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

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251–260 of 1001 posts

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

#251
Well, I did a rewrite of this app (RiVal.T, an iOS timer)[0], and I'm working on a new release that includes a Watch app (acting as a remote control). Getting the Watch and phone talking reliably is a challenge, but I seem to be stumbling towards success (eventually).

I have a couple of other apps that I have plans for, as well. If I get sick of playing traffic cop, with the phone app, I may take a break, and work on them.

[0] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/ios-apps/rival-t/

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

#254
A HTML validator for websites and web applications. It’s just not scalable having to do this manually, and having valid HTML is still important. Wrong HTML can cause bugs, and can harm accessibility. This is becoming more important now in Europe with new accessibility laws coming into force next month.

https://jezenthomas.com/2025/05/dont-skip-html-validation/

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

#257
post #249

Planning a hobby alpaca farm (3-4 alpacas), very early stage. Everything from farm related stuff (water, food, shelter, etc.) to self-sufficiency (solar, etc.) to real time monitoring (which cameras, affecting power supply). Who knows if it'll ever happen, but just planning everything in detail is a lot of fun. Especially with weird regulatory constraints where I'm living, there's a lot to watch out for. Example: Sol…

This must be the dream for a lot of tech people living behind a screen. I can see myself wanting to do this (although maybe work on the farm not own it)

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

#258
I’m working on a Content Security Policy parser. There are a handful of them around the web, but I couldn’t find one that implemented the entirety of the CSP spec and I wanted something I could use to verify structure and validity of CSP directives.

https://github.com/damien/content-security-policy/tree/main/...

Once I’m happy with my take on a reference implementation I’m hoping to create some tooling with it to do some interesting analysis of CSP abstract syntax trees to identify things like policy anti patterns, reporting on capabilities a policy grants to a domain/resource, and a better mechanism for allowing tools like OPA, SemGrep, etc. to define and enforce rules on a policy.

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

#259
Ive almost finished the first version of a desktop video library app I've been writing for myself. I had the idea last year, but the cost of sending images to an LLM made it too expensive (to run over about 1500 videos), but now it's fairly reasonable.

In the app you pick a folder with videos in it and it stores the path, metadata, extracts frames as images, uses a local whisper model to transcribe the audio into subtitles, then sends a selection of the snapshots and the subtitles to an LLM to be summarised. The LLM sends back an XML document with a bunch of details about the video, including a title, detailed summary and information on objects, text, people, animals, locations, distinct moments etc. Some of these are also timestamped and most have relationships (i.e this object belongs to this location, this text was on this object etc). I store all that in a local SQLLite database and then do another LLM call with this summary asking for categories and tags, then store them in the DB against each video. The App UI is essentially tags you can click to narrow down returned videos.

I plan on adding a natural language search (Maybe RAG -- need to look into the latest best way), have half added Projects so I can group videos after finding the ones I want, and have a bunch of other ideas for this too. I've been programming this with some early help from Aider and Claude Sonnet. It's getting a bit complex now, so I do the majority of code changes, though the AI has done a fair bit. It's been heaps of fun, and I'm using it now in "production" (haha - on my PC)

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

#260

I've been working on an e-ink laptop. I wanted a machine I could stare hours at and feel okay about it. I didn't seem to find a device like that out there. I'm designing everything from the chassis to the software OS. E-ink has its own design constraints. I'm building 5 apps for it: a browser, reader, mail, writer and code editor. It's still a ways to go. Here's a picture of what I have so far: https://www.heyravitej…

hey maybe the kid that made the anyon_e would be inspiring for you!

Here's a couple related videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fks3PBodyiE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0sLQvuLwxQ

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