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

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711–720 of 1001 posts

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

#711
I'm making a hymn presentation website for my dad. He's an organist at the local church and they've got TV's at the front showing everyone the words to the hymns. He switches the pages using a foot pedal while he plays and sings.

The software he currently uses is too complicated and he gets lost easily with all the buttons and features. My website is basically the same thing but only the buttons he needs, only his hymns and is completely controlled by me so I can fix things to suite him.

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

#712

I'm building a platform for small-city business directories called TownWire: https://townwire.com We launched our first location last week and have had a great response so far from business owners and residents alike: https://canandaigua.com With the current tech climate of AI and big tech, things have gotten so impersonal for the majority of actual people. I'm betting on communities and the small businesses that ser…

I love this idea! Do y'all push/pull the data to OpenStreetMap at all or the users have to add it all manually?

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

#714

I’m working on Popgot ( https://popgot.com ), a tool that tracks unit prices (cost per ounce, sheet, pound) across Costco, Walmart, Target, and Amazon. It normalizes confusing listings (“family size”, “mega pack”, etc.) to surface the actual cheapest option for daily essentials. On top of that, it uses a lightweight AI model to read product descriptions and filter based on things like ingredients (e.g., flagging pean…

I like that you have the ability to exclude on some dimension (eg, I don't use Amazon.com). Do you have or are you considering adding more retailers beyond the four you mentioned? For example, I buy a lot of unroasted coffee from sweetmarias.com, and excluding Amazon from Popgot results eliminates all but one listing (from Walmart).

Ah, hell yeah! My buddy on this project has been itching to add sweetmarias.com ... he just needed this as an excuse.

So yeah, we'll add it. If you shoot me an email (or post it here?) to chris @ .com I'll send you a link when it's done. Should take a day or two.

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

#715

A tree cutting tool. Take photos of the tree from 6 different angles, feed into a 3D model generator, erode the model and generate a 3D graph representation of the tree. The tool suggests which cuts to make and where, given a restricted fall path (e.g. constrained by a neighbors yard on one side). I create the fallen branches in their final state along the fall plane, and create individual correction vectors mapping…

I would love to have such a model tell me how to prune my fruit trees as they grow up. Should be a fairly straightforward supervised problem with the right front end for the graph generation.

You can start right now with an algorithm I learned from an expert when I was working in a landscaping business.

It is a very simple three-pass plan: "Deadwood, Crossovers, Aesthetics".

So, first pass, go through the tree cutting out only and all the dead branches. Cut back to live stock, and as always make good clean angle cuts at a proper angle (many horticulture books will provide far better instructions on this).

Second pass, look only for branches that cross-over other branches and especially those that show rubbing or friction marks against other branches. Cut the ones that are either least healthy or grow in the craziest direction (i.e., crazy away from the normal more-or-less not radially away from the trunk).

Then, and only after the other two passes are complete, start pruning for the desired look and/or size & shape for planned growth or bearing fruit.

This method is simple and saves a LOT of ruined trees from trying to first cut to size and appearance, then by the time the deadwood and crossovers are taken later, it is a scraggly mess that takes years to grow back. And it even works well for novices, as long as they pay attention.

I'd suspect entering the state and direction of every branch to an app would take longer than just pruning with the above method, although for trees that haven't fully leafed out, perhaps a 360° angle set of drone pics could make an adequate 3D model to use for planning?

In any case, good luck with your fruit trees — may they grow healthy and provide you with great bounty for many years!

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

#716
post #96

I am working on the sunflower plant density estimation problem. The goal is to be able to estimate the germination rate as early as possible. Farmers benefit from such information, because: - there are lots of expenses still to be made (fertilizer, pesticide, salaries), which may not be worth it if germination is under certain threshold - if detected early, there is still time to plant another grain or to fill up the…

Hey, this is interesting. I used to work on a somewhat similar problem. Our problem was more general, but one usecase is to predict the number of interactions between flowers and pollinators, given some initial counts. As these initial counts are obtained manually (by going to the fields, taking pictures and count, like number of bees within a frame), those count numbers are likely to be lower the the actual numbers. We addressed this under-counted issue using low-rankness and Poisson mixture model. Take a look if you're interested: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10888717

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

#717

Creating stealth group in a huge Fortune 500 company with the blessing of my immediate boss but no other higher-ups. Trying to productize critical consulting tool sets in the utility industry so we can stop repeating ourselves for the 100th consulting engagement. Yes, customer is a special snowflake but they still need 90% or whatever every other client in this industry needs. Feeling increasingly like this is a fool…

This sounds very much like an application begging to be done as a stand-alone company supporting these F500 companies. Could be very profitable as the basis for a service-provider model while you gain enough knowledge to product-ize and package it on basically customer-funded development. It seems your company kicking you in the gut is showing you the direction

Good Luck!

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

#720

The first ever SQL debugger – runs & visualizes your query step-by-step, every clause, condition, expression, incl. GROUP BY, aggregates / windows, DISTINCT (ON), subqueries (even correlated ones!), CTEs, you name it. You can search for full or partial rows and see the whole query lineage – which intermediate rows from which CTEs/subqueries contributed to the result you're searching for. Entirely offline & no usage o…

this is very cool! Where can I follow you to see updates?
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