Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)

news.ycombinator.com

351–360 of 1001 posts

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)

#351

I recently launched a daily word puzzle! https://tiledwords.com It’s inspired by tile placement board games like Patchwork and crosswords. You rotate and move tiles to rebuild a broken crossword. It’s free, web based, and responsive. I currently have several hundred daily players and growing. My wife and I create the puzzles and I’m continuing to fix bugs and add new features. I just launched a ”community puzzle” fea…

Awesome work

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)

#353
A Civil 3D plugin (Genabler) that will include all the network catalogs and collate the Civil 3D styles for civil engineers to use. There are some out-of-the-box catalogs and styles shipped with the default installation, but they are quite limited and fairly well hidden—which is not surprising, given that Civil 3D is a huge beast. As a result, they are not commonly used.

When people think about Civil 3D, they often assume it requires BIM modelers (in a sense, just glorified drafters) to create all the necessary catalogs and styles, and to assist with their use.

My Civil 3D plugin will:

1. Make standard, market-compliant catalogs and polished styles available to engineers at large. Think of it as the WordPress theme provider equivalent.

2. Make the entire process easy and painless through the plugin, with prominent buttons for quick access.

If the plugin is done well, there will be less need for BIM modelers, since for a fee, engineers could simply purchase catalogs and styles that are so easy to use they require no technical training.

As a side benefit, I also get to explore how LLMs can help me write code. It has been a while since I last updated my AI usage policy [0], and I look forward to revisiting it.

[0]: https://civilwhiz.com/my-ai-usage-policy/

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)

#354

Built a local-first Kanban board with Tauri (Rust + Svelte) after getting frustrated with SaaS tools and basic offline options. Stores data in JSON files you control, full keyboard-first UX, parent/child tasks, release management, and it's blazingly fast with localStorage + background sync. No telemetry, purely local. Curious what others prioritize in personal task tools. Seems like there's a gap between "todo.txt" s…

I’d love even a screenshot! Neat.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)

#358
I have been working on Buckaroo - my table display library for dataframes in notebook environments. Buckaroo adds table and analytics features like histograms, summary stats, sorting, and search to every dataframe. Recently I have been working to make it work better with large datasets.

This involves making it lazy for polars, allowing it to read arbitrarily large files no longer requiring loading the entire dataframe into memory. When a large dataframe initially displays, no summary stats will be available. Summary stats are computed in the background in groups of columns. Then results are cached per column. To accomplish this I wrote a polars plugin in rust that computes hashes of columns. Dealing with large data like this is tricky, operations sometimes crash, sometimes take all available memory, and sometimes they just run for a very long time. I have also been building an execution framework for Buckaroo. It uses multiprocessing based timeouts, and the caching to execute summary stats in the background.

Being able to control the execution, recover from timeouts, crashes and memory exhaustion opens up some interesting debugging tools. I have written methods that take arbitrary groups of polars expressions and produce a minimal reproduction test case through a git-bisect like process.

All of this assures that if individual columns of a dataframe fits into memory, summary stats will be computed for the entire dataframe in the background. And because it is cached, the next time you open the same dataframe, the stats will be display instantly. When exploring data I do this in an adhoc way manually (splitting up a dataframe by columns and rows), but it is error prone. This should all be automatic.

I will be presenting this at PyData Boston in December.

The Column's the limit: interactive exploration of larger than memory data sets in a notebook with Polars and Buckaroo

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)

#359

I recently launched a daily word puzzle! https://tiledwords.com It’s inspired by tile placement board games like Patchwork and crosswords. You rotate and move tiles to rebuild a broken crossword. It’s free, web based, and responsive. I currently have several hundred daily players and growing. My wife and I create the puzzles and I’m continuing to fix bugs and add new features. I just launched a ”community puzzle” fea…

Great game! The effort you put into animations and interactivity really pays off, especially when first learning how the game works.

This is a classic HN comment but I’d love a Thursday/Friday crossword difficulty equivalent in addition to the dailies which are a ~Monday.

Post reply on HN