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

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431–440 of 1001 posts

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

#431

A tool for creating custom/branded palettes that have accessible WCAG contrast by design: https://www.inclusivecolors.com/ No AI or autogeneration stuff, more like an advanced editor that lets you tweak large sets of colors to your liking and test they pass contrast checks in advance before you start using them in your UI/designs.

Love this bookmarked and will be using this for future web!! Good founder

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

#432

https://desktop.with.audio/ A one time payment (no subscription), local text to speech solution for MacOS or Windows. I've been a heavy user of Speechify but it was a bit expensive to justify. So I eventually built With Audio and after a few iterations now I'm working on the desktop app. Our laptops are very powerful and they are more capable of running some of these Text To Speech models with near to real time perfo…

Care to explain more? how is it going? how many paying customers? how did u get the first 100 users or how are u going to achieve it?

Of course. Its very early days of doing this. I released the early access last month and then spent some time compiling it for Windows as well (before that it was only Mac arm). I'm promoting it again. At the moment I have 5 customers that are not friends and families by posting on Reddit audiobooks subreddit. My plan is to just keep promoting on social media, or communities like study groups or students for a while. I believe I should be able to get first 100 customers without paying for ads. It might be too naive but I think it not being a subscription can be a very good selling point and also it being local.

I'm a dev, I'm very much new to sales and marketing world. I think its fair to say I have no idea about next steps after dev work is finished (enough to attempt to sale). Mostly trying to figure that out.

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

#433

I've been collecting and digitizing vintage print advertisements and publishing them ( https://adretro.com ). I have tens of thousands of ads in the collection and it would take me many lifetimes to complete, but I've been using AI to extract and catalog the meta data. I can get through about 100 ads/day this way. One of my favorite ads, a computer from 1968 that "answers riddles": https://adretro.com/ads/1968-digi-c…

This is really cool! What are you using to digitize the ads?

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

#434

I've been collecting and digitizing vintage print advertisements and publishing them ( https://adretro.com ). I have tens of thousands of ads in the collection and it would take me many lifetimes to complete, but I've been using AI to extract and catalog the meta data. I can get through about 100 ads/day this way. One of my favorite ads, a computer from 1968 that "answers riddles": https://adretro.com/ads/1968-digi-c…

This is awesome-sauce! Any thoughts on an API?

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

#435

An open-source, self-hostable app for sending out newsletter to your friends and families. I'm mostly making it for myself because I want to share what I've been up to and family photos, without uploading it to Facebook or whatnot. At the moment, the flow goes like this: 1. During the week, write posts for things that have happened. 2. Posts can be assigned to groups. (family, friends etc). 3. At the end of the week…

If already open sourced, would love a link!

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

#436

RankPic ( https://www.rankpic.info ) is an app to help users crowdsource their best photo. I've been building over the past 3 years & it's grown into a lovely community of people who help each other pick their best pictures for dating apps, professional photos etc. I've seen some pretty fun novel use cases, such as (multiple!) people using it to pick out glasses, wedding invites & so on. I recently completed a leader…

This is cool. It could be generalized into arbitrary ranking (not just photos).

Questions: how do you plan to deal with people that will randomly rank other's pictures to get credits quickly (or even build a script to do so)?

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

#437
I previously worked in Finance, where collecting forecasts and internal data from colleagues - often using Excel - was a recurring pain point. Existing systems sometimes covered part of the process, but their inflexible data structures made it difficult to adjust them for new use cases. Therefore I’m building a flexible internal data collection platform: it supports multidimensional data, custom workflows, a rules engine, automatic consolidation, and a range of configurable widgets.

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

#438
post #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 sub…

Neat! Have a repo?

Thanks! I have been thinking about opening it up, but not sure, as I've never done any open source stuff and don't know how useful others would find it - there's some clunky bits!

I also have the whole Aider/Claude prompt history in the repo too, as I started this on a platform & framework I'd never used, and used the AI to scaffold much of the app at the beginning. Thought that might be useful to go back and see what worked the best when AI programming.

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

#440
I have been working on Broadcast (https://sendbroadcast.net).

It’s an email marketing tool, self-hosted, for use with existing ESPs like Postmark, Mailgun, Amazon SES, etc.

Been working on this since September 2024, and have been consistently hacking away at it weekly: https://sendbroadcast.net/changelog.

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