Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

I'm working on a project to find the best places for you to live (in the US).

Right now, people are deciding where to move based on gut feels, spreadsheets, and wikipedia pages. There needs to be a better way to enter personal preferences and come out with enough data that ensures the place you're in is the best fit for you.

Enter your preferences, narrow down locations, and compare them:

https://exoroad.com

I recently bought a used Seadoo and discovered the dirty little secret of personal watercraft that they don't want you to know. Unlike cars with their standardized ODB2 ports, those aren't a requirement for PWCs. And the diagnostic scanner hardware/software costs hundreds or thousands of dollars. Major affront to the right to repair, so I'm ending up doing some CANbus hacking.

A firewall for SMS.

Scams usually start with messages. Predominantly SMS/email sent with links.

ML models exist to determine this, but we are prototyping using Gemma2 2b to utilise its natural language understanding to see if a better firewall could be built, one which users can talk to.

It has been surprisingly easy to get started on this project: https://ai.google.dev/edge/mediapipe/solutions/genai/llm_inf...

We want to subsequently build a firewall for Calls, too; but that's a more challenging problem given its dynamic and online / realtime nature.

Hope to integrate these two features in our existing network firewall open source app.

I am currently working on building a lending platform. My goal is to both run it as a product loaning money to businesses and sell the software as a service to other investors as well. Very early phase, talking to a few friends who are currently in this line of work. I have a couple decades of experience myself but as an engineer and leader, not as a product or business owner, so if you have advice or ideas, please respond here, I would love to hear from you.

I’m building a door. I find that mortises (my frame is mortise and tenon, the tenons were easy on a table saw) are much harder to create if you don’t have a proper plunge router. I’m using some chisels and it works fine but I have eight mortises to make and I’ve finished 1.5 in about the same number of hours. I don’t want to buy a plunge router, because I’m unemployed at the moment, but it would finish the job in minutes. I guess I’ll go get to chiseling! Next door I make will use half laps, so I can use the table saw for both ends of the joinery.