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

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521–530 of 1001 posts

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

#521

I've always been into MUDs since the mid-90s and every now and then I get this idea to write one from scratch (again) and I get pretty far and then I lose interest. The new one is browser based. The mud engine runs in a web worker and takes advantage of some of the modern web tricks to do stuff. For instance, data files (think: area files that don't change often) can be stored remotely and then cached with a service…

YES! Another MUD programmer! I started writing one in Meteor about eleven years ago. I don't even know if Meteor's still a thing anymore... I've had a few projects in Rust that were mixtures of roguelike and MUD models, conceptually. I usually got aggravated with the models I created, though.

I really like your multiplayer idea. That sounds really clean and flexible.

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

#522
I am about to begin a PhD in astronomy. Until last month I was working at Caltech for 3 years on code which calculates orbits of asteroids to high precision. This code is being used on several NASA telescopes now to predict when they will image known asteroids (NEO Surveyor, SphereX, maybe Roman eventually). I was allowed to open source it and I am planning on making it the basis of my PhD research:

https://github.com/dahlend/kete

It can predict the location of the entire catalog of known asteroids to generally within the uncertainty of our knowledge of the orbits. Its core is written in rust, with a python frontend.

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

#523
https://interestingbars.com: Discover the best, most interesting bars in your area

https://tallytabby.com: The simplest way to keep track of anything in your life. From habits to inventory, TallyTabby makes counting effortless.

https://qrfeedback.app: Get honest customer feedback with a simple QR code

https://skillriskaudit.com: Knowledge Risk Management

https://shiftingtictactoe.com: The classic game with a twist—play in real-time, and there’s never a draw!

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

#524
A children's book about creative problem solving and entrepreneurship.

The book is written in the Choose Your Own Adventure style. 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.

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? (April 2025)

#525

A tree cutting tool. Take photos of the tree from 6 different angles, feed into a 3D model generator, erode the model and generate a 3D graph representation of the tree. The tool suggests which cuts to make and where, given a restricted fall path (e.g. constrained by a neighbors yard on one side). I create the fallen branches in their final state along the fall plane, and create individual correction vectors mapping…

I was imagining something like this for pruning fruit trees — something to help noobs like me see how to put pruning guidelines into practice on a real, overgrown tree. Good luck!

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

#526
Last month, I started playing around with code sandboxes and how LLMs might interface with them and wrote a little blog post about it [1]. I then took the code and vibe coded my way to a multi-tenant (untested!) sandboxing server that lets you run arbitrary Docker containers and provides a simple HTTP interface and UI. A cute, novel idea is that you can fork containers easily, as seen in the video in my repo:

https://github.com/ammmir/sandboxer

It may not be useful, but it's been fun, and I've honed my gut-level experience in Docker, Podman, Linux namespaces, Checkpoint/Restore, CRIU, and more. The ultimate goal is to hand each AI agent iteration a sandbox of its own (forked from the previous iteration), and have it build apps in private sandboxes. You'll be able to view intermediate progress as the app is being built (or failed rabbit holes), since each sandbox gets a unique URL automatically. Like, imagine if each commit of your git repo had its own URL to preview the app!

[1] https://amirmalik.net/2025/03/07/code-sandboxes-for-llm-ai-a...

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

#528
Still working on Connet[1] and the associated Connet.dev[2], which is a p2p reverse proxy with NAT traversal (and hosted version of it). Currently, adding support for defining multiple points of ingress, next will be adding support for PCP port forwarding.

[1] https://github.com/connet-dev/connet

[2] https://connet.dev

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

#529
Working on my Java NLP library that can figure out what geographical location is from a piece of free text.

e.g.

"san francisco ca united states" - San Francisco, California, America

"california, san francisco" - San Francisco, California, America

"glasgow, kentucky" - Glasgow, Kentucky, America

"glasgow, UK" - Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom

It started as a project when I was scraping websites, and some data had inconsistent ways of writing a location or address.

The library is called location4j - https://github.com/tomaytotomato/location4j

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

#530
I launched my web-based notepad calculator, https://numpad.io/, a few years ago.

Right now I'm working on a version 2 that has user accounts, multiple documents, markdown support, and document exports. Everything is local-first and it uses CRDTs to sync documents.

It looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/Plk1DQ4.png the calculator is mostly the same for now, with a few improvements. It's unstable right now, so I don't want to publicise the dev url, but if you'd like to become a beta tester email me at contact@numpad.io

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