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

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

#451
post #382

Nest Thermostats of the 1st and 2nd generation will no longer be supported by Google starting in October. I'm working on an enclosure-compatible open-source version of the 2nd gen Nest thermostat. It reuses the enclosure, encoder ring, display, and mounts of the Nest but replaces the "thinking" part with an open-source PCB that can interact with Home Assistant

I'd upvote this twice if I could. Love to see efforts to /recycle/repurpose otherwise-useful hardware that has been abandoned by the manufacturer. I understand the commercial imperative to discontinue support for older hardware, but it still irks me no end.

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

#452
microfn.dev - https://microfn.dev

It started out as a cloud runner for small (mostly pure) composable javascript functions that we run for you in the cloud. So whenever you have some small code snippet that you want to run, you can hit up microfn.dev, paste your code and then plug it into wherever you want (pipe into the terminal, use from MCP, add a cron to it, add to Siri shortcuts, use for home automation, ping it with webhooks, etc)

Now we added agents support, so you can have autonomous AI agents take your functions and decide when to use them. Even better, you can hook microfn into a MCP and have anything that supports MCP use those functions as well!

Suppose you need a new thing that your agent should do, you could ask the agent (whether that's claude or cursor) to compose a new function, add it to microfn, then use it itself going forward!

microfn.dev wants to be a toolbox for composable small tools. Imagine a toolbox at home with a bunch of hammers and screw drivers that you collect, share, and use for different purposes.

Some actual examples:

- Pull data off services (twitter, etc)

- Store data from sensors somewhere

- Give agents tools to talk to your specific systems without needing to write an entire MCP

- Wrap complex logic (eg slack auth + sending a message to slack) into a function and add it to a Siri shortcut, so you can quickly send messages to a specific channel with a ping or curl

Still very early alpha (beta-ish), but very excited about this

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

#453
post #382

Nest Thermostats of the 1st and 2nd generation will no longer be supported by Google starting in October. I'm working on an enclosure-compatible open-source version of the 2nd gen Nest thermostat. It reuses the enclosure, encoder ring, display, and mounts of the Nest but replaces the "thinking" part with an open-source PCB that can interact with Home Assistant

I hate to rain on a cool personal project but you could just get a cheap z-wave dumb thermostat like a CT101 for $50 and hook it up to home assistant.

Solves the problem permanently, no risk of future deprecations.

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

#454
post #123

I’m building Electrobun ( https://github.com/blackboardsh/electrobun ) It’s an alternative to Electron/Tauri that uses Bun. It has a bsdiff based update mechanism that lets you ship updates as small as 4KB, a custom zstd self extractor that makes your app bundle as small as 12MB, and more. I’m currently working on adding Windows and Linux support.

sounds awesome!

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

#455

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…

Really cool collection! It seems like these are just photographed on a desk? Would recommend a flatbed scanner if you don't have one already!

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

#456
I’m a mom. I built https://www.DreamList.com a few years ago because all of the wishlist companies were indexing your baby registry stuff by your name on Google. It has been growing steadily for years and it’s going well, so I never needed to raise money for it, but I noticed that a number of the Angel Investors in my network were former Traders. So I started looking into the market as well. A lot of even paid data sources were deliberately delayed - putting retail investors behind on any trade. I started digging for more reliable real time data, started generating my own candles from trades and doing my own indicators and doing my own trading and now that’s growing too. (not an outside thing, just for personal use). You wouldn’t believe the number of obstacles that get in the way if you want to do anything with finance or trading. Not touching crypto with a 10 ft pole - this is bread and butter stocks and you will still hit 100 gotchas. The more obstacles that show up, the thinner the air and the more money end up on the other side of overcoming each obstacle.

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

#457

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…

there is a very large collection of old catalogs on archive.org for people interested in looking at old print advertisements
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