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

A minimal website (https://lgtms.app/) to get a random ASCII art for the acronym LGTM cause I love using them in the comment field while approving PRs. Supports CLI as well.

I'm a big chess buff, and will say that the hard part is not making an engine (which is hard!), but making an engine that plays poorly, well. What I mean is: engines are very smart and better than the best human. When you make a "dumb" engine, you are telling a chess god to intentionally make mistakes. The mistakes they make, however, are not the same mistakes a beginner chess player would make. Today, beginners are discouraged from learning by playing against bots because of this; It simply doesn't serve you in human games.

Lichess has a "humanlike" bot[1] but I haven't played with it yet. I think this problem will haunt you, if you get past the whole "create a chess engine" problem :) I have tried and failed to do this in the past.

[1] https://lichess.org/@/maia1

I've been on parental leave, and it turns out newborns sleep a lot - so lots of stuff! :)

The most exciting thing is I'm working on a way to pre-bake one's WiFi information and an SSH key into the piCore Tiny Core Linux image.

piCore is sort of the holy grail for a lot of people who just want to stick a tiny personal-user server onto a Raspberry Pi and then not have to worry about the SD card burning out on them, because the entire system runs in RAM after first boot anyway - the only thing standing in its way, methinks, is that it requires you to physically plug in a keyboard and a monitor to get it up and running on the first boot.

I think that's dumb. A Raspberry Pi should be a thing you can plug into a wall socket in your home and then work entirely via SSH with. I do a lot of work with Linux images and virtualization like this at my day job anyway, with more scrutiny and regulatory compliance in place - if you can imagine what "embedded devops" might look like, that's a good way to describe it. So I'm a surprisingly good fit by now for this kind of thing.

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Currently I'm neck deep in some Fish shell scripting to automate writing posts for https://andrew-quinn.me/ , similar to what I already have for https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/ . With the latter, I just type in `til` at a terminal, and I

1. Get asked for a title;

2. Get a fzf multi-select list of all previous tags used on the blog (this ensures I actually continue to use the same handful of tags, which makes the blog much more fun to dive down); and

3. Get a vim window open to actually crank out the blog itself.

aqdm doesn't have tags, but it is built on a very similar Hugo base. Honestly the hardest thing about writing this script is simply wrestling with the fish shell programming language. I should really sit down and learn it properly one day...

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We changed our modem recently, which broke the cronslave Raspberry Pi I had powering https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/selkouutiset-archive/. That led me to spend the weekend finally moving its codebase off of Raspbian and onto a fully RAM-based Tiny Core Linux.

Running the OS entirely out of RAM for a Raspberry Pi increases its longevity by at least an order of magnitude, because you only ever read from the SD card on boot and on backups. If you configure the server such that everything is ephemeral anyway, you'll basically never see that little green "Writing" LED blink. That's how I got interested in the aforementioned prebaked piCore project!

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I collected my smattering of Finnish language learning software projects all in one place at http://finbug.xyz/ . I recently added the ability to mark and unmark words to my Finnish pocket dictionary https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/tsk - that makes it super easy to save words during a reading session and then import them into Anki later.

Of more general interest to people might be https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/audio2anki , which takes a YouTube URL, runs it through Whisper for an automatic transcription, then slices it up sentence-per-Whisperified-sentence and creates Anki cards out of each transcription for spaced repetition listening practice.

I made this for Finnish originally, but it fills a niche I was surprised to see had no really good locally-runnable FOSS options. There are some startups hawking a similar slice-and-dice service which I'm sure is much higher quality. But I figure the most likely people to get a lot out of a program like this are high school students, who generally don't have credit cards they can buy SaaS with - they need something they can dump their hours into, to get to work, instead of their dollar bills to get something that already works.

Those are cursed!

HomeFree

https://homefree.host

A turnkey self-hosted home router + app server that you can (eventually) just plug into your modem and go through a simple setup and have self hosting. It's in heavy development, so it requires some experience with NixOS to get running, but the goal is to have it usable by non-technical people.

Current features

    - Firewall
    - Headscale VPN, apps private by default
    - Automated DDNS
    - Dozens of apps with automated subdomain allocation and TLS cert management
    - Ad Blocking
    - Customizable public landing page
    - Single module configuration for all features
    - Automatic backup for all apps

In Work/TODO:

    - Better landing page and contribution process
    - Admin Dashboard, Config page
    - SSO across apps
    - Ability sync to a cloud instance in case you no longer want to host at home
    - Ability to mesh with friends/family/associates for social networking, distributed backup, distributed CDN, etc
    - Getting others to install it and build a community

Aspirational:

    - A standard protocol or tool for updating DNS entries at registrars
    - A standard protocol or tool for updating modems with suitable settings for self-hosting
    - a free DDNS service to provide to users of HomeFree