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

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651–660 of 1001 posts

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

#651

I’m working on Popgot ( https://popgot.com ), a tool that tracks unit prices (cost per ounce, sheet, pound) across Costco, Walmart, Target, and Amazon. It normalizes confusing listings (“family size”, “mega pack”, etc.) to surface the actual cheapest option for daily essentials. On top of that, it uses a lightweight AI model to read product descriptions and filter based on things like ingredients (e.g., flagging pean…

I like this idea a lot -- feels like there's a lot of room to grow here. Do you have any sort of historical price tracking/alerting? And/or also curious if there is a way to enter in a list of items I want and for it to calculate which store - in aggregate - is the cheapest. For instance, people often tell me Costco is much cheaper than alternatives, and for me to compare I have to compile my shopping cart in multipl…

> For instance, people often tell me Costco is much cheaper than alternatives, and for me to compare I have to compile my shopping cart in multiple stores to compare.

A few years ago, I was very diligently tracking _all_ my family's grocery purchases. I kept every receipt, entered it into a spreadsheet, added categories (eg, dairy, meat), and calculated a normalized cost per unit (eg, $/gallon for milk, $/dozen eggs).

I learned a lot from that, and I think I saved our family a decent amount of money, but man it was a lot of work.

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

#652
post #593
post #402

https://github.com/colibri-hq/colibri/ Colibri—a self-hostable web application to manage your (and your family's) ebook library, intended as a companion to Calibre. I want it to be a friendly, simple, capable, opinionated app to review your books, add metadata to them, get them onto your reader, share them with family and (few) friends, create a public shelf for bragging, connect with Goodreads etc., and exchange com…

This is super interesting. Where do you store the ebooks and the metadata?

Ebooks in an S3 compatible storage bucket, metadata in a Postgres database. That has the huge advantage of being able to do full text search and kNN similarity right in the database, for example.

Colibri is built around a pretty solid data schema (I hope). Check out the migrations folder if you’re curious :-)

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

#653

My project is an ongoing one of self improvement. I've spent most of my adult life working on technical stuff, and it's taken a bit of a toll on me. I quit working about ~20 months ago, started a low-carb time restricted eating regime, lost ~230 lbs, have been doing 15-25 hours of cardio a month for the past year, started going to therapy, got an ADHD diagnosis, read a bunch of classic literature (Middlemarch and The…

so proud of you Mike. we still regularly talk about how we miss you. i am so glad you are doing well.

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

#654

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'…

super cool

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

#655
post #402

https://github.com/colibri-hq/colibri/ Colibri—a self-hostable web application to manage your (and your family's) ebook library, intended as a companion to Calibre. I want it to be a friendly, simple, capable, opinionated app to review your books, add metadata to them, get them onto your reader, share them with family and (few) friends, create a public shelf for bragging, connect with Goodreads etc., and exchange com…

Ooh, this looks fantastic. I'd love to help, but I'm spending almost all of my off-work hours looking for jobs right now. Maybe I'll find a good one sooner rather than later...

Thanks you, that means a lot. And good luck for your search!

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

#656
Im working on a Discord Bot that can spin up game servers on demand. We are two developers, me and my friend from uni. Its called SLASHPLAY (https://slashplay.gg) . We are trying to make it as convienient as possible to spin up a game server for friends or fellow gamers. Currently we are trying to find out if we can make a living from it :?

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

#658

My project is an ongoing one of self improvement. I've spent most of my adult life working on technical stuff, and it's taken a bit of a toll on me. I quit working about ~20 months ago, started a low-carb time restricted eating regime, lost ~230 lbs, have been doing 15-25 hours of cardio a month for the past year, started going to therapy, got an ADHD diagnosis, read a bunch of classic literature (Middlemarch and The…

230 lbs in 20 months -- that's amazing. Congrats.

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

#659
I'm working on my second self-published technical book related to Elixir. The first one has been a surprising success, but since it was about learning to use Ecto on the basis of an old pedagogical toy database (and tiny dataset), the new book is about the development of a production-grade REST API with Elixir and Phoenix.

I find that many books out there are focused on documenting the "happy path" for rather small and simplistic applications without boundary conditions or business thinking behind them.

So, I thought (as with the first books) that it mix things up by also documenting the business context, the questions, decisions, and the decision-making process itself, as well as all the gotchas and "side-quests", rather than showing "here's how you do it" and then expecting the reader to suddenly make the jump from tutorial hell to actually software engineering.

Overall, it's enormously enjoyable, and I hope it goes as far as the first book, and possibly even farther.

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

#660

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…

Perhaps an opportunity for weed control for lawn as well.
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