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

Everyone knows reading is the best way to build vocabulary, but many avoid it and turn to flashcards or spaced repetition because long texts can feel overwhelming, and they often have to refer to a dictionary.

This app gives users short, engaging passages focused on comprehension. While reading, users guess word meanings from context and find out whether they got it right by answering a few questions below. I believe this will be helpful for people who haven’t had much success with popular vocabulary learning methods.

I shared it on HN earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44543063), but it didn’t get much attention. If you're interested in novel learning methods or vocabulary, I’d love your feedback.

P.S. Login is required since the app uses LLMs to generate interesting passages. You can register with any non-existent email if privacy is a concern.

Insect populations worldwide are experiencing significant declines in both abundance and diversity, with several studies reporting reductions ranging from 40% to 75% over recent decades. Estimates suggest that 5%–10% of all insect species have disappeared in the last 150 years, and some global meta-analyses indicate terrestrial insect populations are declining by close to 9% per decade.

Part of another odd project, and testing how long the material holds up. =3

After working on and using many MCP servers, I hit couple of issues multiple times:

* Do I configure 2 MCP servers of same type for 2 different API Keys or do I manually update configurations all the time? (e.g. production and development environments)

* when I have too many tools enabled, I noticed that either I am hitting context limit too quickly or LLM is hallucinating when choosing a right tool

* Some MCP servers expose a lot of tools, I want to disable some of them forever, instead of doing configuration per AI assistant (first for Claude, then Cursor and so on)

* Most MCP servers are hosted by third parties, as a privacy conscious person, I do not want to share my credentials with third parties.

And I am building Aiko - AI tools marketplace: https://getaiko.app

NOTE: Gmail and Calendar apps are currently under CASA Tier 2 security assessment, hence not published to production. But you can see demo usage here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgEy6Y1kfn4

Firstly a DevManual - for “any” software team/IT dept - how to think about the philosophy, history and practise of basically everything - release management, backup and recovery or IAM and security and marketing-by-engineering or CSS

It’s kind of “this much I know” and a working docker based OSS “software team in a box”

And the second one is really expanding on the philosophy - how software is changing companies and how democracy works with software