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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)

#761

Post by slig »

knuckleheads wrote: post #519

https://www.threeemojis.com/ , a daily word game for learning foreign languages. It's been a lot of fun to work on, and it's almost something that I am very proud of. For now it's only playable in German, and someday I hope that it will include many more languages. Today's puzzle shows the challenges of making something like this because there are a lot of old ancient words in there (that I am working on filtering ou…

Hoping to see the English version soon! By the way, I'm also working on a daily games website with a subscription model (it's not live yet!), and I'm considering a price range exactly like yours. Are you having success with your subscription model? This thread [1], specifically this comment [2], was a letdown, but I haven't given up.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595184 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43600346

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

#762

Post by tracker1 »

chistev wrote: post #369
rudasn wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, I've been working on similar my self. Not released yet, haven't had the time recently. Curious as to why you store the data in the database in b64 as opposed to files on disk. What's the reasoning for that? Doesn't it make storage/backups/etc more complicated? Not an expert myself, I opted for in browser encryption, in chunks, so as to avoid memory limitations (at least in some browsers, not FF yet), and in bro…

Thank you for the kind words and for taking the time to read the white paper. It's a good feeling when you spend time and effort on something and someone takes the time to go through it. I opted for database storage to simplify the management of ephemeral data. For a solo project, and as someone still learning, this was a practical way to keep the codebase manageable while focusing on core features like encryption an…

Just a +1 for browser encryption... you should be able to use pbkdf2 + aes to take an input passphrase with pbkdf2 to generate an aes key to then encrypt an input file in the browser, I'm not sure if you gain much via gzip before/after depending on the document that may already be a zip file (for word/oo, etc).

On the file storage, I generally recommend going straight to a cloud interface to separate storage backend from the actual storage medium... There are self-hosted options for an S3 compatible backend you manage, or you can use actual S3 or one of several other providers for S3 style storage.

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

#763

Post by m-a-t-t-i »

motohagiography wrote: post #719
m-a-t-t-i wrote: post #174

Working on fabric construction blocks (like Lego of clothing), that you can use to build clothing and accessories completely by hand without any tools or machines. Intro video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_eKc6c5tDw

this is a really important and disruptive idea. amazing. what do you need to scale this?

I needed my own CAD setup that can draw the detailed assembly instructions as 3D vector drawings. And that can also derive the assembly order from a graph based garment representation automatically. I'm almost finished with those, so after that I just need more large format laser cutters and customers.

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

#764

Post by tracker1 »

crimsontech wrote: post #388

I'm making a personal app to help me visualise time passing. I get "time blind" when I'm fixated on something like work, programming, reading, research, etc. While it can be a good thing, it also means I forget to eat, don't take breaks, miss meetings, or just spend way too long doing one thing and end up wondering where the day went. Typical notifications don't seem to snap me out of it either. The app creates a thi…

I use alarms/timers on my phone for this. Almost always 3-5min before a meeting... I have to make a habit of setting them up each morning, but that isn't too bad. I tend to miss the highlight color on the status bar for calendar or even chat messages/notifications. So the loud/obnoxious alarm is best for me... at least as I work from home.

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

#765

Post by efromvt »

Still iterating on Trilogy, a SQL variant with an embedded semantic layer that removes the need for joins and better typing/functions.

Spent some time last month improving array handling + error messages and UX and adding an MCP server option; Claude does pretty well already but there's some syntax/error tweaks to make it simpler for it and humans.

Then pivoting back into scheduling + materialization optimizations (identify common aggregates across several scripts and automatically build the common datasets for reuse).

Link: https://github.com/trilogy-data/pytrilogy

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

#766

Post by tombert »

yu3zhou4 wrote: post #755
tombert wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was doing the University of York online PhD in computer science (formal methods), and it was actually pretty great, but it was costing me like $17,000 per year, and it was a huge time sink when I was already working full time. That said, if you feel like you're organized enough to pull it off, I do recommend looking into University of York. It's a very good school.

Thanks, that's actually useful and I will be happy to consider it once I have more spare time in life! Why did you complete WGU masters in computer science after already having a PhD in computer science?

I don't have a PhD, I dropped it about a year ago; sorry, rereading my comment that was not made clear.

I wanted a graduate degree in CS, and I figured I could get the WGU one quickly.

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

#767

Post by password4321 »

jatora wrote: post #231

I'm working on a rating/reviewing website for YouTube videos, with strong search and filter functions that YouTube sorely lacks, along with good curated list building functionality. https://www.ytdb.io/ With a strong rating weight system that can avoid (some) of the pitfalls of community ratings. Right now videos must be added to be searchable, to comply with YouTube API rules. I'd hope that over time, with enough us…

Maybe you hit some type of Heroku limit, currently an HTTP 404 "no such app" error.

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

#768

Post by jmstfv »

crimsontech wrote: post #388

I'm making a personal app to help me visualise time passing. I get "time blind" when I'm fixated on something like work, programming, reading, research, etc. While it can be a good thing, it also means I forget to eat, don't take breaks, miss meetings, or just spend way too long doing one thing and end up wondering where the day went. Typical notifications don't seem to snap me out of it either. The app creates a thi…

i built something similar in spirit a while back, but instead of a bar, it uses 144 rectangles, each representing 10 minutes of your day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30881096

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

#769

Post by motohagiography »

ashwinsundar wrote: post #161

Software for biomedical research labs. Animal colony management is largely managed in Excel sheets, with no integrations to related systems or hardware sensing. We're working on the spreadsheet problem first, so that biomedical researchers can share information about their colonies with other researchers at their institutions, and explore the lines that other labs have. This opens up collaboration options and makes i…

to me that's exciting and optimistic because any marginal efficiency in animal testing pays off in net-humane treatment of lab animals.

it's counter intuitive, but if even a small portion of animal rights money went into tech solutions like this, they could have an orders of magnitude greater impact on welfare.

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

#770

Post by juxtaposicion »

xk3 wrote: post #746
juxtaposicion wrote: post #360

I’m building Popgot ( https://popgot.com ): compare unit prices (per oz/sheet/lb) across Costco, Walmart, Target, and Amazon. We normalize fuzzy sizes (“family,” “mega,” multipacks) so you see the actually cheapest option for staples. New: a deep research mode that, on demand, crawls thousands of product pages and uses visual LLMs to read label photos (ingredients, counts, square footage) when the text is messy. Firs…

I see paper towels but no toilet paper? I think toilet paper is the most confusing one edit: also this doesn't seem correct: Everything above will save you $57.65 on 33 fl oz https://popgot.com/shampoo?attributes=scalp_concern%3Adandru...

I had to look at that carefully, but I think that "save you $57.65 on 33 fl oz" is both technically and meaningfully correct. It compares our best choice to the most popular choice -- we use the product with the most ratings as a proxy for that. Nizoral 2-in-1 has a crazy 100k reviews, but it is in fact almost 20x more expensive per fluid ounce! And it is the most popular product@

If you hover the text it explains the logic (you can see that in this screenshot https://imgur.com/a/hO7fiWR). But to replay the logic here:

Equate 2 in 1 Dandruff Shampoo 28.2oz is 21¢/fl oz (for 33 fl oz it costs $6.99) is the Popgot choice.

But the most popular (e.g. most reviewed) product is "Nizoral 2-in-1 Anti-Dandruff Shampoo" and that costs a whopping $1.96/fl oz (33 fl oz it costs $64.63)

So yes, the most popular anti-dandruff shampoo (which I used to use, until I saw this shampoo list https://popgot.com/shampoo?attributes=scalp_concern%3Adandru...) is literally 20x more expensive, so you can do a lot better by picking alternatives at the top of that list.

Not sure why you didn't see toilet paper, but it is right here: https://popgot.com/toilet-paper

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