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

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

#691

Post by rcy »

wrboyce wrote: post #291
rcy wrote: post #191

I am working on a site that allows kids to chat and play online with other kids. To connect, kids must have their parents sign up and connect with the parents of their friends. Kids can chat with their parents and family as well as other kids in their network. Messages can be monitored by parents. There are also other activities like a bot workshop where simple llm bots can be "programmed" by creating system prompts…

Interesting goals, and quite different from the norm. I assume you must have somewhat strong feelings about privacy and/or children having access to technology/internet/etc that has driven you to build this platform? As a happily childless late 30s married man, this is quite foreign to me; but I definitely recognise that there is passion driving this project… Could you talk some more about your inspiration and long t…

When my daughter was around 2 years old she would sit on my lap and type letters on my laptop into Emacs. I would change the color of the text and she would type more. I figured there was a simple webapp here, so built various things for her to play with over the next couple years. One let her type words and then fire off a ddg safe image search and return cartoon images in response. She would copy words out of her books to get pictures of dogs and trees and silly things.

We live far away from family, and the idea of having a way for her to communicate with cousins and grandparents became the focus. As well as other kids in town. So I thought about a social version of the experiments I'd been playing with.

I'm inspired by Seymour Papert's thinking, about kids using technology to learn math and logic... living in "mathland" so to speak. But I'm also thinking about positive alternatives to the default social network interactions that are available for kids and families now.

Long term I would love to build a platform that lets kids explore technology and build collaborative spaces.

Keeping parents in the loop of what is going on is important, but balancing that correctly can be challenging, I don't want a "big mother is watching" kind of app, but I think its appropriate for parents to know what their kids are doing and looking at and talking to, especially at primary school age (my daughter is currently 8). What is needed and appropriate always changes.

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

#692

Post by rcy »

andyferris wrote: post #416
wrboyce wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting goals, and quite different from the norm. I assume you must have somewhat strong feelings about privacy and/or children having access to technology/internet/etc that has driven you to build this platform? As a happily childless late 30s married man, this is quite foreign to me; but I definitely recognise that there is passion driving this project… Could you talk some more about your inspiration and long t…

I’d say some of the downsides on the modern internet become much starker when your kids come up against them. As adults growing up through the birth of the internet we are kinda inoculated to it. I suspect the lack of privacy is because the target audience is “kids” not “teens”. When my kids first discovered group chat in iMessage with their cousins it was fun for literally 30 minutes before it was tears and abuse -…

Yeah it is true. I am more or less modelling the interactions my kid has with other kids and the social relationships I have with her friends parents. She doesn't go to anyone's house who's parents I don't know. Obviously that will change as she gets older.

So for now, the social dynamic in the app is for parents to connect first. Once connected, their kids can choose to connect (facebook messenger kids uses this same process I think).

When I talk to less tech-savvy parents in my community, I think many feel quite helpless and unsure how to navigate a lot of this. Consuming youtube kids videos on an iPad is one option, or outlawing screentime entirely is another. Kids want real stuff that they are in control of. I want to build age appropriate versions of this kind of stuff... with the appropriate guards and oversight in place, keeping parents in the drivers seat.

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

#693

Post by wonger_ »

brynet wrote: post #678

Making rent as an open source developer. Attracting new monthly sponsors and people willing to buy me the occasional pizza with my really bad HTML skills. https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

Ah you're the pizza guy! I remember discovering you thru Brad's pizza page: https://btxx.org/pizza/

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

#694

Post by nzach »

WiggleGuy wrote: post #428

Currently thinking about better ways to spread the word about https://theretowhere.com (my website that makes it easier to find apartments and Airbnbs/hotels close to things you care about). I've actually started getting some back and fourth feedback with a couple users, which has kept me motivated and validated. But I need more organic traffic somehow. I've recently released a new usecase ( https://theretowhere.com/…

I'm starting to think about moving to a new city and was considering to build a tool like this. And now I'm excited to see this already exists!

For my use-case the interface you created isn't the best. Now that I'm searching for a new home I'm interested in finding a place that has a bakery nearby, but it doesn't really matter what bakery. The same goes for restaurants, pubs, ... For this case there are too many places to add them "manually".

Thanks for creating this, I will be definitely using this in the the coming months.

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

#696

Post by jeremy_k »

I'm working on a mortgage scenario planning tool. A simple mortgage calculator can give you an estimate as to how much a mortgage payment will be but there are so many other inputs that must be taken into account on a per individual basis. For example someone could input that they want to put 20% down and see the monthly payment amount but there are other fees, such as closing costs, which must be taken in account to determine how much cash on hand a buyer will need to actually transact on the mortgage.

My friend and my lender has built up a giant Google Sheet which he uses with his clients and I've been slowly working to translate the logic in that Sheet into an application. It's been a lot of fun as I've been learning how to replicate the multiplayer aspects of Sheets into a React application.

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

#697

Post by brynet »

wonger_ wrote: post #693
brynet wrote: post #678

Making rent as an open source developer. Attracting new monthly sponsors and people willing to buy me the occasional pizza with my really bad HTML skills. https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

Ah you're the pizza guy! I remember discovering you thru Brad's pizza page: https://btxx.org/pizza/

Hah, I remember them sharing that on mastodon. Happy to inspire more pizza pages. :-)

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

#698

Post by sponrad »

At my day job we have an MCP server and had to spend quite a lot of time setting up extra monitoring and validation for it so I'm building a tool to do those things. Pretty much a regular server uptime checker, but also with some extra's that an MCP client gets access to tool and resource calls.

Our MCP server at work relays most of it's calls over to our API so we wanted to be sure something was testing and validating the whole flow.

https://healthymcp.com/

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

#699

Post by wonger_ »

naiquevin wrote: post #572

I've been building a desktop app on the side that addresses the problem of screenshots getting accumulated on disk over a period of time. It provides an alternate workflow for capturing screenshots, where the app let's the user select tags before taking the screenshot. Tags can be associated with actions such as "move to trash after 1 day", "delete after 7 days" or "store in /specific/location". I have got the main f…

Tags with actions sounds useful. Maybe worth a demo video to get opinions from a broader audience?

Personally, I think I'll stick to pruning my screenshots folder once a year with an image manager. I'm pretty content with niri's builtin screenshot capture or something like Greenshot on windows. Just my two cents

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

#700

Post by khazit »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #688
khazit wrote: post #582

I'm working on Simple Observability[0], a platform for monitoring servers (metrics and logs). Think of it as a super simple alternative to the Prometheus + Grafana + Loki stack, designed for teams who just want to know “is my server healthy?” without setting up and maintaining a full observability pipeline. It uses a lightweight, open-source agent[1] that collects data and pushes it to the backend, so it works behind…

This is really cool. For the landing page, I think it'd be useful to see an actual screenshot of the UI. Also, what I'm looking for in a solution like this is to receive this information passively — I don't want to need to proactively watch a dashboard. I would want to receive email alerts when, for example, I'm running out of disk space. It says on your landing page that you provide this feature, but it also says it…

Thanks for the feedback. I'll make sure to add screenshots.

For the alerts it is configurable pretty quickly (you just select what you want to monitor, a threshold value, and a notification channel). But I’ll look into having some sensible defaults built in so it works out of the box

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