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

I would have to know more about your circumstances before I could make genuine recommendations. But as an autodidactal programmer, I can serve as somewhat of an authority on this manner ;) The value I get out of the platform is:

1. I can study all my languages on the same platform. For my, having studied 30+ languages (note: not claiming to speak them), I just want to “do my languages”. I can study dialectal Arabic, minority languages, archaic languages, and the major languages, all in a nice consistent and (if I can say so myself) beautiful UI.

2. Everything is heavily annotated with all the information you could ever need. This means that I add flashcards, and when I’m learning them, I have the gender, cases, tenses, agglutination, phonetics, translations, audio, conjugation/declention tables, character breakdowns, mutations, idioms, multilword expressions, roots, etymology, etc etc (the list really does go on) at my fingertips. This means I just go through my flashcards, and when I have a question, I get an answer. If I have more questions, I have a context aware chat integrated. For me, this is the autodidactal dream come true.

3. Personally, I really love SRS. I also really hate SRS. If I have to study the words “dog”, “walk”, & “morning” - and I have a sentence “I walk my dog in the morning”, I just want to study that one one sentence and be done with it. Also, I really want to just be able to play audio sentences and listen to them while cooking/cleaning/walking my dog. Or do a free recall sessions, write down everything I remember from yesterday, and skip those reviews today (it’s more effective than SRS anyways).

Lastly, WRT to creating your own flashcards: You can still create flashcards manually on Phrasing - I agree the act of creating flashcards is beneficial, I’m not trying to take that away from anyone - but I’m not sure I buy it’s the highest leverage way for one to spend their time. At least for me, it definitely is not. I would rather skip that (admittedly beneficial) step, and move onto the next step. YMMV

It’s really hard to narrow the list down to three, I have a hundred things I want to say, but I’ll leave it here. Due to popular demand, I recorded a few live demos today so you can see it in action:

https://x.com/barrelltech/status/1917093849219895715?s=61

Higher quality demos will come in time!

Let me know your thoughts, I’m happy to dive deeper into any of this (I mean I could talk about Phrasing for literally days on end)

EIDT: s/extinct/archaic

One of the things I'm working on is also this, most of the problems in the space have been solved already, the only interesting part is how elegant can your implementation be. Good luck!

I'm working on email. Principles are growing stronger and for some reason I don't want to use Gmail/Tuta/Proton anymore, so I'm _making my own_. It'll be paid and you'll be able to bring your own domain and however many aliases/inboxes you need.

It'll eventually be at c3n.ro and will be "sovereignly" hosted in the EU.

I’m working on myself. :)

After three tough years in finance, I’ve decided to start a trip around the world, visiting the UK and the US, spending one month traveling through Japan, and then heading to South Korea.

There might be problems in life that can’t be solved with a three-month sabbatical trip around the world, but luckily, I don’t have any of them. :)

At the same time, I’m exploring ways to apply LLMs to video games and have built a small prototype of an LLM-based D&D system. Let’s see where this goes!

It’s useful to travel. I’m on a bit of a creative renaissance myself.

If you’re ever in Los Angeles or California, give a ring!