creating a gamified novel writing app that will be a duolingo for novel writing. AI can help you write, review what you've written, all while encouraging engagement by playing for points. Looking for some beta testers if anyone is interested in trying it. Best part, I'm only taking 5% cut of all sales in my shop. Amazon and Barnes and Noble take between 30% and 40%. Hoping it becomes the go to app for future novelists from all over the world.
Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)
381–390 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)
#382An open source system to build web-based assistants. SaaS like, API-first and multi-LLM. Feedbacks are welcome! https://sermas-eu.github.io/
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)
#383I'm building a dating app for what I think is an untapped market. I'm just worried the apple store is going to reject it. I read back in 2020 they aren't accepting more dating apps but I've also seen a number of new ones pop up.
What's the idea?
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)
#384https://rankandfile.me
At the moment, I am validating demand for Rank And File, a platform for employee activism. Think Institutional Investors but instead of suits, it is employees who own a large number of shares in their own company and act as a collective.
R&F aims to provide a private forum for employees to discuss company policies and act as a platform where employees can connect with legal experts and activists who will help them
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)
#385I'm working on an interactive book that introduces young readers to the world of entrepreneurship. Readers get to join the protagonist, Daphne, on a fun, week-long adventure launching her own mini-businesses. Readers help her make smart decisions, solve fun challenges, and learn about money and problem-solving in the process. Featuring several storylines in a single book, readers learn about the fundamentals of business, smart saving, and the rewards of creative effort.
https://tendollaradventure.com
The book has been a fun endeavor in both writing the manuscript and code! On the latter, I wrote an exporter for Twinery to Org Mode and an Emacs Org export backend to do the reverse.
The book is currently open to beta readers - Happy to let a few more in through the sign up page here: https://tendollaradventure.com/#get-notified
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)
#386I am finishing up a 32 year old stretch project (as of this month). 99.9% sure I nailed it. Technically a 42 year old project, but it took me 10 years to find the right way to think about it and craft a formal definition.
The theory seems to check, but I can't/won't be convinced until the tools based on it are complete and working without friction or exception. Many times it has felt like I was tilting at windmills, but every challenge eventually caved.
An epic (for me) black triangle moment approaches! (Discovered that term here on HN.) An algorithmic triad the color of space without light is a poetic, but not misleading description.
Wish me luck!
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)
#387My pursuit of happiness, I'm in fear of quitting my current job and go for a working holiday to Australia, I'm excited while still trying to overcome the fear of not having a stable and well paying job because I don't find any joy in this job no more , so I am working on mentally getting out of this, I want to truly let go "money is more important than my happiness" idea.
I embarked on a working holiday to the UK in 1998. Quit my job in South Africa and left with nothing but a backpack. Opened up my world, I worked for Coca Cola, the BBC, an investment bank, got wrapped up in the dot com boom, met my American wife, met the smartest people in the world, some invested in me, moved to the States, started a business that now has millions of customers and a team of 40 that my wife and I 100% own. So I guess I lean towards GO!! NOW!! :-) Best of luck.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)
#388[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)
#389I threw together a ratio calculator for Dyson sphere project to get the last two achievements done.
https://wohlben.github.io/factory-fractals/recipes/75?target... It's not really optimized for mobile though, and I actually forgot to give mobile users the recipe picker.
And there seems to be a strange bug only with the rare quartz recipe (it thinks it'll provide 1/4 more items then it does).
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)
#390Manabi Reader - learn Japanese by reading on iOS/maCOS https://reader.manabi.io
I quit my job a couple years back to work on this app full-time, as well as its companion flashcard app, Manabi Flashcards. The goal is to help you learn through immersion.
What's special about it? Manabi Reader became popular as an Japanese-focused alternative to services like LingQ in that it locally tracks and analyzes all the words and kanji you read and study. It shows you which words are new and which you're currently learning via flashcards, so you can easily find content that suits your level and see what flashcards to prioritize adding. It also passively accumulates an on-device (and in your personal iCloud) corpus of example sentences from your reading.
I had built this part-time while working over many years (starting with flashcards and then the reader app) but going full-time gave me the time to do a full rewrite: SwiftUI, native iOS + macOS, and an offline-first architecture that syncs with iCloud and my server in the background.
Although it has a companion SRS algorithm (SM-2) flashcard app, it's also excellent for mining Anki cards. This works with AnkiMobile on iOS and AnkiConnect on desktop.
You can use it like a web browser for the web, or subscribe to RSS feeds. It comes with a bunch of curated content by level. Recently I added EPUB support, pitch accents, and note-taking with todos.
I'm now almost done adding a manga mode via Mokuro.
Next I plan on adding more media types (video, YouTube, PDFs), AI functionality (grammar explanations, document Q&A, etc), Yomitan/Yomichan dictionaries for bilingual/monolingual EPWING and Wiktionary support, and more service integrations such as 2-way sync for WaniKani, JPDB, and existing Anki decks. I've begun work on these items and hope to share more soon.
I'd also like to make this app much more beginner-friendly so that people with zero Japanese knowledge can start learning. Currently it assumes you can read kana at least.
Previous discussion [2023]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674259