Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

381–390 of 1001 posts

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

#382
An AI interface to a point-of-sale (POS) system: https://github.com/paulmooreparks/PosKernel

I'm actually in the middle of a complete redesign of the AI layer, but there is a POC video linked from the GitHub README that demonstrates the interaction I'm going for using an earlier version. The POS is a very bare-bones system where the "kernel," as it were, is implemented in Rust. There's an MCP atop that to allow the AI and UI layers to drive the POS. Stores may be implemented as extensions that plug into the POS kernel, and that's where language, currency, item databases, and such are defined. The AI cashier knows what items are for sale, how to modify items (in a restaurant context), how to translate from other languages, how to interpret what the customer actually wants, and seamlessly lead the customer through a transaction.

The current code is quite ugly and full of a lot of unfortunate hacks, but it was a good education. The new design puts the AI much more in charge, without as much code-level orchestration. I'm applying a lot of my knowledge from the retail POS and self-service checkout domains to this, as well as learning a lot about applying AI to a "legacy" software domain.

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

#383

https://pleasetrymyapp.com I've been working on a map that shows which neighborhoods in a city are nice/not nice with a short description. Whenever I visit a new city, just looking at Google Maps is pretty meaningless - it's just a bunch of gray land and streets. I end up looking up Reddit posts for where to go, searching for crime maps, trying to find annotated maps, etc. to get a better idea of where to visit in a…

Very cool! I really like the idea, the way I'd develop this further is by having live crimes reporting on it so that you know which streets to avoid , similar to what waze does where people report items

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

#385

Trying to document my current hobby project, but stuck in the analysis phase. I dont even know what it is. When I try to describe its purpose I get blank looks. People tend to need physical demonstrations to understand whats going on. Its not entirely new, or novel, its definitely not revolutionary, but it is a hybrid of so many things, in a very indirect sense, that its just beyond my verbiage. Not a humble brag, I…

Er... is it software? Hardware?

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

#387
post #67

I've been working on a 3D voxel-based game engine for like 10 years in my spare time. The most recent big job has been to port the world gen and editor to the GPU, which has had some pretty cute knock-on effects. The most interesting is you can hot-reload the world gen shaders and out pop your changes on the screen, like a voxel version of shadertoy. https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai I also wrote a metaprogramming…

Cool. Especially love the low dependency approach. Readme says OpenGL 3.3. Are you doing the GPU compute using old-school GPGPU techniques?

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

#389

I've been building a website to find great blog posts related to the programming/tech world called https://greatreads.dev/ There are a lot of things that I still want to polish, but it's in a usable state already, and I'm very happy with it. If someone takes a look and has any suggestions, feedback, or ideas, they are all welcome. Also, any suggestions for blogs that could be added as sources is appreciated.

Looks cool. I would be honored if you added my blog. Each post is a summary of a recent computer science research paper. https://danglingpointers.substack.com/ Also, maybe add a place on your website where people could submit blogs for your consideration? I didn't see one at first glance.

Hi Blake,

Yes, the form to submit blogs is one of those last-mile polish that I need to work on.

I've added your blog as a source. Very cool concept.

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

#390
post #374

Enhancing the restorative function of sleep, without altering sleep time. https://affectablesleep.com Our patent-pending neurostimulation builds on over a decade of research in slow-wave enhancement, and more than 50+ published peer-reviewed papers. Today we're building our last 3D printed unit. In October we start our first tooling run.

The first thing I need to see is what it can achieve.

30% increase in slow-wave activity. 15% decrease in early night cortisol 14.5% increase in HRV during stimulation

It's all in the research.

Post reply on HN