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

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

#711
post #664

Still building https://ongoingthings.com - a way to document and privately share life updates with close people. I used to post personal updates in group chats - scattered, repetitive, and easy to miss. Now each topic (like raising a child, a trip, a project) gets its own private space - an Ongoing Thing - where updates stay organized. People get email notifications for new posts. There's no feed, no comments, no ads…

This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently! My friends group all seem burnt out by the direction social media is going, with what you're building seeming like a better return to the norm. Will follow along to see your progress!

One thing that kept tripping me up when thinking about this was pricing - everyone is so conditioned to think that social media is free that this will be a huge hill to overcome. Your pricing, although I think if done right feels very fair, instinctively makes me recoil a bit.

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

#712
post #545
post #540

I have been working on building a site where you search by phrases which you have heard in some youtube shorts and are not able to remember which video was it, my project would give the users the videos in which the phrase has been said or mentioned

Like youglish but for more videos?

Yeah something like that. I am thinking of using audio to text converter using whisper apis, index the audio text in a vector DB and then perform string matching.

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

#713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was recently looking for a master's degree in math that is: - 100% remote - 100% self-paced - fairly cheap and it looks like Open University is the best option right now? Did you find any better option?

I couldn’t find anything that ticks all those outside of OU. University of Texas has one that looked pretty ok, but it was kind of expensive for a non-Texas resident. University of Western Florida has one for “Mathematical Sciences”, which more or less fits, and it’s not even that expensive, but I think that one is synchronous.

Yeah, I wish there were more options than that. Also, remote phd or master+phd would be even better, but these are even more uncommon and pricey (unless you know about a one that is good and cheap and remote then I’d love to learn more)

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

#714
I've been working in the intersection of LLMs and Traditional Astrology, for personal knowledge, professional and personal decision-making, and mostly for fun. I'm not a professional astrologer (I'm a CS PhD Professor), but I've studied with some people (some renowned authors on the field) and always had curiosity about it.

I have a python astrology library [1] which I use to generate my astrology chart, as text, to feed it into an LLM (Gemini 2.5 Pro). I then ask it questions about personal characteristics (the easy parts), but, more interesting, I can also ask it to consider some scenarios and it answers back with several hypothesis and how well it fits my character, personal goals, etc. It's like talking to a friend that knows you very very well.

Lately I've been working with a technique called Primary Directions. It's a predictive technique that tries to describe events in your life by means of astrological symbols (things like "Opposition of Saturn reaches the MC by 34.5 years old", which means something "bad" for your career or social position) and use it to check if a specific scenario has worked for me previously and will work in the future, and to ask it for other scenarios that match my personal characteristics and predicted symbolic events. I find LLMs, specifically Gemini Pro, quite good at these kind of things.

I also have fun "playing" with other peoples charts. For instance last night I gave it my chart and list of primary directions to Gemini and asked it if it could find who it was. It said Kurt Cobain. Quite off! But it described a lot of events that could fit my primary directions, like for instance, that Kurt Cobain got his guitar at his 14's or the one at 27 where he died. I didn't die at 27 (but "life issues") and also got my first guitar at 14. I'm also a musician, although an amateur one.

If you're into these kind of things, I created a gist [2] that you can feed into an LLM and talk to Kurt Cobain's chart. Note that it doesn't mention anywhere that it's Kurt Cobain. For fun, ask it something like "Considering the chart and the events predicted by the primary directions, in which ages will this person have some success or public visibility". In my case it answered, among others, 13-14 yo something related to "success, popularity, academic, sports or artistic achievement" (Kurt Cobain seems to got his first guitar at 14, and discovered his vocation), and 23-24 "beginning of career, marriage, or first step that puts the person on the 'map'" (release of the Nevermind album that catapulted Nirvana to the world stage). You can then ask it to match the events to Kurt Cobain, and it will find the real life events that seem to match it quite well.

I find that LLMs are quite good at generating hypothesis, multiple scenarios, and I'm still exploring their strengths and weaknesses (and of astrology as well).

[1] https://github.com/flatangle/flatlib/

[2] https://gist.github.com/joaoventura/68e0aed7c49c389347df98ec...

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

#715
Mostly just doing some furry porn commissions while I wait for my partner to finish enough of the scripts for the next chapter of out comic (http://egypt.urnash.com/npol/) for me to start drawing pages.

If you have more money than you know what to do with and want to support queer artists then https://comradery.co/egypturnash and https://www.patreon.com/egypturnash are great ways to funnel some of your money into my wallet :)

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

#717

I've built a VST3 plug-in that simulates a Mesa Boogie Mark IIC+ preamp purely from the circuit. The approach doesn't seem popular for professional plug-ins likely because it wasn't viable for real time until modern CPU enhancements became available. Performance scales with frequency of the input which is interesting and seems to be a consequence of using an iterative solver on a system of equations and using the pre…

How does the performance and accuracy compare to modeling the same amp using NAM or similar AI tool?

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

#719

Working on fabric construction blocks (like Lego of clothing), that you can use to build clothing and accessories completely by hand without any tools or machines. Intro video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_eKc6c5tDw

this is a really important and disruptive idea. amazing.

what do you need to scale this?

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

#720
post #717

I've built a VST3 plug-in that simulates a Mesa Boogie Mark IIC+ preamp purely from the circuit. The approach doesn't seem popular for professional plug-ins likely because it wasn't viable for real time until modern CPU enhancements became available. Performance scales with frequency of the input which is interesting and seems to be a consequence of using an iterative solver on a system of equations and using the pre…

How does the performance and accuracy compare to modeling the same amp using NAM or similar AI tool?

Not sure, don't have any of those. The response feels very natural from my own playing.

Here's a little announcement video I put together a week ago for an earlier version:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xEy34cuOPaY

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