alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
What are you working on? Any new ideas which you're thinking about?
Comments
Lately I've been trying to detect/mitigate prompt injection attacks. Wrote a blog post about why it's hard: https://alexcbecker.net/blog/prompt-injection.html
Writing the last chapter of my book myindiebook.com for the official release in July.
It's the story of how I quit my job ($100k/year) with no experience, foundation or advantage to build a profitable one-man business 3 years later.
Working on my startup: ProtoMatter
Automating Clean-room plant propagation using robots
There are about 2-3+ Billion plants cloned in laboratory conditions per year which are all done by hand. I am in the process of trying to develop a MVP to automate this task while also getting customer conversations to get early adopters.
What I am struggling with is that I don't know if I should focus on developing the MVP which will cost 20k-40k & 4-6 months to develop or put in place a pilot program to get customers willing to buy the machine / pay up front before I start developing. Hardware startups are rough usually because their MVP takes so long to develop.
I am currently bootstrapping while I am pushing for more conversations trying to do both at once. I could personally finance the venture, but it seems like a poor move to just take on all the risk personally? I have am setting up conversations with a few VCs, but that is a month out.
I'm working on this full time at the moment. I have a couple people who I have talked to who could be co-founders but nothing has materialized yet. So I am just all over the place at this stage in the process.
I spoke to 4-5 potential customers and 2-3 of which are 'interested' in what I have but seem only interested in the 'validation' stage which only comes up after the huge personal investment on my end.
My wife and I recently started sharing our passion for cooking at https://soulfulsabor.com. Got WordPress set up to get things running and focus on the cooking and photos. Wordpress turned out to be hyper complex for my taste and needs plugins for a lot of things, so I'm starting to develop my own static site for specifically for food blogs, not wanting to turn it into a product but just to add simplicity to our own workflow. The cooking side of the project is really fulfilling after a long day in the computer, it feels great to do something tangible with quick results. Got a bunch of bread recipes to upload soon.
https://readworks.app/ is an app to do research within PDF collections mainly for scientists or in the legal field. It’s an oss project I’ve worked on the last two years.
I’ve figured out that I lack in terms of marketing / sales and to develop successful strategies to gain visibility. So actually enjoining the summer rather than coding at night / weekends but still having plenty ideas how develop it further and assist analytical reading.
My Carnatic Raga classifier is progressing very well. I am now training a classifier to identify 142 ragas.
A bit of background: I have been working on a Raga classifier since November of last year - I started with just 2 ragas and a couple megabytes of audio. After experimenting with a lot of different ideas and Neural Net Architectures, I finally landed on one that could scale. I increases to 4 ragas, then 12, then 25 and then to 65.
All the training is done locally on my desktop (RTX4080, AMD 7950X, 64G RAM). My goal is to make an app for fast inferencing (preferably CPU) and to get this app in the hands of enthusiasts so that I can get some real data on its efficacy. If that goal is hit, then my plan is to iterate and keep increasing the raga count on the model and eventually release to the public. As long as I can get the model to either run locally or for very cheap on server, I hope to not charge for this.
It has been an amazing learning experience. The first time I got a carnatic singer to sing and the model nailed almost all ragas was the highest high I've felt in a while.
A free meeting-scheduling tool with all the pro-sounding features without any restrictions or commissions. Think Calendly, but free and much better.
https://thecoderssage.com Trying to build a platform for creating specific tailored coding lessons from prompts or your own code, with interactive coding, quizzes and exercises.Kind of youtube shorts but for coding lessons, on demand.
Writing SFF novels!
I need to put it up on the ol' blog-thing, but I've signed a contract with a small press for a debut novel, which is highly exciting. That one's urban fantasy from the point of view of the wizard's magic cloak. (You better believe it has opinions.)
Meanwhile, I've been working on a novel about a group of time travelers who accidentally get stuck in the Permian, well before the dinosaurs. Surprise! There are still big animals that can eat you, they're just more weird (and not as big). The research for that one has been wild.
The ol' blog thing, where I post story-related tidbits and such: https://rznicolet.com
Compiler back-end for WASM and more, but with the core at a slightly lower abstraction level than WASM and with a somewhat novel ABI.
To abstract around register file differences in different ISAs, I'm using SSA-form with spilling to a separate "safe stack". Enforces code-pointer integrity for security's sake (not unlike WASM) but extended also to virtual method tables.
"Partial-ISA migration" allows a program to run on multiple cores with slightly different ISA extensions. "Build-migration" is migration to another build of the same program in the same address space: Instead of trying to debug an optimised program, you would migrate it to a "debug-build" to attach a debugger. Or you could run a profiling build, compile a new build using the result and then migrate the running program to the optimised build: something that previously only JIT-compilers have done AFAIK.
I'm out of the research stage and at the stage of writing the first iteration of the main passes of the compiler, but now and then I've had to back-track and reread a paper on a compiler algorithm or refine the spec. It has taken a few years, and I expect it to take a few years more.
I'm working on a system to help people write their Family History.
You upload interviews with family members (text, audio or video all work) and the system automatically transcribes the text, finds key people or events, and puts it together with other information you may have gathered about those events or people before. Like building a genealogical tree but with the actual details about people's lives.
In the works to also attach pictures of said people and events to give it some life.
I'm working on an online photo gallery platform for professional photographers. The MVP is ready, but I'm also using the opportunity to learn more about SEO, marketing, and communication. This is the URL: https://picstack.com
One interesting lesson is to see the effort involved in acquiring new customers and setting up funnels, especially when bootstrapping with a small budget. Sometimes, as developers, we are in our bubbles and don't realize how much skill one needs to figure out the customer acquisition domain.
https://askcrystal.info/dashboard
We aggregated half a dozen plus disparate data sources to create a comprehensive infrastructure map of the PNW power grid. Our goal is to be able to query for and provide informed answers for grid operators, investors, and other energy adjacent businesses in the space.
(For reference): The PNW has the most abundant clean power in the US and is one of the markets with most opportunity as our consumption increases with AI.
I have been writing a few technical posts about how ML is used to show ads: https://satyagupte.github.io/posts/how-ads-work/
currently in the process of building a small CPG/food lab/accelerator/incubator. I have access to talent, supply chain, logistics network, retail space and a little bit of capital. I want to take and implement the VC model for SaaS startups in Mexico. I'll have a very specific selection process for products we would take on and I'll provide all the infrastructure to get the product onto store shelves in Mexico, USA and hopefully Europe.
I have no idea what I'm doing but I never really have. I've always just figured it out on the way.
I'm putting the finishing touches on VT[0] - a minimal AI chat client focused on privacy. No tracking, clean interface, with support for deep research, web search grounding, tool calls, and RAG... and more.
The code is all open source on GitHub[1]. Really close to shipping now - hope to share launch details soon.
These monthly HN threads have been great motivation for me to keep building consistently. Thanks everyone!
https://github.com/patched-network/vue-skuilder https://patched.network
FOSS toolkit for SRS and adaptive tutoring systems. Inching closer to proper demos and inviting usage.
In essence, I'm looking to decouple ed-tech content authoring (eg, a flash card, an exercise, a text) from content navigation (eg, personalizing paths and priorities given individual goals and demonstrated competencies), allowing for something like a multi-sided marketplace or general A/B engine over content that can greatly diminish the need to "build your own deck" for SRS to be effective.
Project became my main focus recently after ~8 years of tiny dabbling, and I've largely succeeded at pulling spaghetti monolith into a sensible assembly of packages and abstractions. EG, the web UI can now pull from either a 'live' couchdb datalayer or from statically served JSON (with converters between), and I'm 75% through an MVP tui interface to the same system as well.
This goes against the grain - but I’m starting to reimagine enterprise & manufacturing workflows using AI.
Very good leadership support, small (but great) team, huge mandate and uncertainties - and it’s quite exciting.
We are also hiring - AI+Full Stack https://cenovus.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/careers/job/Seni...
Side project to enable speech-to-text functionality on my Ubuntu laptop so I can prompt AI coding tools fast:
I've started to make EDM since 2 weeks ago. I've always wanted to do it and now I finally get to spend some time to do it. I'm having tons of fun.
The premise is that when I read social spaces like Reddit or X, if the government has done anything contentious you get nothing more than strident left takes, or strident right takes on the topic. Neither of which is informative or helpful.
So I have set up a site which uses AI which is specifically guided to be neutral and non-partisan, to analyses the government actions from the source documents. It then gives a summary, expected effect, benefits and disadvantages, and ranks the action against 19 "things people care about" (e.g. defence, environment, civil liberties, religious protection, etc.)
The end result is quite compelling. For example here's the page that summarises all the actions which are extremely beneficial or disadvantageous to individual liberties: https://sivic.life/tyca/tyca_individual_liberties/
Repo: https://github.com/ilmoraunio/conjtest
Conjtest is a policy-as-code CLI tool which allows you to run tests against common configuration file formats using Clojure. You can write policies using Clojure functions or declarative schemas against many common configuration file formats such as YAML, JSON, HCL, and many others (full list in repo).
Under the hood, it uses Babashka and SCI (Small Clojure Interpreter) to run the policies and Conftest/Go parsers for compatibility with Conftest (https://www.conftest.dev/). It’s also possible to bring your own parser or reporting engine using Babashka scripting.
The initial big pieces are in place now, I’m preparing my end of the year to talk about Conjtest and get some feedback/issues to work on.
Two person Micro-SaaS which helps employers collect one way video interview screening responses from candidates at scale
Here's Hirevire’s #buildinpublic stats for June 2025!
MRR Metrics
$4263 MRR (+18.79% MoM ▲)
$348 is the average lifetime value and ARPU is $51.35
14.71% Gross MRR churn rate and 13.43% customer churn
$119,426 total revenue (last 12 months)
2 years and 10 months since launch
8.1K unique visitors, 4K from Google organic
$14,258 one time revenue collected
29634 (45% MOM ▲) applications collected
Conversion numbers
3.18% Visits to Trial signups
8.46% Trial to paid plans
I've been working on a simple, multi-protocol, global pub/sub system. https://messagebus.org/
It currently supports subscribing, publishing, and unsubscribing in JMS, MQTT5, Redis, and Websockets, and send-only in SNS.
I'm not really sure who might use it, but it's been fun.
https://figma-to-react-native.com
Plugin to convert Figma designs to React Native code fully client-side.
And a complimentary service that syncs the code directly to your filesystem in real-time, as well as an optional MCP server to flex the generated code to your codebase to fit your framework/libraries.
Source: https://github.com/kat-tax/figma-to-react-native
(includes cool tech like lightningcss-wasm for styles conversion and esbuild-wasm for client-side previews)
I posted a couple of months ago:
https://github.com/dahlend/kete
Research grade orbit calculations for asteroids and comets (rust/python).
I began working on this when I worked at caltech on the Near Earth Object Surveyor telescope project. It was originally designed to predict the location of asteroids in images. I have moved to germany for a PhD. I am actively extending this code for my phd research (comet dust dynamics).
Its made to compute the entire asteroid catalog at once on a laptop. There is always a tradeoff between accuracy and speed, this is tuned to be <10km over a decade for basically the entire catalog, but giving up that small amount of accuracy gained a lot of speed.
Example, here is the close approach of Apophis in 2029:
https://dahlend.github.io/kete/auto_examples/plot_close_appr...
https://vibed.pub/ "vibe blogging" platform, think bolt.new x substack.
Waitlist is open, /blog contains example posts
We're building Zigpoll (https://www.zigpoll.com), a survey platform focused on zero-party data collection — think post-purchase attribution, customer feedback, and segmentation — all done directly on your site without relying on third-party cookies or offsite links.
We initially built it for Shopify, but now it’s fully embeddable, supports headless implementations, and integrates with tools like Klaviyo, Zapier, n8n, and Snowflake. One thing we’re especially proud of is how fast and unobtrusive it is: polls load async, don’t block rendering, and are optimized for mobile and low-latency responses.
From a tech angle:
Frontend is all React, optionally SSR-safe.
Backend is Node.js + Postgres, with a heavy focus on queueing + caching for real-time response pipelines.
API-first design (public API just launched: apidocs.zigpoll.com).
We recently open-sourced our n8n integration too.
If you're a dev working on ecom, SaaS, or even internal tooling and need a non-annoying way to collect structured feedback, happy to chat or get you set up. Feedback welcome — especially critical stuff. Always looking to improve.
Figuring out the plot and character designs for the next chapter of my graphic novel about a utopia run by AIs who have found that taking the form of unctuous, glazing clowns is the best way to get humans to behave in ways that fulfil the AI's reward functions.
And moving my financial support for this graphic novel over to a new crowdfunding platform that's run as an employee-owned co-op instead of a for-profit affair with a lot of VC investment that's starting to demand more and more attention to turning a profit.
A Parquet file compactor. I have a client whose data lakes are partitioned by date, and obviously they end up with thousands of files all containing single/dozens/thousands of rows.
I’d estimate 30-40% of their S3 bill could be eliminated just by properly compacting and sorting the data. I took it as an opportunity to learn DuckDB, and decided to build a tool that does this. I’ll release it tomorrow or Tuesday as FOSS.
A better paint-by-numbers generator than what I found online.
Examples wiki: https://github.com/scottvr/pbngen/wiki
The code: https://github.com/scottvr/pbngen
https://pickyskincare.com - a tool that lets you find skin care products based on the ingredients you want and don't want in it. The main use case is for finding cheaper versions of a product you already like, or one without things you're allergic or sensitive to.
It's written in elixir using Phoenix live views. There's almost no custom Javascript outside of what that framework gives. First load may take a while because it's the cheapest tier of fly.io and boot loads all known ingredients and products in to memory.
Still building: https://www.saner.ai/
The ADHD-friendly AI personal assistant for notes, email, and calendar.
Where you can just chat to search notes, manage emails, and schedule tasks. It proactively plans your day every moring and checks in to help you stay on top of everything.
Getting close to dark-launching a web-app that scans a domain for common issues - there's a heap of "performance measurement", "security analysis", "SEO scan" sites - but nothing that really does them all - a one-stop-shop if you will.
It's been a fun ride co-coding with Claude (Sonnet 3.5 > 3.7 > Code). Already it found a bunch of interesting bugs on a heap of my own sites, older employer sites, friend's sites.
Started as a simple Django web app, extended to Celery+Redis, now also leveraging CF Workers and R2 storage.
Was bourne out of an observation that some sites I have been working on missed some crucial things like domain expiration of asset-domains, mis-configured CORS or SSL certificates, http header and meta collisions, missing/wrong redirects for http/https/www/no-www etc.
For fun, I am building a little tool called 'domain-manager'. Basically just a binary that automates configuring a Linux host to run a bunch of WordPress/Laravel/PHP sites.
It creates all the necessary boilerplate to generate PHP Docker containers, creates all of the MySQL users, and sets up all of the directory structures to get a new website up and running. It even helps set up SFTP users and gets letsencrypt certificates set up with certbot.
It's still very early days, but I appreciate that what used to be a bunch of commands that I would run by hand and slightly change every few months is now pretty much just all self contained. Should mean the next migration to a different server is easier.
Created in frustration because I was too cheap to pay the $50/month for a cPanel license.
Broadly: Still forging ahead building a game server framework in Erlang. I've shifted my attention away from Godot integration (which AFAIK is still working) and toward LÖVE and Lua. Godot is great, but having to write GDScript on the client and Erlang on the backend has caused me many headaches in my game logic. My current goal is to have a beautiful, concurrent, Erlang-based control plane with Lua-based game logic running on both the server and the client.
To that end, I've most recently been hacking on Robert Virding's Luerl (https://github.com/rvirding/luerl), working to adapt the Lua test suite to chase down some small compatibility issues between PUC Lua and Luerl. While Lua is a lovely language, it would also be swell to get Fennel working under Luerl. I wrote a game for the LÖVE jam a few months ago in Fennel and it was a pleasant way to dip my toes into lisp-likes.
I've also been adding things to control plane software, Overworld, here and there: https://github.com/saltysystems/overworld Happily all of the Protobuf and ENet stuff that I've already built nicely carries over into the LÖVE world.
I've been working on my own version of a literate programming system (https://github.com/adam-ard/organic-markdown). It's kind of a mix of emacs org-mode, jupyter, and Zettelkasten. But, because it's based on standard pandoc-style markdown, you can use it with a much wider range of tools. Any markdown editor will do.
Even though I made it as a toy/proof of concept, it's turned out to be pretty useful for small to medium size projects. As I've used it, I've found all kinds of interesting benefits and helpful usage patterns. I've tried to document some; I hope to do more soon.
--https://rethinkingsoftware.substack.com/p/the-joy-of-literat...
--https://rethinkingsoftware.substack.com/p/organic-markdown-i...
--https://rethinkingsoftware.substack.com/p/dry-on-steroids-wi...
--https://rethinkingsoftware.substack.com/p/literate-testing
--https://www.youtube.com/@adam-ard/videos
The project is at a very early stage, but is finally stable enough that I thought it'd be fun to throw out here and see what people think. It's definitely my own unique spin on literate programming and it's been a lot of fun. See what you think!
I'm building https://zenquery.app — a tool for querying large CSV, JSON, Parquet and Excel files using plain English. No SQL or coding required.
As a data engineer, I regularly have to dig through massive files to debug issues or validate assumptions — things like missing column values, abnormally large timestamps, inconsistent types, or duplicate records. It’s tedious and time-consuming, and that’s what led me to build this.
ZenQuery makes it quick and easy to explore data locally, without needing to spin up notebooks, write scripts, or upload anything to the cloud. It’s also useful for doing lightweight analytical QA if you're working with business data.
Happy to answer any questions.
I built a hardware server monitor with LED display based on the ESP8266. I needed 8 fewer things to think about in the morning. If you want, you can build one yourself, I released the hardware and firmware: https://github.com/seanboyce/servermon
Next up is a small lamp for migraines. I noticed that dim red light is much more tolerable to me than anything else. I mean obviously, darkness is ideal, but you need to do other stuff like eat and drink eventually if it's a persistent one.
So I designed a quick circuit to use fast PWM (few Mhz, so no flicker) to control a big red LED. I'd like it to be sturdy and still functional in 50-100 years, so made some design choices for long-term durability. No capacitors, replaceable LED and so on.
A simple project, but it's a busy month and I need something easy this time.
Integrating molecular dynamics into my protein viewer: https://github.com/David-OConnor/daedalus
a Slack and Discord app to help take turns (i.e. queue) with your teammates, overwhelmingly used for sharing tech resources like staging servers. It's crazy something that started so tiny (almost as a joke for my old workplace) has grown into my main "thing".
an infrastructure configuration monitoring solution for terraform/opentofu managed stacks. I am unsure how to proceed with this tbh. It's sort of the underdog in this space - it's much cheaper than the competitors. But really, it's yet to make a dent.
(I am maybe prowling around for something new to build)
I'm working on a little website to summarize discussion trends across the podcast ecosystem. I wrote about an early prototype here[1] and also gave a presentation about it a few months ago[2] and now I'm working on an expanded "daily pulse" view across hundreds of episodes of top news podcasts from the last few days.
My secret agenda is to explore how the "information supply chain" can be tracked across the data-processing stack all the way from the original audio through transcription, the processing pipeline, and UI. I'm using language models for multi-stage summarization and want to be able to follow the provenance of summaries all the way back to the transcripts and original audio.
More and more people are more cognizant of their alcohol consumption, and like calories - it can be hard to eyeball them compared to the "standard unit" (14g alcohol).
I build an iOS app (https://quenchai.app) that uses a carefully constructed Multimodal LLM workflow to convert photos to standard drinks and track consumption over time.
Did you know a standard margarita is ~2.5 standard drinks and a light beer is ~0.8?
Insurance is negative NPV. Trying to make it NPV neutral by giving people tools to self-insure. Starting with an app that lets you self-insure your phone with friends and family.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/open-insure-self-insurance/id6...
I’ve built the best way to learn over 120 languages to advanced levels (optimized for studying multiple languages in parallel): https://phrasing.app
I got the demo video produced, and a blog set up and seeded. You can see some of the science behind learning multiple languages at https://phrasing.app/blog/multiple-languages or follow my progress using Phrasing to learn 18+ languages at https://phrasing.app/blog/language-log-000
Now I’m working on the onboarding process, which I’m very excited about on both a product and a technical level. On the product level, it dovetails nicely into most of the shortcomings of the app. One solution to a dozen problems.
On the technical level, I’m starting to migrate away from reagent (ClojureScript react wrapper). The first step was adapting preact/signals-react to support r/atom, r/cursor, and r/reaction. This has worked beautifully so far and the whole module, with helpers, is less than 100 LoC. I’m irrationally excited about it, and every time I use any method it brings me a stupid amount of joy… especially since it’s exactly the same API as reagent.
For those curious, the next steps in the migration will be: upgrading to React 19 support once reagent ships with it (in alpha currently), then replacing the leaf components with hsx and working my way up the tree. No real code changes, just a lot of testing needed. Maybe at the end of it all, I can switch the whole app over to preact — will be interesting to test the performance differences.
As far as ideas I’m thinking about, I’m currently planning the next task in my head. This will be an (internal) clojure library that will hopefully have ClojErl (erlang), ClojureScript (js), and jank (C) interfaces, which means I’ll be able to write clojure once, and run on the server, browser, and mobile — all in their native environment. Needless to say, being able to write isomorphic clojure without running JavaScript everywhere has me almost as excited as my signals wrapper :D
A few things!
1. After hearing Cell by Pannotia, I became obsessed with trying my hand at making a bit of electronic music. I have an Arturia Keystep 32, a Korg NTS-1 and a Korg SQD-1 to mess around with, but I'd really love to learn how to capture the sound on the Pannotia's album since it speaks to me on a visceral level (album link for the curious: https://pannotia.bandcamp.com/album/cell)
2. Turning some old telephones into fun "audio guestbooks", have some additional features lined up that I am going to add (just waiting on parts to arrive), trying to improve a bit on the ones shown in this excellent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI6ielrP1SE
3. Managed to get a blog post up recently. My work is not exactly what I would call "HN worthy" but if you need a laugh or some decent toilet reading, it probably qualifies (my blog: https://futz.tech/)
I love these threads. So many people working on so many different and interesting things. Renews my hope for the future, a bit.
I've been building a satirical t-shirt brand for the miserably employed: https://www.miserablyemployed.com/
As a European missing a managed hosting solution, me and a buddy of mine are building an alternative: https://ploi.cloud
The goal is quite simple, allow developers to host their application with easy straight forward pricing. We are about to launch very soon. Everything is built on Laravel/PHP.
We are open to beta testers, so if you feel you want to test this please drop me and email in my profile.
Building some software for the Trim UI Brick. It's such a neat little thing; being able to turn it into an offline-first device that can handle my data needs would sincerely fill me with joy.
Right now I'm making an Anki-style flashcard system in Rust (https://github.com/jmahmood/Cardbrick/). It's amazing that all of the annoying stoppers I've had with build systems were blown away by Gemini. It's also nice to actually build something that is not another web application.
(I say this knowing there is zero value in me posting this in a thread with 1134 comments already)
I am building a Hardware Design Language for FPGA accelerators.
The big trick or the language is that it doesn't hide the pipelining you have to do to up your FMax, instead, you can manually add register stages in the places they're important, and the compiler will synchronize the other paths.
A really neat trick with this pipelining system is that submodules can respond to the amount of pipelining around them (through inferring template parameters). This way the programmer really doesn't have to think about the pipelining they do add. Examples are a FIFO's almost_full treshold, inferring how many simultaneous state there needs to be for a pipelined loop, inferring the depth of BRAM shift regs, etc.
https://sus-lang.org
https://github.com/pc2/sus-compiler