Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

Repo: https://github.com/mochilang/mochi

I'm building Mochi, a small programming language with a custom VM and a focus on querying structured data (CSV, JSON, and eventually graph) in a unified and lightweight way.

It started as an experiment in writing LINQ-style queries over real datasets and grew into a full language with:

- declarative queries built into the language

- a register-based VM designed for analysis and optimization

- an intermediate representation with liveness analysis, constant folding, and dead code elimination

- static type inference, inline tests, and golden snapshot support

Example:

  type Person {
    name: string
    age: int
  }

  let people = load "people.yaml" as Person

  let adults = from p in people
             where p.age >= 18
             select { name: p.name, age: p.age }

  for a in adults {
    print(a.name, "is", a.age)
  }

  save adults to "adults.json"

The long-term goal is to make a small, expressive language for data pipelines, querying, and agent logic, without reaching for Python, SQL, and a half-dozen libraries.

Happy to chat if you're into VMs, query engines, or DSLs.

Still building. https://tosreview.org/

Reading through the Terms of service in websites is a pain. Most of the users skip reading that and click accept. The risk is that they enter into a legally binding contract with a corporation without any idea what they are getting themselves into.

How it started: I read news about Disney blocking a wrongful death lawsuit, since the victim agreed to a arbitration clause when they signed up for a disney+ trial.

I started looking into available options for services that can mitigate this and found the amazing https://tosdr.org/en project.

That project relies on the work of volunteers who have been diligently reading the TOS and providing information in understandable terms.

Light bulb moment: LLM's are good at reading and summarizing text. Why not use LLMs for the same. That's when I started building tosreview.org. I am also sending it for the bolt.new hackathon.

Existing features: Input for user entered URLs or text Translation available for 30+ languages.

Planned features: Chrome/firefox extension Structured extraction of key information ( arbitration enforced , jurisdiction enforced etc).

Let me know if you have any feedback

I'm tinkering with relative positional encoding by trying to integrate acoustic features directly into it.

More specifically, I'm trying to use pitch (F0) to dynamically adjust the theta parameter in rotary positional embeddings, so the frequency of the positional encoding reflects the underlying pitch contour of the speech and instead of using a fixed unit circle (radius=1.0) for complex rotations, I'm trying to work out how to use variable radii derived from the pitch. The idea is to create acoustically-weighted positional encodings, where the position reflects the acoustic salience in the original audio. https://github.com/sine2pi/asr_model

It’s not something technically inclined or interesting. I used to host a Flash Game, some sort of, Bubble Wrap Bubble Popper. Unfortunately, it went away along with Flash. My site complains of the usual 404 on that page. Early this month, on one fateful evening before I retired for the day, I decided to work alongside an AI Coding assistant and completed it. Since then, if not others, my daughter has popped a lot and lots of bubbles.

https://bubble-pop.oinam.com/

I made a film called "Searching For Kurosawa". This short documentary chronicles the story of Kawamura, a man who worked with legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa on the set of his opus "Ran". Kawamura was working in the BTS crew, but his footage got confiscated. It took almost 40 years to recover the footage and present that as his feature film.

My film got screened at the Academy Award-qualifying Bali International Film Festival and the Marina Del Rey Film Festival in the past month. It will be screening next month in New York City at the Asian American International Film Festival.