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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)

#571
I got frustrated with the current web becoming more and more unusable and made a browser extension to fix that.

It's an addon that allows one to modify any web page behavior. You can write rules for things like redirecting reddit to old reddit or keeping youtube videos playing in the background.

It's like Tampermonkey/Greasemonkey/etc but it works on HTTP request level and can modify scripts/styles/markup before they are ever rendered making it considerably more powerful.

Currently it only works on Firefox (and Firefox Mobile) because it's the only browser that supports the necessary APIs. It's seen its first release already but the UI is a bit lacking :)

AMO: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-defuser/

Sources: https://gitlab.com/gear54/web-defuser

Example rules: https://gitlab.com/gear54/web-defuser/-/snippets

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

#572
post #513

https://pagecord.com Blogging by email. The best way to blog. Pagecord makes blogging so effortless you'll want to write more. Publish posts by sending an email (or use the Pagecord app). Your readers can follow you by RSS, or subscribe to your posts by email. Share long-form posts or short stream-of-consciousness thoughts. Both look great! Pagecord is independent, open source and built to last :)

Great idea!

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

#573

I've been putting together a no-nonsense free invoice generator, for people (like myself) that only occasionally send invoices. It's more-or-less a WYSIWYG editor, and the state is stored in the URL, so you don't have to worry about keeping track of where you stored your copy - if you've sent someone an email with the link, you've got a copy. This project was born out of the frustration of trying to generate an invoi…

Not be negative about bestfreevoice, or any other invoicing tool, but it always seems like developers and early-stage entrepreneurs don't understand invoicing.

First major disconnect is that not every country uses invoices, but may use receipts instead. This is true for the USA for example, so many US devs (for example: Stripe in the early days) are not familiar with the concept of invoicing. Technically there is no difference between receipts and invoices, so if you're not familiar with the concept of invoicing, just read this post with /s/invoice/receipt in mind.

The point about invoicing is to act as a non-mutable entry into the ledgers of both parties (seller and buyer). In most countries (especially EU) invoices are mandated by law for B2B transactions, and so is keeping accounts (aka bookkeeping). So for invoicing to be practical it needs to be tied to your books/accounts. Because of this, any business will use some bookkeeping/accounting software, which will have invoicing capabilities built-in. Invoicing as a standalone product doesn't make sense if you have to import it all into your ledgers later.

Then there is the 'design' trap, which many invoicing startups seem to fall for. Invoices are weird things. They are basically very, very inefficient artefacts from the past. An invoice is just a very little amount of transaction data exchanged between buyer and seller. In the days of physical bookkeeping (actual paper books) paper invoices made sense, but nowadays it is all done digitally. So the invoice is effectively a machine-2-machine interface, but for all sorts of legacy reasons we still wrap them in PDF with a fancy design that looks great for humans, but it effectively impossible for machines to read.

There are all sorts of attempts made to improve upon this situation (like OCR, and nowadays AI to extract data from PDF invoices). There are open structured data formats such as UBL to replace / augment PDF invoices, but due to all sorts of politics and lobbying the open standards have been doomed from the beginning. There is a lot of money made in accounting software, and they all rely on vendor lock-in. The major accounting software vendors have very strong incentives to keep us from adopting UBL et al, and most of the established accounting product suck, but you can't easily migrate so you'll be stuck with it.

If you run or own a business, treat your books as an asset of your business, a very important asset for that matter. Books are kept in accounting software, which is typically part of a larger software suite which also features tax filing, HRM, asset management, invoicing, etc. In fancy business terms this is often called ERP. But think of ERP as just your central database, or your 'books'.

Choosing your accounting software an important decision. Choose accounting software that allows exporting your data (very important!), that has an API (also very important), and preferably a web interface. It should be always available, so on-premise software is out. For entrepreneurs: choose your own accounting software, do not be tempted to hire an external bookkeeper that keeps the books in 'their' systems (accountant lock-in). Don't let an accountant recommend your software either, they get huge kickbacks from the software vendors (vendor lock-in). Every sale—whether this being PoS, invoicing, or a payment integration like Stripe—should automatically registered as a ledger entry in the books, preferably with an invoice document attached. Here you can see why an accountant who keeps your books in their systems won't work, you don't want to be stuck having to periodically send an email (or shoebox) filled with invoices for them to process. Your books should be owned by the business, should be automated (at least for the receivable side), and always be up-to-date. You can then give an(y) accountant access to your books for them to do audits, tax filings, etc. For a business, the books are the central database of the business, everything else revolves around it. Do not be tempted to write your own, instead integrate with existing solutions while avoiding vendor lock-in as much as possible.

Integrating your business with the accounting software is an ever-ongoing part of your software development efforts, so not underestimate it. Accepting payments is hard, making sure it is well registered in your books is equally hard. It takes _much_ more time than you'd think (most first-time entrepreneurs actually don't consider it at all). There are no silver bullets here.

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

#575

My 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 10…

Wordfence is pretty cool. Heard about it and your security research for years before I ever used the plugin, then started using it with a client in the past couple years. My time with it is ending shortly (see my comment elsewhere on this thread[0]), but it's been great. Thanks!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43528309

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

#576
We’re building AI PSY HELP – an AI-powered mental health assistant offering 24/7 anonymous support via voice and text, without appointments or waiting. It’s used by 100,000+ people in Ukraine, including veterans, teens, and first responders.

The AI is trained on 40,000+ hours of real psychotherapy sessions and provides individualized emotional guidance to help users manage stress, anxiety, and trauma. We partner with public institutions to deliver large-scale support and just launched a B2B program for employers.

Now preparing for EU expansion (starting with Germany), mobile app rollout, and voice interaction in Ukrainian. This is not just a chatbot – it’s scalable mental health infrastructure.

https://ai.psyhelp.infohttps://chat.psyhelp.infohttps://chat.dev.psyhelp.info (+voice)

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

#577
I am building DollarDeploy [1] - platform to deploy apps to your own server. Think of it as a Vercel but without serverless or public cloud confusing pricing - DollarDeploy + VPS of your choice. DD supports NextJS, React, Python, Docker Compose apps. NextJS and React runs without docker and deploy super fast - around 1min from GitHub push to live with HTPPS, Postgres and Redis db alongside.

Currently in progress of implementing DevOps AI which will configure properly your deployment based on the source code.

- [1] https://dollardeploy.com

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

#578
I am trying to become a business and financial programmer. Right now i am focusing on SAP technologies and ABAP, UI5 and GUI. I would like to become an expert in anything that is financial informatic related or business programming in relation to companies. Meaning Financial modules, Databases and Dashboards, automation of bank transactions and secure economic data communications. I would like to become the expert that when enters the room people say "Thank god you're here!"

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

#579

I've been building mentions.us[1] - it sends you alerts when your keywords are mentioned on Hacker News, Reddit, Bluesky, LinkedIn and a few other places. For anyone who uses F5Bot, it's similar but with some extra data sources and a Slack integration. It's been a fun project. Dealing with the scale of Reddit (~300 posts/second) creates some interesting technical challenges. It's also let me polish up my frontend dev…

Looks very interesting!! I registered and found an issue: when I add the mention keyword, it shows two results, but after saving it, it shows zero results. I tried checking mentions for my side project DollarDeploy.
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