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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)

#91

Post by alextousss »

czhu12 wrote: post #75
alextousss wrote: post #24

My roommate and I are still working on Tornyol, our mosquito killing drone! It uses ultrasonic sonar to detect mosquitoes, and missile control theory to ram into mosquitoes and grind them in its propellers. Our target platform is a 40 grams tinywhoop so it’s safe to fly everywhere and makes almost no noise :). A Roomba for mosquitoes! The main plus compared to traditional systems is that a drone can cover an enormous…

This is incredible. What is the background you needed to even have intuition on how to build something like this?

Just an insane obsession with ultrasound! (and some control theory classes)

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

#92

Post by mNovak »

Making progress on a Warhammer 40k rules engine and client (think in-browser RTS style). It's actually getting to be playable with a reduced rules set, and designed to be highly extensible / plug-in-able.

I'll still need to implement some kind of "AI" opponent or hack together P2P networking to demo it though; playing against yourself is fine for testing, but not really how the game is meant to be played.

It's hand coded so far, but I'm hoping AI can be a big lift for churning out the multiple thousands of named special rules, as most of these are very simple (+1 here, reroll there, etc).

Any WH40k players out there? Love to hear your thoughts!

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

#93

Post by hyperbrainer »

I have been experimenting with rendering fonts in Rust lately. I was pleasantly surprised by how simple reading the ttf file format is. The hard part, of course, is actually doing everything with the bezier curves and contours and filling the insides etc. But if I were to just be working with straight lines, I already have everything I need. Indeed, I used MATLAB's `patch` to quickly check my progress and see the major bugs in my rendering implementations, and got there within a couple hours.

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

#95

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

I'm releasing an actually instant search-to-type TUI and CLI Finnish to English dictionary called Taskusanakirja (pocket dictionary). It's been steadily optimized to the hilt to be the perfect brookside or website-side dictionary for any learner of the Finnish language. Available on Windows, Mac and Linux as a single standalone executable, with an optional paid database download for Taskusanakirja Pro.

This is the first time I've ever actually released something with a monetization option, so I'll be interested to see where it goes. It's a small enough niche that I think I have several features that genuinely don't exist anyplace else, like the ability to lemmatize even heavily inflected words (a very common stumbling block for learners of Finnish).

A web app would obviously be much easier to monetize, but then I would lose the buttery smooth feel of the search at it currently exists.

Tsemppiä! It's not live yet, but when it is it will be at https://taskusanakirja.com/.

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

#97

Post by moojacob »

I've been working on an app that writes customer emails so small businesses can focus on what energizes them.

It makes answering customer emails 10x easier.

The magic are training templates which are templates that get suggested (and eventually auto-selected) and personalized by LLM for every reply.

Every reply sent trains it to auto select that training template for future similar customer emails.

The stack is Ruby on Rails and Postgres hosted on DigitalOcean. The LLM currently is Kimi K2 hosted on Groq.

https://vipreply.ai

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

#99

Post by elpalek »

I'm building a information hub that utilize AI agents to compile all the relevant information from China (gov, econ, commerce, anything and everything). I call it "information domination". Heard many times that language barrier stops people having a better understanding of China. Now the LLM translation is good enough, and AI agents can do way more in information gathering stage. It's time to put things in practice.

https://wallnot.com

For now, it only has a daily newsletter fully compiled by AI agents without any human intervention. I plan to add public listed companies (semiconductor, energy provider, etc) onto the platform. Already found lots of good data points that can be used by analysts, researchers or observers.

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

#100

Post by seanwilson »

I'm still working on a tool to create custom accessible Tailwind-style CSS color palettes for web and UI designs:

https://www.inclusivecolors.com/

Example with colors from HN to play with (the grays used for links and main body background, orange from the navbar, green from newbie usernames):

https://www.inclusivecolors.com/?style_dictionary=eyJjb2xvci...

The main features are it shows if your colors meet WCAG accessible contrast on a live UI mockup, you get quick and precise control over every color grade in a swatch (via editing HSL curves) instead of these being auto/AI generated, and it helps you create a full palette of tints/shades for each color rather just a handful of colors.

The idea here is to design your tints/shades upfront with accessible contrast in mind so you don't run into problems later. Most brand style guides I see only have around 5 brand colors, and when you need more tints/shades later to implement actual UIs and landing pages, you get into a conflict where you can't find contrasting colors to introduce that match the brand.

I've had interesting feedback about different workflows designers have so far. It's tricky to make a single tool that fits everyones workflow but I might end up with multiple modes e.g. easy but more opinionated, and more freeform but for advanced users.

I admit it has a learning curve at the moment but I'm not sure how simple you can make it without giving up control. I think once you get it though, you'll realise it's much easier to make a custom accessible palette than you thought.

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