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Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)

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Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)

#2
https://www.inclusivecolors.com/

Iterating on an accessible color palette creator, for custom Tailwind-style palettes of multiple swatches, where you can check your colors have sufficient WCAG/ACPA color contrast on a live UI mockup. You can export the colors for use with Tailwind, CSS, Figma, and Adobe.

I started working on this because for design projects I was almost always getting handed brand style guides that were missing thought into accessible colors pairs and lacked tints/shades, where I had to fill in the gaps. There's lots of color tools out there, but this supports multiple swatches, checking the contrast of multiple color pairs at the same time and the HSLuv based color picker makes it easier to explore accessible colors.

It's really only usable on desktop right now but I'd love any feedback good or bad on if it's useful and what to work on next! There's actually a lot of directions to go in, and it's tricky to balance more features with keeping it simple. Some tips:

- The "Load examples" menu in the top-left lets you compare the colors from Tailwind, IBM Carbon and United States Web Design System.

- The "contrast" menu lets you see how WCAG 2 contrast checks compare against APCA when "vs black/white" is turned on. WCAG 2 has known inaccuracies, especially for dark mode. APCA is the candidate contrast method for WCAG 3 that's meant to improve on this.

- Use the "..." menu to create a swatch based on a brand color.

- Use the "..." menu to "flip to dark/light palette" to create a dark theme. Or just manually flip the lightness curves horizontally.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)

#3
This is an ongoing experiment that david927 has been helping with (thanks!). The two previous in the sequence were:

Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41690087 - Sept 2024 (1041 comments)

Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41342017 - Aug 2024 (1424 comments)

One thing I'd like to hone in on is that these threads aren't intended for promotion, but rather for the just-because sort of project, driven by idle interest or weird obsession—the sort of thing people might spend their free time on.

I'm not sure yet what the official "rule" should be (if any), but if you're working on a startup or have had attention via Show HN, maybe abstain from these discussions? It wouldn't be good for the thread to get taken over by things HN already has a place for.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)

#5
Knitting hats. The fall/winter is when I bury myself in knitting projects to fight seasonal depression and cabin fever. Audiobook + knitting == bliss.

The work most of us do isn't tangible. You have nothing to "prove" that you made something. Creating something in meat space is really rewarding.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)

#8
I'm building a social network for humans[1]. I plan to make each user a verified human and disallow AI content as standard. I will also ensure that each human can only have one account, to eliminate the ability of state actors/rich people spreading online propaganda.

1 - https://onlyhumanhub.com

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)

#9
I've been working on the idea of building synthetic workers. I'm trying to implement a planning workflow system for scenarios where the workflow definition, the environment, or the task are not well defined. I also ended up implementing a micro Palentir plugin system to support the action system for the synthetic users.

Its a cool project that gave me immense pleasure to built, however its unfortunately a intellectually masturbatory one, because although the tech is cool, I haven't found a cool application for it. If anyone is interested hit me up.

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