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

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

#541

Post by matthewshere »

I'm currently trying to transition from a fairly rigid day job into working as an independent developer. The goal is to build useful online tools and hopefully create a sustainable income stream doing something I find more engaging.

One consistent annoyance in my professional work has been dealing with PDFs – specifically, extracting information into editable formats without losing structure. Copy-pasting often creates a mess.

So, my first project tackling this is an online PDF to Markdown converter: https://pdftomarkdown.pro/

I've focused heavily on trying to maintain good formatting for headings, text flow, formulas, and especially table structure (getting rows/columns right in Markdown). It also has an online editor for quick modifications after conversion.

A key aspect for me was privacy: the application explicitly does not save the content of uploaded PDFs or the generated Markdown files. It only stores minimal metadata (email, filename, page count) for registered users' plan limits.

It's very much a "scratching my own itch" project born out of that PDF frustration. Early days, but hoping it proves useful for others too.

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

#542

Post by nabeards »

martin_a wrote: post #48

Working on getting my life back together. I've been more or less sick for the most of Q1/25. Always some cold, coughing, sometimes worse. Went to work nevertheless most of the time (stupid, I know), because... I don't know. Guess I think work is more important because it gives me the feeling of being good at something and worth it. Didn't take much care about eathing healthy, getting my gym routine done or even enoug…

Going to work while sick exposes everyone there to whatever you have. That’s a very careless act.

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

#543

Post by tschillaci »

My team’s building micro AI agents that perform very specific tasks really well. Right now, we see ourselves more as a consulting firm, developing custom agents while we search for the right vertical to specialize in. Eventually, we’d love to turn that into a SaaS product. We only have demos to show yet, but I’d be happy to chat more about it :)

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

#544

Post by mrwww »

I'm working on a Dutch dictionary for immersion learning; https://hetnederlands.com. Structured outputs combined with react router renders a chain of thought on demand. With most "learners dictionaries", you're limited to the basic words. This enables getting a perfectly laid out learners dictionary explanation of any word in the entire language.

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

#545

Post by 6510 »

matthewshere wrote: post #541

I'm currently trying to transition from a fairly rigid day job into working as an independent developer. The goal is to build useful online tools and hopefully create a sustainable income stream doing something I find more engaging. One consistent annoyance in my professional work has been dealing with PDFs – specifically, extracting information into editable formats without losing structure. Copy-pasting often creat…

I've often wanted a bulk tool that takes the title or some other easy to find value from a pdf and renames the file to that.

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

#546

Post by middayc »

For several years now, my free (programming) time goes into experimenting and making a REBOL based language:

https://ryelang.org

March was quite productive:

* there was major (somewhat breaking) upgrade to the language

* We have a working web (wasm) console again

* full binary builds with some improvements for Windows that before didn't get much attention.

* full function reference with unit tests should arrive soon

I try to post about what I'm working on on Rye's reddit group:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ryelang/

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

#548

Post by RobinL »

- A FOSS Python package for record linkage and deduplication at scale called Splink: https://moj-analytical-services.github.io/splink/

- A library for fast, accurate matching (geocoding) of UK addresses that uses Splink under the hood: https://github.com/RobinL/uk_address_matcher

- An npm library that generates maths mental arithmetic problems that align to the UK national curriculum, that can be used to power maths games: https://github.com/RobinL/maths-game-problem-generator

- A breakout maths game that uses the above: https://github.com/RobinL/maths-game-problem-generator

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

#550

Post by voidUpdate »

6510 wrote: post #545
matthewshere wrote: post #541

I'm currently trying to transition from a fairly rigid day job into working as an independent developer. The goal is to build useful online tools and hopefully create a sustainable income stream doing something I find more engaging. One consistent annoyance in my professional work has been dealing with PDFs – specifically, extracting information into editable formats without losing structure. Copy-pasting often creat…

I've often wanted a bulk tool that takes the title or some other easy to find value from a pdf and renames the file to that.

Unfortunately, PDFs are right buggers to work with and there often isn't an "easy to find value" for anything
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