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Ask HN: What apps are you building?
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Re: Ask HN: What apps are you building?
#22I’m working on a 100% faithful adaptation of both QBasic and QuickBasic 4.5 that runs entirely in the browser running on a virtual CPU and hardware abstraction layer. It’s a love letter to everyone who learned to program on Microsoft’s BASIC interpreters in the ’80s and early ’90s. The whole project is fully open source. The best compliment I’ve received so far is from friends who grew up in the same era I did: when…
I am also doing something similar here [1]. But I decided to NOT use BASIC as the language. Instead I implemented a new language with more modern features like foreach loops, closures and a less verbose syntax etc. But the focus is still on getting the same IDE experience as QBasic IDE as well as the graphics/sound capabilities as the good old QBasic. Another priority was the availability of built in documentation he…
Nice.
Mine is definitely more about achieving as close to perfect parity as possible with Microsoft QBASIC (a dog-eared copy of the Microsoft QuickBASIC Compiler book circa 1985 is sitting on my desk right now), but it also dives pretty deeply into the technical decisions behind some of QBasic’s quirks and how it worked with MS‑DOS at the time.
So it’s just as much an educational tool for understanding how BASIC pulled off certain effects. And with the hardware abstraction layer, it also mimics period‑appropriate hardware (386SX, 486DX, etc.).
I took a look at the video. The only thing is that I had a hard time making out what was going on. I could clearly see the green cannon at the bottom, but at the top it just kind of turned into a smeary, artifact-y mess. I don’t know if that was a result of vimeo's compression or what, but I'd consider re‑uploading it at a higher quality.
Re: Ask HN: What apps are you building?
#23I
I am working on:
Guaranteed weight loss (for overweight) and weight gain for (underweight) people, you'll see clear gain or loss within 2-5 weeks. If you are in a calorie surplus, your weight goes up. If you are in a calorie deficit, your weight goes down. MacroCodex uses that relationship to estimate your true maintenance calories over time: https://macrocodex.app/ This can be used to gain or lose weight. You simply need to eat above your maintenance calorie line to gain weight and below it to lose weight. No ads, no subscriptions, no payments, 16k users already.
If you're interested in how it works: https://macrocodex.app/knowledge/rethink/adaptive-tdee/
Re: Ask HN: What apps are you building?
#24I'm working on xword-pipeline: https://github.com/ekorbia/xword-pipeline It's a pipeline for generating dense crossword puzzles with a Rust grid fill engine and optional Claude based clue writing and QA processes. I use it to generate the crossword puzzles on https://wordfuzz.com/ . The quality is already good for smaller (5x5 and 9x9) puzzles. I'm working on improvements for larger 15x15 NYT style puzzles. I'm also…
Nice. I experimented with automated cruciverbalism in the pre-LLM era, and it was a pretty good challenge especially for strict NYT-style crosswords, which maintain aesthetically pleasing symmetry in the puzzle layout.
Looks like we actually exchanged a bit of conversation on this a while back:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45097346
I think you've done a good job improving on the clue's specificity. As I mentioned in that thread, part of the deep satisfaction of solving a crossword puzzle is the specificity of the answer. It’s far more gratifying to fill in something like “shortwave” than “radio,” or “gallium” instead of just “metal.”
I attempted (over a decade ago at this point) to manage word types using frequency corpuses to help ensure a healthy balance of specific vs filler answers with varying degrees of success...
Small bit of feedback:
On the 9x9 puzzle for Sunday 2026-07-19, one of the three-letter clues was “Cook of Apple fame.” I don’t think this is much of a spoiler, but the answer in the puzzle was WOZ, referring to Steve Wozniak. However I’ve never heard anyone call him a cook. It's made even more confusing because there is a Cook at Apple, aka Tim Cook who took over as CEO after Steve Jobs.
Re: Ask HN: What apps are you building?
#25[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: What apps are you building?
#26[dead]
Re: Ask HN: What apps are you building?
#27I work on FluidCAD on my free time.
I published v0.0.40 last weekend with some big updates.
Re: Ask HN: What apps are you building?
#28I've been working on https://dynobox.xyz which is a local test runner for agents skills.
I was working on an agentic payments (MPP) powered service and had a hard time getting consistent behavior from my skill.md i was hoping to distribute. so like usually, one project let to another...
If anyone wants to try it out and has feedback I'd love to hear!
Re: Ask HN: What apps are you building?
#29[dead]
Re: Ask HN: What apps are you building?
#30I'm working on xword-pipeline: https://github.com/ekorbia/xword-pipeline It's a pipeline for generating dense crossword puzzles with a Rust grid fill engine and optional Claude based clue writing and QA processes. I use it to generate the crossword puzzles on https://wordfuzz.com/ . The quality is already good for smaller (5x5 and 9x9) puzzles. I'm working on improvements for larger 15x15 NYT style puzzles. I'm also…
Nice. I experimented with automated cruciverbalism in the pre-LLM era, and it was a pretty good challenge especially for strict NYT-style crosswords, which maintain aesthetically pleasing symmetry in the puzzle layout. Looks like we actually exchanged a bit of conversation on this a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45097346 I think you've done a good job improving on the clue's specificity. As I menti…
Yes, I tried a while back to use LLMs for both the grid fill and the clue writing but was not able to generate dense puzzles. This pipeline uses a Rust fill engine that fills hundreds of candidate grids using a scored word list.
Thanks for the feedback! I will recheck the clues for that puzzle.