alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
Comments
Making a phishing domain detection tool through Certificate Transparency real time scanning.
I intend to make it "too cheap to pass", because we should all be able to monitor Certificate Transparency.
Email me if you want to be a design partner!
I just relaunched my 15 year old niche online community for fans and users of tractors:
It’s part of a broader network of niches within the agricultural, heavy equipment and transportation sectors.
It has around 10M pages and pretty decent traffic.
I'm still tweaking my tool for creating accessible Tailwind-style color palettes for web/UI design that pass WCAG 2 contrast requirements:
https://www.inclusivecolors.com/
There's 100s of color palette generation tools, where most only let you customize a single color then try to autogenerate tints/shades without much thought about accessibility or tints/shades customization. The main features of this tool are:
- Emphasis on accessibility. A live UI mockup using your palette warns you if your tints/shades are lacking contrast when used in practice for headings, paragraphs, borders, and buttons, and teaches you the WCAG rules. Fixing contrast issues and exploring accessible color options is also made much easier using an HSLuv color picker, where only the lightness slider alters the contrast checks, and not the hue/saturation sliders (most tools use HSL, where hue/saturation changes counterintuitively alter contrast checks which makes accessibility really tough!).
- You can tweak the hue/saturation/lightness of every tint/shade. This is useful because autogenerated colors are never quite right, and customization is really important for branding work when you have to include specific tints/shades. The curve-based hue/saturation/lightness editing UI also makes this a really quick process.
- Instead of just a handful of colors, this tool lets you create a full palette. For example, if your primary color is blue, you always end up needing other colors like green for success, red for danger, and gray for text, then 11 tints/shades for all of these, so you want a tool that lets you tweak, check, compare and manage them all at once.
It's mostly a demo on mobile so check it on desktop. I'm still working on making it easier to use as it probably requires some design background to understand, but really open to feedback!
I'm making a cat themed puzzle game for my wife using NiceGUI, MindAR and some cat shaped sticky notes. Each note has a name and a secret code. I've hidden 20 of these around the house. I set up a single page app in NiceGUI to display a grid of the lost cats. When you click one it'll display their name, a clue to its hiding spot and an optional hint. 5 of the puzzles use MindAR that will display AR image cards over different art pieces and book covers in our house. I have the NiceGUI page and MindAR set up on one of my Proxmox LXCs that I use for various Flask servers.
Working on an app to learn Hiragana.
A gamified approach that gradually introduces characters.
As I'm currently in Osaka I can use my own app well :) Hoping to make learning Japanese more fun.
It's here: https://app.tolearnjapanese.com
It's based on my simple web app to learn Korean vocabulary. I'm taking elements from Anki and other language learning apps, but making it focused so it works well in a broader language learning journey.
For learning Korean vocabulary: https://game.tolearnkorean.com
Have also been writing about these in my monthly mail-letter: https://bryanhogan.com/follow
I was thinking about FizzBuzz and thought it might be cool to benchmark various LLMs to see the highest number they could go before they got it wrong. FizzBuzz is cool because you can test whether the model's can generalize to any other game (divisors of 3 and 7 instead of 3 and 5 for example).
Fun, short and sweet experiment to run over the weekend, with some mildly interesting results :)
I resurrected some of my old code for computing hash collisions: https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/birthday_party (it's actually more of a rewrite)
It can collide 96-bit truncated sha256 in under 24 hours on a 6700XT.
Next steps are a) figure out something interesting/useful to do with it (beyond surprising people), and b) modify it to support accepting contributions from untrusted clients (see "Future Ideas" in README). For a sufficiently interesting answer to a) I could create a "SETI@home"-like system.
A ~102-bit collision would cost $$ worth of rented GPU capacity, and 128-bit is optimistically possible with enough crowd-sourced compute (a ~5-figure dollar cost if you were renting).
A service that allows you to post generic agent/task workload and execute and observe it in the background. Sort of for long timelines. I just want to have background agents to monitor various aspects of my digital life and keep those healthy, eg check if I’m using all of the tax credits and leverage them to get the most after tax cash, or constantly monitor my network and alert me when something is off, or scan and evaluate my public contributions and remind to post something new once in a while. Just a tool to make sure I am on top of everything.
Using Go on the back, React for ui, sqlite, containers for async work, openai. Trying to keep it simple.
Trying to nail down version 1.0 of mooR, my defibrillation, rewrite, resurrection, and completely bike shedded rewrite of LambdaMOO.
https://timbran.org/moor.html https://codeberg.org/timbran/moor
along with the prototype brand new ultramodern MOO "core" (starter DB) "mooR cowbell"built on top of it https://codeberg.org/timbran/cowbell, with example/demo at https://moo.timbran.org/
Mostly been working on tier6 [0], which is "like" zerotier but over the sanctum protocol and fully open source (ISC licensed).
Getting ready to release a 1.0.0 of sanctum [1], after almost a year of internal testing, dogfooding and talking about it at security conferences.
We've also setup conclave [2] as an official release site for the projects tied to sanctum such as tier6, or the library implementation of the protocol etc.
A multi-purpose scrapper to turn any webpage into structured data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45870231
It uses LLMs to generate python code to scrap a webpage to fit any Pydantic model provided:
from hikugen import HikuExtractor
from pydantic import BaseModel
from typing import List
class Article(BaseModel):
title: str
author: str
published_date: str
content: str
class ArticlePage(BaseModel):
articles: List[Article]
extractor = HikuExtractor(api_key="your-openrouter-api-key")
result = extractor.extract(
url="https://example.com/articles",
schema=ArticlePage
)
for a in result.articles:
print(a.title, a.author)- Inspiree by my wife to pursue my weaponized desire to create things and organize my thoughts, I’m trying to gather my marbles to learn Swift/SwiftUI in order to try building an iOS app that which will automate directing and funneling data to where it needs to go.
- Updating my personal SSG to support Obsidian fully, which should simplify the publishing process a bit more. https://0xff.nu/hajime/
- Trying to find a new job, which is proving to be more difficult than it should be if you have certain standards about work/life balance.
- Writing an informative article about automating with/for ADHD which explains the motivation and solutions that I came up with for perhaps the weirdest, yet most annoying issues I face or forget about on a daily basis.
- Building a micro-learning platform that uses AI-powered role plays and conversational assessments to gauge learner understanding instead of eg. a multiple choice questionnaire.
- I’ve just started designs and initial setup for a personal productivity system heavily inspired by the Newton & HyperCard and built in Rust. Idea is to use LLMs to build GraphRAG-like connections between content & break out of the standard app+document model. My current thinking is having ‘frames’ of content (notes, sketches, events etc) that are acted on by capabilities and displayed in views (timeline, calendar, stack, knowledge graph etc).
- Also working on a static site generator and CMS webapp that creates sites that can be viewed on anything, from web browser to TUI. Like if Gemini or Gopher also rendered to html.
Working on increasing the knowledge about the watch industry. I just posted an article about how Swiss Super-LumiNova® is made. https://www.thenakedwatchmaker.com/making-swiss-super-lumino...
Trying to figure out how this platform works as well. :))
I added Nvidia PhysX to GameMaker. https://youtu.be/CNy4D0Kfu34 I have a public alpha launching in two weeks, so this video is unlisted at the moment. Nervous but I'm pretty happy with the current API.
https://saveam.app & https://planam.app (all WIP)
Basically building a read-it-later app and a work todo-list app to my personal taste.
Some recent tools, finished/improved this year:
- db2qthelp — a DocBook book to QtHelp project converter (https://github.com/dkrajzew/db2qthelp)
- grebakker: a private backup tool (https://github.com/dkrajzew/grebakker)
- gresiblos: a tiny static site builder (https://github.com/dkrajzew/gresiblos)
Currently, I work on a Desktop GLSL shader editor. Looks fine so far...
I am working for a while on a command line game about spacepirates playing basketball across the galaxy. The game is a basketball managerial game with some pirate-y stuff. It's a P2P game with no central server, built on top of libp2p.
It runs as a terminal application, meaning that you just need to run it from your terminal, but you can try the game over ssh without installing: `ssh frittura.org -p 3788`
downloads: https://rebels.frittura.org/ repo: https://github.com/ricott1/rebels-in-the-sky
Feels like I’m the only one here not already a greybeard, so just gonna share in case it resonates with anyone not already building awesome things: I’m working on learning how to program with C++. New at this, loving it, hoping to make a career change into IT in the coming year.
Working on migrating Hopp's [1] overlay window, which we use for drawing the remote cursors, from winit + wgpu to gpui. I used claude in the weekend to make a prototype and now I want to make a gpui app, which will replicate all of our requirements, in order to see what is missing and if I need to contribute upstream. I am planning to write a blog post when the migration is over.
I built a website (https://hpyhn.xyz) for hacker news users for reasons: 1. hn comments are valuable, I've spent a lot of time going through hn comments. I think there are valuable comments buried in the threads with fewer points, so it's not enough to just read top3 threads.
2. Sometimes a good post is ignored due to a bad title, sometimes I still have no idea what the post's theme even after I read a few paragraphs.
3. I want to filter out some posts I'm not interested in, but I realized I need read some other posts it's not a simple yes/no problem, so I gave every post a interesting score based on my own preference
so I built this tool to save my time while not missing out too much on hn
I’ve made AI browser that others do but having full control.
It was my weekend 1-day hackathon yesterday building Electron-based web browser connected with PlayWright MCP and local Codex as LLM backend.
Yes, you need to be ChatGPT Pro+ to use, because Codex has no usage fee unlike API Key.
GPT-5.1-Codex-Max can handle really complex web task without templating DOM. Codex-Mini is fast so you can pick models. It does my job applying task to any of recruiting sites with no interactions. (with persistent data store, which is currently disabled on published version)
Enterprise/Organization focused MCP gateway with support for sophisticated credentials management, integrates with OIDC/SAML, team and profiles support, external secret stores (AWS/GCP/Azure/Hashicrop Vault), using envelope encryption, and in-band-MCP authorization trigger for e.g. trying to use a tool which Gatana not yet has credentials for.
Ideal for Agent-2-Agent/dev teams/Github Copilot Agent (the one you assign issues)
Stack is k8s, NodeJS, React, Google KMS, hosted on GKE, with GKE Sandbox for local server isolation.
I'm learning Java and hoping to finish a course and a big project I've been working on for a while.
https://paydai.in We are building agentic solution to fine tune your resume that fit the job requirements. Fine tuning helps to full the gaps you have and helps to standout
An AI coding tool desktop application written in Rust and Javascript. Cursor, Windsurf and etc uses too much memory on my machine. As an engineer it is important that the tools I use daily are performant and fast and I could use while watching a youtube video or browse hackernews.
While working on the tool I am building some boilerplates to start from, starting with mobile games targeting arcade games like Flappy Bird.
I'm completely rebuilding my storm chasing game "Tornado: Research and Rescue"
We've been building https://nimstrata.com/ for almost three years now, we put Google's Vertex AI product discovery algorithms on Shopify and Salesforce ecommerce storefronts.
At a high level, Google does not have a product culture, so there is a lot of white space for companies like ours to make adopting Google Cloud APIs much easier for less technical users.
It's also wild how much Agentic AI is creeping into all of our conversations - this space is constantly evolving as we're building.
A typed execution graph for Go. You write functions with typed inputs and outputs—Docket infers the dependency graph, runs independent steps in parallel, and caches what you tell it to. It integrates with River and a number of data stores.
I spent a year attempting to adopt Temporal at scale, and 6 months trying to wrangle some multistep data enrichment and ML pipelines. This is what I wish I'd had with what I learned
I'm building an application that can communicate with my Plex server, and also communicate with APIs like MusicBrainz and Spotify. From there I want to be able to track my Plex music rating history, and export playlists on Plex to Spotify for easier sharing with others.
There don't seem to be many automated tools out there that fit my need for this, so building out my own solution I have complete control over makes sense. It's a lot of fun to build this out exactly as I want to, rather than trying to configure a bunch of tools that I'm not familiar with and that don't meet my needs exactly.
The tooling I'm building up around this should hopefully make it easier for myself to get my playlists and track ratings off of Plex if I ever decide to abandon it for music listening.
Taking a break from software to remodel a house by myself. The plan was just to redo the kitchen and a bathroom and be done by August, so naturally it's now December here in Minnesota and the house is missing most of its wiring, pipes, insulation, and walls. :) I'm having a great time though and just started producing videos about it: https://youtube.com/shorts/6QDOXxh99PY?si=NOjvNVEVHwQt180A
Fringe physics: Trying to understand WTF the A field is in electrodynamics, and how I can measure it for a price I can afford. Specifically, I want to communicate through a wall of rock or sea water at VHF frequencies, with high bandwidth. I just upgraded my subscription with ChatGPT to try to grok all of the physics involved. It decided that since this could be used to covertly exfiltrate data, it wasn't something that could be discussed. ;(
Recently a friend acquired a Collins KW-1 transmitter, serial number 1. I helped him get it working again after a long period of disuse by it's previous owner. You wouldn't believe how often it turns out that wires and bolts don't actually conduct electricity.
It started out as a take-home assignment for a job I’m interviewing for (they asked for about 10% of what I ended up implementing but I wanted to do/show more :). It’s an aggregator for crypto exchange data.
The app reads the public data stream from exchanges, handles the nitty, gritty details of each exchange’s websocket connections, deals with its quirks, cleans up and normalizes the data into a uniform structure (currently only supporting spot trades) then exposes it downstream as an SSE stream.
Uses Go, Templ, and Mithril.js, and is open source
Link: https://metra.sh
Working on FileMinutes - a file search app for macOS. There are tons of apps in this space, it focuses on practical use-cases and simplicity.
I shared this last month, and it seemed to resonate with people, so I'll share again and maybe new eyeballs will see it this time. I'm continuing to build a body of work on my retro productivity software blog, Stone Tools.
Previous articles which resonated with HN were on Deluxe Paint and VisiCalc. The latest post, "HyperCard on the Macintosh," seems to be making the HN rounds currently. Bret Victor himself chimed in on the HyperCard article over on Mastodon, filling in some nice historical footnotes. https://posts.dynamic.land/@bret/115716576717006637
Unlike many (most?) other retrocomputing explorations, I specifically do not look at games nor do I tie myself to any particular machine, though I'm focused on the 1977 - 1995 period. I spend a minimum of two weeks with each productivity title, trying to learn it, building things with it, and generally trying to understand its approach to solving problems. I'd characterize my writing tone as casual, conversational, and decidedly light-hearted.
Each piece of software (so far, knock on wood) gets me thinking about some other aspect of related computing history, so I explore that as a tangent. With the Superbase article, I talked about "the paperless office." With the VisiCalc article I considered its impact on less obvious industries, notably hog farming.
I hope the passion and effort I put into the articles comes through. If you're interested in computing history beyond just the games I think you'll find something of interest on my blog. "This Week in Retro" did a segment about me and my various projects as well, if you're curious to get an overview of what I'm all about (link is queued up at the start of the segment) https://youtu.be/UHYscl1Ayqg?si=7JM1sZagjoqvPjk2&t=2137
Deciduous.
It's a way of working/tools for working with an LLM that allow you to track decision tree graphs, have the robot make more informed decisions and build its own logical chain for history keeping, and modeling all the work as a DAG of events, goals, outcomes, decisions, and observations that network together to allow you to work better/smarter/faster, giving it a living and recorded memory and ways to explore all this.
It's easiest to check out the short demo on the site.
It also links to the live graph of how the tool has built itself.
I've been hard at work building a weightlifting workout tracking & analytics app. Its main selling points are being iOS native, being a one-time purchase, and being completely private (does not depend on a backend, but still saves data to the cloud).
If it sounds interesting, you can sign up for a waitlist here, it even includes some screenshots: https://plates.framer.website/ (excuse the website being on a framer domain, i promise the app is far more professional)
I'm finally wrapping up a little webdav tool that's been on my todo list for years. It's just a simple tool to copy directories over webdav. I tried using Cadaver but I kept running into strange errors with it. And this one ties in with an unusual authentication setup. Might open source it, haven't decided yet.
Also dicking around with DMARC tools. Was unhappy with all the existing tools, want something simple I can run semi-locally for a bunch of low volume email domains. Haven't decided yet how that will turn out, still in the reading specs & tinkering stage.
Working on turning individual disparate services into a unified zero-trust overlay network (what we're calling a Synthetic Environment™) where mocks and real services can be integrated or work seamlessly together, accessible through traditional networking or exposed public tunnels.
This is a developers tool, that can be used during development to seamlessly integrate mocks and changes into existing systems. Or easily expose internal work through a public tunnel. Or if been in an position where its hard to push to staging, pre-prod or other environments because of many competing constraints, then this product may help.
A platform that takes your podcast footage and produces the podcast(with trailer), mid form clips and reels by analyzing what your audience responds to posts it on various social media[0].
A fiat to crypto payment gateway for businesses and freelancers without a strict KYC. Users can pay using card and merchants can claim instant crypto settlement[1].
WIP: a casino algorithm that outperforms most casino algorithms in terms of user retention over a long period of time with the objective function of maximizing long term profit.
[0]: https://xclip.in [1]: https://obliqpay.com
Working on https://greatreads.dev/ A place to aggregate and find articles from developers' blogs. Right now, I'm building a submission form for people to submit new sources.
There is also a way to search for articles using vectors, it's called "Semantic Search". So basically you can ask, for example, "Postgresql and how to best optimize it." and it would search for articles touching that subject, or at least related to it.
Wondering about the best way I can add a weekly newsletter built on top of the content currently being ingested, and still looking for more sources to add to the database (let me know if you have any good recommendations).
Nothing on the scale of most the things mentioned here, but I'm trying to assemble the first version of my digital garden to publish online a bunch of notes I've collected over many years. I'm also trying to put together a workable system to catalogue and index hundreds of thousands of digital images scattered across multiple devices so I can deduplicate them and collate them effective. Digital Librarian is not a hat I ever thought I'd end up wearing, but I refuse to buy more 18Tb HDDs and still not have any means to locate pictures in a meaningful way.
https://monofocus.lovable.app/
Yup, it's another task manager.
I made it for myself to help me focus on one task at a time, hence the name.
It implements my number one productivity hack of picking a task and setting a timer. Time spent on a task increments.
Data is stored locally in the browser although there is a sync option i wouldn't shake a stick at if I hadn't built this myself.
Plus it's a PWA! Those are lovely.
Trivyn: Ontology-first knowledge platform. Runs on a single machine, via a single executable. I wanted a simpler alternative to the large complicated enterprise products that tend to dominate this space.
I'm really trying to get a private beta out the door by Christmas. I do plan to have a free version for academic/personal use.
Backend is written in Rust, uses oxigraph for its triple store.
There are too many LLM-related projects. Setting up multiple runtimes, Python, Node, Go, Rust and then some environments, different CUDA versions, dependencies is tedious. Managing updates later is even worse.
So, I'm building a toolkit that allows to keep things simple for the end user. Run Ollama and Open WebUI configured to work together: `harbor up ollama webui`. Don't like Ollama? Then `harbor up llamacpp webui`. There are 17 backends, 14 frontends and 50+ different satellite projects, config profiles that can be imported from a URL, tunnels, and a helper desktop app.
https://github.com/av/harbor?tab=readme-ov-file#what-can-har...
It’s “Hotwire for command-line apps”, meaning you can ship a CLI in a Rails app without building an API. The dream is to make it work for all major web frameworks.
Terminalwire streams stdio, browser launch commands, and a few more things needs to ship a CLI for a SaaS quickly.
The best part is when you want to ship a feature for the CLI, you don’t have to worry about pushing out updates to clients and making sure it’s compatible with your API.
A more interesting development are companies that are using it as a replacement for MCP in AI stacks. They’re reporting less token usage and better overall results.
I am working on a casual/strategy game that will be released in the App Store very soon (followed by Play Store and others as I have time). https://tetranea.net/ It is a deck-builder, tile-placer aimed at an audience who wants a relaxing game with some challenge.