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

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211–220 of 922 posts

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

#211
An iphone todo app that's tailored for my needs and motivates me to commit to completing some amount of small tasks every day (even if it's just a single "rest and relax" task). Currently I'm building a prototype with SwiftUI and SwiftData and I'm struggling to comprehend why Apple is ditching Objective-C. Compared to my previous experience writing and publishing an iphone app, everything now feels much worse with Swift's ridiculous compile times and non-descriptive compile errors.

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

#212
Radar-based device for measuring athlete sprint & agility tests.

A lot of professional sports clubs, S&C coaches, etc.. use timing gates for measuring sprints, but those are a pain to set up, only capture split times, and are expensive. I think radar (+ optional video overlay) provides a far superior solution.

https://ledsreact.com

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

#213
Working on letting users upload their own transparent fashion images to a web app that let's you use your camera to apply the world to characters clothing. I made it for an exhibition in Kyoto and it was a lot of fun. Hoping to expand on it a bit more.

https://www.urbanlens.city/

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

#214
I'm making AI more fun to talk with. The new updates just keep making it blander and blander. What I want to do is inject more personality into bots. It's not natural, it's dramatized.

Quillbot makes it sound better for essays and presentation. I want to do the opposite and make it sound elliptical, turn a rant into a jab, that kind of thing. You don't say, "You're an idiot," you say, "Thanks, I thought I was the dumbest person in the room."

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

#216

I've been working on an iOS app that aggregates cinema showtimes across chains and independent theaters in the UK. I moved to London some years back, and was pleasantly surprised by the vibrant cinema scene, that seems to be in a steep decline in so many places. On any day of the week, one can find independent films, old and new classics, Q&A's with filmmakers etc. playing in one of the many theaters across the city.…

cool idea! good luck with your app! I also want to build an app that leverages happenings "in the real world".

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

#217
I have celiacs, so I'm making a database of every single labeled gluten-free product in grocery stores. (I have 8,858 products across 243 grocery categories).

GF products are expensive and hit or miss, I really wanted something where I could keep track of my favorite items. I also want to let people rank them, so maybe I can discover the best gluten free hamburger bun (Rudi's Brioche), or beer (Glutenberg Blonde).

I'm also making a user submitted recipe section, so say you want to recreate a Taco Bell Doritos Locos Taco, it's easy to link to the products you need.

I'm not sure where this project is headed but I couldn't find any jobs working in this space so decided to make something to help myself.

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

#219

I'm building tools for my own community on WhatsApp, from a simple bot to summarize texts and give some simple statistics to full on subscriptions through WhatsApp itself. Yes, I'm aware I relying on WhatsApp and that it is a risk.

This is cool! What types of stats? Can you give more detail on the types of tools?

Sure, as a community manager of a technical group I want to:

* Track most active users in a period (day/week/month)

* Track which users post/react the most

* Know (and now it is possible, but not implemented) who is 'lurking' just reading messages

* Summarize content and frequently asked questions to help users in the future

* Check which channels (groups inside a WhatsApp community) are most active and how many messages were posted in each channel in a specific period (day/week/month)

* Track (external) links posted to communities, how common they were, which users posted these links

--

The tools:

- A WhatsApp bot capturing all events in the group (reactions, messages, etc)

- A (same) WhatsApp bot to onboard new users in the community, check your membership, talk to

- A web application where the community member can check their membership + admin panel for me to check the stats mentioned above, think of it like a circle.so but built for my specific case.

--

The tech stack:

1/ a WhatsApp instance running on web, I'm doing this because WhatsApp oficial APIs do not support the "communities" -> I use Z-api [1] but you can use something like Baileys and self host [2]

2/ Elixir running on a simple machine

3/ OpenAI/Claude for summarization and topic extraction

[1] Z-API https://www.z-api.io/ [2] Baileys https://github.com/WhiskeySockets/Baileys

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