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Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

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Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

#781
https://readworks.app/ is an app to do research within PDF collections mainly for scientists or in the legal field. It’s an oss project I’ve worked on the last two years.

I’ve figured out that I lack in terms of marketing / sales and to develop successful strategies to gain visibility. So actually enjoining the summer rather than coding at night / weekends but still having plenty ideas how develop it further and assist analytical reading.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

#784
Been building my YouTube channel where I cover things like Apple Vision Pro development — as well as some new storytelling directions for me, like my newest short on the Voyager mission's camera problems when it was 2 billion miles from earth:

http://youtube.com/@dreamwieber

In parallel I'm working on a bunch of apps for Vision Pro -- my most well-known at the moment being Vibescape which was featured recently by Apple: https://youtu.be/QcTiDBtCafg

To round this out, my wife and I are converting a historic farm in the Pacific Northwest to regenerative agriculture practices. So far we've restored over 20 acres of native ecosystems.

If that's interesting to you there's a channel here:

http://youtube.com/@cleryfarm

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

#785
Syntax highlighting caught my interest after I created a data format. I stumbled upon TextMate grammar bundles which are supported in some editors and created a bundle that works with three of them. The gnome text editor uses a different language definition format for which I created a grammar file as well. [1]

To highlight the syntax in the browser I checked out the CodeMirror project that uses Lezer grammars. It is very flexible and allowed me to implement additional features like custom folding. [2]

I would also like to create a grammar for tree-sitter, finish the Java implementation and documentation of the ESON parser before I try to implement it in other languages.

[1] https://gitlab.com/marc-bruenisholz/eson-textmate-bundle [2] https://gitlab.com/marc-bruenisholz/eson-lezer-grammar

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

#786
I'm cleaning up a 25-30 year old bicycle. First time I've stripped one almost right back to the frame.

Strongly recommend the rust remover described by Backyard Ballistics[0] on his second channel[1]; 1 liter water, 100g citric acid, 40g washing soda, generous squirt of dish soap. He claims the acid and alkali cancel out so there's nothing to attack the normal metal surface, but they leave citrate ions which dissolve rust by chelation, which makes it better than just citric acid, vinegar, or soda alone, which all pit and dissolve the clean metal surfaces, and easier/better than wire wool scratching. He also claims it's as effective as EvapoRust but much cheaper and can do more rust dissolving per litre than EvapoRust.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@Backyard.Ballistics - restoration of old and very rusty guns

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVYZmeReKKY - "The Ultimate HOMEMADE Rust Remover (Better than EvapoRust)", Beyond Ballistics channel

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

#787
https://www.dreamsign.ai/

An AI-native DocuSign

It's been around a month I've been working on it. Struggling with getting people to actually use it - this week I've set the ambitious goal of 10 new contracts sent *and completed* by people I don't know (last week's was 10...by people I do know).

It's hard because I feel I'm in a weird hole - in order to have a good product I need people to use it and give me feedback, but in order for people to use it and give me feedback I need a good product. It's like wth!

Another thing I'm struggling with - enjoying the process. I get daydreams like mad. I feel I'm always living in the future in some way, especially with this software, and it's taking away from being present in this work. Which sucks, because I want to be excited to *work* on this and NOT fake my own excitement towards this as a manifestation of my greed to get rich off it.

But MAN am I greedy. It's ugly sometimes, to myself.

But god how I love to work on software also. How I love making stupid bash commands on my terminal. How I love to feel like the old gods, who conquered the infant digital world.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

#788

Building https://www.typequicker.com Long-term, passion project of mine - I'm hoping to make this the best typing platform. Just launched the MVP last month. The core idea of the app is focusing on using natural text. I don't think typing random words (like what some other apps do) is the most effective way to improve typing. We offer many text topics to type (trivia, literature, etc) where you type text snippets. We…

So I've got some things that seem a little bit weird to me:

1. Typing uppercase characters counts as a mistake

I'm not sure how that got to be the case, but somehow typing an uppercase letter instead of the lowercase is a mistake, despite the fact that sentences start with a lowercase letter. This conflicts with my muscle memory of starting sentences with a capital letter.

2. WPM is not a useful metric on its own

WPM can rise and fall depending on the length of the word. The bigger the word the less likely you are to type that word correctly from muscle memory, so the speed drops. The speed also drops due to the word being longer. I believe having both metrics would yield more useful data, such as when do you slow down etc.

Speaking of which, there are some more statistic things that could help, like measuring how fast you are at fixing the mistakes, or measuring three-letter combinations instead of two-letter combinations, because the context of the third letter might help, but you do need more data to gain a statistically significant result. Maybe trying to classify mistakes by the side of keyboard they happen on -- i.e. are they simple typos or a miscoordination of your hands.

---

Also, as pointed out by another commenter, hands also threw me off. I've been observing them and it's interesting that I don't use my little finger for the left row -- it's used in case I need to press shift.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

#790
post #621

I'm building (and have been for the last few years) an open source high-performance Wordpress alternative on Elixir. It aims to achieve 1:1 feature parity. One thing that Wordpress has built up over the years that will take a little long for me is the plugins eco-system. But, other than that, I think everything else should be on par. IF you're an enterprise, you should easily see over 30-40% in server costs just by s…

I don't know if Wordpress has any kind of customizability or scripting, but it's now possible to add Lua scripting, natively, to an Elixir application. If that's handy it's something to consider.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43972485

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