously used it for browsing since I fixed up Libreddit into Redlib :)
Karrot_Kream
I don't like the Reddit app personally but I also do like something a bit more dynamic than what Redlib offers. Personally I'm fine with JS on the frontend and frameworks like React as long as they're implemented well.
I'd also just like to play around with different styles of frontend just as a way to hack on things.
xyst
~2 years ago, Reddit was cracking down on this type of usage. This lead to a mass exodus of users to lemmynet and other decentralized platforms.
What makes you special in this aspect? Seems you are small fish now, but if your niche project picks up steam. Nothing to stop them from cutting you off or forcing you to court/injunction and waste your personal resources.
sodality2
That crackdown was for regular API usage aka just regular content access, which definitely isn’t special. Most other “reddit data access” sites either use some sort of headless browser or just the JSON endpoints, which are brittle and limited, whereas I can access the private mobile API that the app uses for ad/recommendation distribution at a much larger scale. These things aren’t accessible via the API. Picture it as: an API where you can access just content, vs having programmatic access to every piece of data the mobile app can access, which unintuitively is not limited to what the mobile app displays (there’s other interesting fields available).
pinoy420
[dead]
ttd
I'm working on a new app for creating technical diagrams - https://vexlio.com. It's an area with some heavyweight incumbents (e.g. Visio, Lucid) but I think there's good opportunity here to differentiate in simplicity and overall experience. I'm still in the fairly early phase, and I suspect I haven't quite found the best match of features to customers yet.
From a dev perspective this area has a ton of super interesting algorithmic / math / data structure applications, and computational geometry has always been special to me. It's a lot of fun to work on.
If anyone here is interested in this as a user, I'd love for any feedback or comments, here or you can email me directly: tyler@vexlio.com.
Some pages the HN crowd might be interested in:
* https://vexlio.com/blog/making-diagrams-with-syntax-highligh... * https://vexlio.com/solutions/state-diagram-maker/ * https://vexlio.com/blog/speed-up-your-overleaf-workflow-fast...
Malazath
Actually right up my alley. I have many frustrations and reservations against the current offerings. Super excited to see a new player enter the field
ttd
Would love to hear those frustrations and reservations - drop me a line if you're interested in sharing: tyler@vexlio.com.
EnnEmmEss
It looks like a pretty interesting product so I really hate to be that guy but the FAQ page at https://vexlio.com/faq/ straight up doesn't work (whenever I click any of the questions, it does nothing). Also, wanted to know if there was anything in the pipeline to get a Desktop application which would work offline. In several places in the enterprise world especially, I do feel there would be scope for that. I would definitely pay for a desktop version which worked offline for example.
ttd
Whoops - FAQ issue should be fixed if you refresh (if it's still broken, give it some time for caches to be invalidated). Thanks for mentioning that!
Re: desktop version. The short answer is yes, probably, but I don't have a concrete timeline. I made tech and architecture choices from the beginning to make sure a cross-platform desktop version always remains possible. Frankly, the biggest obstacle for desktop is not the app itself, but distribution and figuring out a pricing model. The current solution for enterprise, business, and other interested people, is to self-host Vexlio, with separate licensing.
EnnEmmEss
FAQ works fine for me now.
sixpackpg
In the off chance you haven't seen Bret Victor, your app reminds me of him, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGYGl_xxfXA
santana16
Visio and Lucid are trying to cover everything at the expense of practical convenience. Pick a lane and stick to it. Good luck!!!
ttd
Definitely seems to be the case from my observation as well. Appreciate it!
noleary
oh cool! I want to try this soon.
ginger_beer_m
seamless latex integration is a winner for me!! will definitely spread the words for this
ttd
Awesome, thank you! If you or your colleagues have other LaTeX-related goals or wishes, do let me know. There's a lot of untapped opportunity there as well (IMHO).
ajd555
I've been working on a fully electric last-mile delivery company: https://hudsonshipping.co
Beyond the landing page (built with Astro), I've been building all of the route optimization, the delivery and warehouse management systems. A combination of go and java has allowed me to write a few microservices in the past 6 months to handle all of my logistical processes, and I'm just testing the mobile app in the field as we speak! I hope to make some of the code open-source one day!
iamnotmeet
This is interesting! Have you considered leveraging Google OR Tools[1] for route optimization? At a previous hyper-local eCommerce startup I worked for, we used it to solve similar problems. Although the setup and integration is not super easy, but the results far outweighed the effort.
ajd555
I have considered it! I've opted for a more specialized optimization library that deals specifically in the Traveling Salesman Problem (https://github.com/graphhopper/jsprit). I will revisit this though, might come in handy pretty soon - thank you!
ag_rin
This is a super cool intersection of real world problems and software. How hard has it been to get customers? I assume trust is a big hurdle here. How are you approaching this problem?
ajd555
Thank you! You've definitely identified the trickiest part, especially when you come in with a track record of, well...0 deliveries (I was in working in tech teams before this). Luckily, there are quite a few freight brokers in the NYC metro area, and they are willing to give you a trial period. Another way to approach is to work with smaller companies and offer discounts during the startup phase. (We're starting deliveries in August)
abrinz
I'm working on an MCP to give your coding agent the ability to generate on-demand Mermaid diagrams about anything in your codebase. Among other benefits, it is very helpful for spotting unnecessary code or architecture that can accumulate while vibe coding.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/@mindpilot/mcp
Claude Code Quickstart:
``` claude mcp add mindpilot -- npx @mindpilot/mcp ```
What are you working on? Any new ideas which you're thinking about?