Working on Pandora's Inbox (https://pandorasinbox.com). Aiming to be the biggest email search engine. Would love to get feedback from the HN crowd.
Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
491–500 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
#492I'm working on tooling to turn kids from consumers into creators. I'm focusing on game development initially, but have plans for video production and hands on crafts. For older kids I've been making it easier to write games in Godot using TypeScript: https://breaka.club/blog/godots-most-powerful-scripting-lang... I'm building tooling using this technology which allows kids to create their own games, this is itself pr…
I have interest in this space, but as you wrote the software will be only useful if kids want to create games and there aren't many kids (I think) who want to create their own game. Kids mostly want to play for fun.
My kids play Roblox for pure entertainment, but I think the experience can be improved. Making a platform like Roblox that's fun to play and has ability to extend (the learning and game creation) it easily would be great. Atmosphere was great but it vanished.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
#493A real-time video processor in hardware:
- static (mp4) or live (hdmi) input, hdmi output
- a collection of effects (various distortions, color glitches, demoscene-like) applied over incoming video stream, maximum of 4 effects stackable on top of one another
- midi controllers support (controlling actions/params of effects via CC)
- modulation of effects params via LFO and audio events (bpm, kick, tonal detection)
- loading of .glsl shaders (eq. shadertoy.com)
- dynamic input resolution, output either 360p (rpi 4/5) or upscaled to 720p / 1080p (networks like SRGAN over Hailo / RPI or RK3588 with a Radxa 5B SBC).
Given a 2nd screen (timeline editor) would love to evolve this to something like a hardware editor, somewhat in the line of DAWs in the audio world. Most things are working with biggest challenge now being building a control surface (buttons, rotaries + associated oleds, etc) and attempting laying it all on a PCB, a process I don't know much about. If there's interest welcome comments and could elaborate more.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
#494Just started out building a micro-agency into software engineering and consulting. I left my 9-5 jobs in engineering and big-consulting to pursue my dream of building something myself. I love to code and build software and have always dreamed of bringing in change to the landscape around software engineering services.
https://shunyaek.se is my agency, "shunyaek"'s home-page. shunyaek refers to "shunya", meaning zero, and "ek", meaning one, in Hindi, my native language. It refers to the binary building blocks of the software & digital world. The landing-page is still under construction. Always open to feedback and crticism.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
#495An 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…
Your email deliverability will be key to survival and easily damaged. All it takes is a couple of spam reports from good or bad actors and you can get black listed. Your users may forget they ever subscribed. Think of some work around to prevent that. Some examples - for large mailings you are required to add a physical address to your emails and an unsubscribe link. Those are filtered by mail providers and automatic…
I haven't really thought about deliverability problems because at the moment, I'm not planning to provide it as a SaaS but only as an self-hostable app. I'm hoping it will be a kind of thing a tech-savvy person with their own domain will host for their own family and friends.
EDIT: but thank you for your advice! If it were a business, I agree that deliverability would be an important thing to think about.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
#496Trying to replace everything I use daily, outside money/banking, with my own fully customizable software. I had enough depending on others.
I'm looking for a replacement simple accounting software. I'm still using Quicken 96, which will stop working at the end of next year. I'm tired of subscription software that sucks. Give me simple and reliable, without the enshittification. I've looked at a number of open source projects, but they are more complicated than what I'm looking for. Just let me manually enter my data or import a CSV into a ledger. All my…
What does it mean for the CSV to be imported into a ledger? Do you simply want a CSV viewer?
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
#497I recently quit my salary job after 16 years and am consulting in nuclear engineering now. I have a few passion projects that I'm working on (between the somewhat substantial consulting work that came out of the woodwork): - Nuclear Reactor Starter Kit --- an open source set of procedures, processes, templates, and maybe even some IT advice that should help newcomers start companies with nuclear quality assurance pro…
Do you think there's a path for ..say.. a competent engineer from a small country to obtain such a starter kit and jumpstart a weapons program? I'd guess all the information would already be available on the internet, but is there competitive advantage here?
Well hopefully the starter kit doesn't include a few kilograms of weapons grade plutonium.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
#498A bitemporal data model in SQLite
... for a little SaaS app, because my friend-and-sponsor hasn't given me a deadline, nor sent irate letters asking for results.
Think of it like the poor man's XTDB + Datomic, if you like. Readings and conversations have taken me to deep questions explored in works by Snodgrass [0], Jensen[1], and Jepsen [2]. Shout out to the XTDB folk for their feedback and suggestions. This is why I hang in the Clojure community... it's full of people doing rad stuff who are also unwaveringly kind, helpful, and generous with their time.
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The pre-alpha version of "Project Writing for Nerds" [3]
A cohort-based workshop to help fellow gentlenerds "spool brain to disk" with as little friction as possible.
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[0] Developing Time-oriented Database Applications in SQl https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/~rts/tdbbook.pdf
[1] Temporal Database Management https://people.cs.aau.dk/~csj/Thesis/
[2] Jepsen's helpful little notes on Consistency https://jepsen.io/consistency
[3] https://www.evalapply.org/index.html#writing-for-nerds
(edit: fix formatting)
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
#499An 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…
Can a recipient be a member of multiple groups, for example, if I happen to be among coworkers and family (or whatever)? If so, hopefully I would get one newsletter containing all the posts tagged as any of my groups. But this means the potential number of different newsletters grows exponentially relative to the number of groups (although in practice, it would be extremely unlikely that a huge number of combinations…
I've been going back and forth on this. For the initial version, I'm making it that a person can only be a member of one group just to keep it simple.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
#500Art project. Counter Productive A random button in a park with a countdown timer. Instructions: - Press the button to reset the 24-hour countdown timer. - If the timer ever reaches zero, the project ends and the project will be removed. - To keep the project alive — press the button Its been running for 56 days with 820 button presses. Write up: https://blog.abluestar.com/projects/2025-counterproductive/ Stats page h…
You should make them input the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42