Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

191–200 of 900 posts

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

#191
I am working on a site that allows kids to chat and play online with other kids. To connect, kids must have their parents sign up and connect with the parents of their friends. Kids can chat with their parents and family as well as other kids in their network. Messages can be monitored by parents. There are also other activities like a bot workshop where simple llm bots can be "programmed" by creating system prompts (kids create video game helper bots, ice cream shop bots, adventure/dungeons and dragons style bots, etc). There is a sticker book (cartoon image search), and a quiz creator. Many other things are planned!

The guiding principles are to create a fun, positive, safe space for kids and families to socialize and interact as well as empower kids to explore and understand technology as a creative tool and not just as something to consume content.

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

#193
post #32

Still working on https://phrasing.app - an app for polyglots to learn over 120 languages in the most effective manner and a beautiful UI. Just finished a onboarding flow, now updating the search and create experience to fall more in line with actual usage from users, then hopefully prepping for a more public launch :) Had a fun week fixing up the application so it’s 100x faster on 5 different axes, and it’s starting…

> learn over 120 languages in the most effective manner and a beautiful UI Why would you need a UI if the basic way to learn a language is to speak to someone? (I suppose you meant graphical UI.) Wouldn't a good STT/TTS interface be more appropriate?

Why do you need a beautiful UI? Because you need something to use for thousands of hours.

Why have a visual interface at all? It’s more convenient to use, is way more engaging, and just better for learning. There is an audio component to the app, and I’m sure more and more audio components will be added, but I would be surprised if in-app audio ever exceeds half of my usage.

For example there is a shadowing exercise that is purely audio based (put in headphones and press play). But what if you want to see what a word means? Or see its gender/case/tense? Mark it as easy or hard, remembered or forgotten? I can look all this information up, plus read a few paragraphs of explanations in less time than I would take me to formulate a question.

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

#195

Because of a HN post( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44421776 ), I've got a ton of feedback for Ensō: my writing app for flow/stream of consciousness writing. So, I'm wrapping up the release and adding good support for non-Latin, esp. RTL languages (Arabic, Persian, Hebrew) + pinyin and Japanese input methods. Recently I also made a font for it! https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/433-how-to-make-a-font-that... I'…

Love this idea. I like to use voice recording and transcription for the same thing, but having a text interface is nice for public spaces!

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

#197
I have been unemployed for the last few months, and there's only so much TV and YouTube I can watch without going utterly insane between interviews,

Since WGU just started doing masters degrees in CS, I decided it would be a way to kill large amounts of time while getting at least a little out of it, so I registered for it.

I've been a professional software person for like fourteen years, so I was able to knock it out extremely quickly due to WGU's competency based stuff, so now I finally am able to put "MS" after my name.

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

#198
post #160

I've been building Crossabble ( https://crossabble.com/ ) a free and fun weekly web word game. Feedback welcome! The game is mostly done, so I'm now focused on tooling to make it easier for me to craft each week's puzzle. I'm solving some interesting graph and optimizations problems

I don't get it. It just looks like 6 clues I'm supposed to guess words for like a fully disjoint crossword puzzle. What am I missing?

Each row reuses the letters from the row above and below. So think a combination of clues and scrabble/jumble.

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

#199

I have been unemployed for the last few months, and there's only so much TV and YouTube I can watch without going utterly insane between interviews, Since WGU just started doing masters degrees in CS, I decided it would be a way to kill large amounts of time while getting at least a little out of it, so I registered for it. I've been a professional software person for like fourteen years, so I was able to knock it ou…

Good for you. Cross my fingers that you'll land a good job soon. Or create your own job.
Post reply on HN