Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

611–620 of 1001 posts

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

#611
Working hard on Rad, which is aiming to be a Bash-replacement for writing CLI scripts. The goal is to allow users to write maintainable scripts with declarative argument parsing, built-in JSON processing, HTTP requests, and interactive prompts - all in a familiar, readable syntax (Python-like!). Here's an example of the declarative approach to script args:

  args:
      username str           # Required string
      password str?          # Optional string
      token str?             # Optional auth token
      age int                # Required integer
      status str             # Required string
  
      username requires password     // If username is provided, password must also be provided
      token excludes password        // Token and password cannot be used together
      age range [18, 99]             // Inclusive range from 18 to 99
      status enum ["active", "inactive", "pending"]
Rad does all the arg parsing for you (unlike Bash), including validation for those constraints you wrote, and you can get on with writing the rest of your script is a nice, friendly syntax!

Very keen for feedback so if any of that sounds interesting, feel free to give it a go!

https://github.com/amterp/rad

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

#612

I've been suffering from migraines for the last month, so have channeled my (non-migraine) time into a migraine tracker to try and find the root causes. All the tracking apps I tried all have nice complex forms, which is all well and good, unless...you are having a migraine. Rough idea is easy to use voice mode to record data, then analyze unstructured data with AI later on. I want to track all relevant life informat…

My current project also revolves around using voice notes to log life events. I'd love to talk and see if we could exchange some ideas. My Gmail username is the same as my HN username.

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

#613
I'm making a Chrome extension a day for a month.

Basically the title explains it, I challenged myself to making a chrome extension a day for a month. I've been posting my progress on reddit, and my first two extensions have just been accepted to the chrome store (I'm only done day 3 so far, those were quick reviews!). For those interested:

Day 1: Minimal Twitter

Day 2: No Google AI Overview in Google Search

Day 3: No Images Reddit (Not Published, yet!)

I'm posting daily, I would love to hear thoughts on the extensions!!

https://x.com/uithoughts

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

#614

A couple of months ago, I saw a tweet from @awilkinson: “I just found out how much we pay for DocuSign and my jaw dropped. What's the best alternative?” Me being naive, I thought “how hard could would it actually be to build a free e-sign tool?” Turns out not that hard. In about a weekend, I built a UETA and ESIGN compliant tool. And it was free. And it cost me less than $50. Unlimited free e-sign. https://useinkless…

For a weekend, this is incredibly well done.

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

#616
I'm fiddling with index optimizations for the Marginalia Search index software, with being able to add ad-hoc domain filters in mind.

Not sure if there's more to say about it right now except that fuzz tests are good for this sort of low level programming with disk layouts involved. They drive up test execution time, but it's still almost hard to build them too early or have too many of them, as there's almost always an unimaginable number of permutations of weird corner cases that are hard to get at with regards to block boundaries and so on that are hard to identify based on staring at the code and doing classic unit tests.

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

#617
post #196
post #31

Currently a one-man side project: https://laboratory.love Last year, PlasticList found plastic chemicals in 86% of tested foods—including 100% of baby foods they tested. Around the same time, the EU lowered its “safe” BPA limit by 20,000×, while the FDA still allows levels roughly 100× higher than Europe’s new standard. That seemed solvable. Laboratory.love lets you crowdfund independent lab testing of the specific p…

1. An example result is " https://laboratory.love/product/117 ", which is a list of chemicals and measurements. Is there a visualization of how these levels relate to regulations and expert recommendations? What about a visualization of how different products in the same category compare, so that consumers know which brand is supposedly "best"? Maybe a summary rating, as stars or color-coded threat level? 2. If you f…

What a wonderful idea! I sincerely hopes this moves the market. And I backed a study.

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

#618

I'm building decision-making software: https://orgtools.com Not sure what the market is for something like this but it's something I've been thinking a lot about since stepping down as CEO of my previous company. My goal is two-fold: 1. Help teams make better, faster decisions with all context populating a source-of-truth. 2. Help leaders stay eyes-on, and circumstantially hands-on, without slowing everything down. W…

OK, it seems you are on the path of another 8 fig exit. Good on you. It seems like a great project and could possible save so much time if well executed and well integrated.

I've added it to SaaSHub saashub.com/orgtools. If you have an @orgtools.com email you can verify and improve the profile. Cheers!

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

#619
post #574

A static site generator for German laws. The goal is to serve the laws in a format that is easy to cite, monitor, or machine-read. It should also have predictable URLs that can be inferred from the law’s name. It will also have side by side AI translations (marked as such). I cite a lot of laws in my content and I want to automatically flag content for review when a specific paragraph of the law changes. I also want…

That's really important I think. Tangentially, https://ecfr.gov/ is bizarrely one of the most impressive websites I have encountered. It's regulations not laws but it has so many ways to discover and link and learn and trace back to law. I'm not a lawyer but it's been a great resource for understanding and surprisingly pleasant to read. I found learning about the whole law and regulation machinery and provenance via eCFR pretty fascinating.

Dunno if other governments are this Byzantine in practice (our system seems to be like... manual integration of diff patches) but it's pretty interesting and I really appreciate the work that goes into these types of things.

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

#620
Tinkering away on my opensource Java NLP library to parse text and find geographical information from it.

https://github.com/tomaytotomato/location4j

I think I am going to re-write the logic to calculate a score on all matches it makes from a given piece of text.

e.g.

"us ca" ---> is this "USA California" or "USA and Canada (CA ISO2 code)"?

"san jose usa" ---> is this "San Jose California, USA" or another San Jose in America

Post reply on HN