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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)

#781

Post by rorylaitila »

elektor wrote: post #756
rorylaitila wrote: post #203

I'm digitally cataloging all US vintage print advertisements I can get my hands on ( https://adretro.com ). The backend is built on MySQL and Lucee and the full page ads published with Notion and Super.so. I'm using OpenAI vision to extract entity data from the images. So far I've cataloged about 1500 advertisements out of the ~100,000 in my possession. Of which that is probably only 0.1% of all the major material ou…

This may be of interest to you: The Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising (SRITA; https://tobacco.stanford.edu/ ) collection currently contains 62,553 tobacco advertisements.

Thanks, I'll check it out!

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

#782

Post by ashwinsundar »

motohagiography wrote: post #769
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.

I appreciate the perspective, but I think that tech solutions like this have plenty of opportunities to bootstrap and apply for various grants and funds (which we are doing). I'd rather see more money go towards non-tech solutions and direct care for animals. Shelters are notoriously underfunded and understaffed, and the number of pets people have adopted and given up has boomed since the pandemic. Not to mention the number of shady animal mills out there exacerbating the issue. Tech can't solve that problem, but more volunteers and outreach can.

The tech community is doing just fine in terms of money at the moment.

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

#783

Post by rorylaitila »

motohagiography wrote: post #728
rorylaitila wrote: post #203

I'm digitally cataloging all US vintage print advertisements I can get my hands on ( https://adretro.com ). The backend is built on MySQL and Lucee and the full page ads published with Notion and Super.so. I'm using OpenAI vision to extract entity data from the images. So far I've cataloged about 1500 advertisements out of the ~100,000 in my possession. Of which that is probably only 0.1% of all the major material ou…

superb and immensely valuable, this is a history of desire.

Indeed :) The aspect I like most is seeing through the advertisers lenses what they thought the public would care about the most.

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

#784

Post by n_u »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #134

Optimizing the Marginalia Search index code. The new code is at least twice as fast in benchmarks, but I can't run it in production because it turns out when you do it's four times as slow as what came before it for the queries that are the simplest and fastest to the point where queries exceed their timeout values by a lot. I'm 97% certain this is because the faster code leads to more page thrashing in the mmap-base…

Which part of the index are you putting in the buffer pool here? The postings list, the doc store or the terms dict?

Is it being cached for future queries or are you just talking about putting it in memory to perform the computation for a query?

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

#785

Post by lowkeyokay »

margarina72 wrote: post #346
lowkeyokay wrote: post #54

I am working on a time tracking app for tasks. I built it because I want to gain a better understanding of how I spend my working days. It's meant to be very simple. Everything is stored locally and requires no login. I don't currently plan to sync it with any backend. This isn't something that can be used to track employees — it's just for personal use. https://www.zookeeper.fyi/

it's somehow on a block list in ublock. Hence white screen here too, I have to disable adblock to see your site. Maybe the domain used to be for something else before.

Thanks for the feedback - means a lot. I had enabled high level usage tracking on Vercel. I was tracking page views to see if I got any users. I have switched to using Plausible [0], a privacy focused analytics tool, and added an opt out option on first load.

[0] https://plausible.io

edit: fixed url

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

#787

Post by konfusinomicon »

alextousss wrote: post #737
konfusinomicon wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is a crowdfunding effort for one going on right now for such a device. I think the price is around $500. the videos are equally awesome and hilarious as they vaporize into a little puff of smoke

That will end up either dangerous or unreleased. Their system sends a 40W laser, which is what you use to cut plastics. There’s no way to make this safe as even a diffuse secondary reflection out of the field of view could blind someone.

ya, your absolutely right. still the idea of setting up an array of them around my house blasting the never ending barrage of West Nile virus attack drones as they cross the perimeter is pretty fun to think about. I suppose a well placed bat house would be just as fun to watch

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

#788

Post by jesse__ »

MITSardine wrote: post #254
jesse__ wrote: post #133

I've been working on a 3D voxel-based game engine for like 10 years in my spare time. The most recent big job has been to port the world gen and editor to the GPU, which has had some pretty cute knock-on effects. The most interesting is you can hot-reload the world gen shaders and out pop your changes on the screen, like a voxel version of shadertoy. https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai I also wrote a metaprogramming…

Hey, I had a quick look at your engine's github page, what are you looking to do with surface meshing exactly?

Nothing specifically for the moment. I've toyed with the idea of having an option for smooth terrain, but it's not important for the game I'm currently making.

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

#789

Post by yu3zhou4 »

tombert wrote: post #766
yu3zhou4 wrote: post #755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh I get it now, thanks! Please let me know if you decide to enroll to math master's in OU, maybe we can help each other! I think I'll do the same on the next semester (so early 2026)

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

#790

Post by tombert »

yu3zhou4 wrote: post #789
tombert wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh I get it now, thanks! Please let me know if you decide to enroll to math master's in OU, maybe we can help each other! I think I'll do the same on the next semester (so early 2026)

I actually just registered for it :) Assuming I'm approved I'll be starting in October.

Feel free to email me (address in profile) if you want to talk about it.

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