Currently, I’m focused on helping students with their academic tasks, providing reliable support for those who need a bit of extra guidance. If you're feeling swamped with assignments, check out Do My Assignment for me at https://myassignmenthelp.expert/do-my-assignment.html. It’s a resourceful platform for quality, timely assistance tailored to meet various academic requirements. Perfect for those managing tight deadlines and complex assignments!
For anyone wanting interesting YT videos for their kids (and not wanting to take anything away from OP's project), I highly highly recommend thekidshouldseethis.com. It's basically a curated stream of cool videos, and I would feel totally safe letting my daughter browse it alone (she never does because we usually watch them together, but the curation is that good). Videos on all sorts of topics, and good enough to be really entertaining for both kids and adults - I can spend an evening there easily. They also have a really fantastic gift guide.
YouTube recommendations for kids shouldn't be driven by engagement (e.g. "oh, you watched 20 hours of MrBeast videos. You probably need another hour.")
If my kid watches an hour of unboxing toy videos, I shouldn't have to try and disable 3,000 channels of toy unboxings in an effort for that topic to never surface again.
The thumbs down button essentially has zero effect.
I’d go further and say nobody should be subjected to this stuff. Engagement is a euphemism for addiction. Self improving addiction machines are a horrible idea. They’re actively bad for people and society for a laundry list of reasons.
Anyone who works on this stuff should be ashamed of yourselves. You’re modern day cigarette companies.
One thing I would like to see is an algorithm based on expressed rather than revealed preferences.
De-jargoned, that means clicking the like button means I want to see more things like that, and the dislike button means I don't want to see things like that. If I watched something all the way through, but clicked the dislike button, that means I don't want to see things that produced a similar response from people who tend to react the way I do.
This kind of algorithm is not going to increase watch time over the short term, and might not over the long term either, which makes it unlikely to be adopted by any for-profit service.
sent you mail,
I would love to be associated with this project. I was looking for a solution for some time, at least one which allows to restrict the content from the main youtube. Youtube kids app they have is a joke.
Putting the finishing touches on my LLM based town simulator. Once it's finished I'll have it simulate 4 hours in the town every 2 hours in reality.
It is designed to solve the problem of "RPG hero just killed a dragon in front of the town and no one says anything about it." All the NPCs realistically react and talk about the Hero's exploits.
Visitors to the site can vote on what quest the hero undertakes next.
I'm running into the problem what the site isn't much fun. I'm honestly not sure what to do about that!
Nice idea, but right now the villagers mostly say some variation on "I eagerly await the valiant hero's return!". Beside the fact that no villagers would ever speak so formally, this seems to fall into the standard fantasy problem that the normal people in the world only exist to further the hero's agency. Could you give the villagers a sense of their own agency, meaning that they have lives of their own that would continue whether the hero returns or not?
I'm working on synthesizing a genome at home! Here is a video with more details, as well as a picture of my home lab. I've always wanted to build life from scratch, and I finally have a chance to do it.
I'm trying to build a DNA assembly company right now (been lots of ups and downs lately...), and one thing I need to do is validate the specs of my oligo pool synthesis provider, Agilent, before I release to customers / raise a seed round. So as a stress-test run of my system, I'm synthesizing a genome, and am thinking about trying to livestream it. The unique technology is variety of ways to assemble and validate DNA from oligo pools for a lot cheaper, pretty much enabling a 10x reduction in DNA synthesis cost vs commercial suppliers. I've worked my ass off for nearly 2 years to get to this moment and am so excited!
Wow this is very exciting! Always makes me happy when I see your comments on HN, you're always up to something interesting! Are you hiring developers or aspiring bioengineers? (I'm a developer and an aspiring bioengineer)
This is incredible. I have a biochemistry and bioinformatics background, and I've always been curious about how easy and cheap it could be to do various experiments at home. Godspeed!
I'm building a simple app to let friends and loved ones know how you're doing. I know many people in some of the current troubled regions of the world, and whenever a particular event happens it's really nerve-wracking for those of us not there, wondering if our loved ones are okay.
WhatsApp and messenger groups don't work for this kind of thing because 1) people are often members of many different groups that they would have to constantly notify if they were "okay" during a particular event and 2) many troubles in the world are ongoing, and constantly spamming a message group saying "I'm still okay" doesn't work.
My app just lets people hit a single button to tell any interested friends / family that they are safe. They can do this as many times as they like.
Normally I would be worried about premature optimization, what I've been spending extra time making the tech stack initially very performant. It's working for my family but once I deploy to the world I want it to be solid and stable, or it loses a lot of its value.
One thing I'd like to hone in on is that these threads aren't intended for promotion, but rather for the just-because sort of project, driven by idle interest or weird obsession—the sort of thing people might spend their free time on.
I'm not sure yet what the official "rule" should be (if any), but if you're working on a startup or have had attention via Show HN, maybe abstain from these discussions? It wouldn't be good for the thread to get taken over by things HN already has a place for.
Thanks, Dan, for that clarification. The question each month is actually two-fold: what have you been tinkering around with and what new ideas are thinking about. It's an invitation to dialogue.
We know our history and the role collaboration has played in it. Whether at Xerox PARC or Bell Labs, bouncing ideas off of other colleagues has spurred incredible innovation.
I submit that HN is a giant Xerox PARC. We have all of the ingredients for this recipe here on HN. We have the brilliant minds; we have the joy of creation. I submit that what we lack is mixing those ingredients. We lack dialogue and collaboration, and it's all completely unnecessary. It's here. Please use it.
I find this "anti-promotion" attitude to be doing a disservice to this HN community for a few reasons.
Clearly, this whole website is funded and exists in part to promote YC's portfolio companies, as evidenced by "Launch HN" threads getting auto-front paged whereas "Show HN" plebians have to earn the upvotes from /new (which most agree required an exceptionally good post and a lot of luck to even get that goodness noticed). And we're not talking promotion of a few posts, YC is now doing multiple batches a year and has hundreds of companies per batch meaning we're seeing a LOT of promotion / advertisements on this site coming via Launch HN threads as well as jobs ad threads.
I don't think Xerox park would have done as well if 5% of the people get got the opportunity for a microphone in the auditorium every week and the other 95% did not. That would seem like a caste system. I understand that YC funds this website so the caste system is inevitable but I don't see why moderation should further stratify it - unless you're prioritizing advertising YC companies over a great community.
Next, I see this "HN is not for self promotion" do a lot of downstream damage on the community in the sense that it's much better for big, existing trillion dollar companies than smaller players. If a small bootstrapped startup writes a blog post and mentions there product, people will complain about "blogspam" and "this blog post is really just an ad for a link at the end". But if Google or Amazon have a new announcement for a new product, nobody complains that it's an advertisement, even though it's often as much or more one. The end result is that the website tends to focus more "corporate" news than "hacker" news as a downstream consequence of a well-meaning "no self-promotion" rule.
Finally, as we've discussed over email, the rules around self-promotion are extremely opaque and in many cases algorithmically enforced by closed algorithms. This leads to a lot of confusion around what's allowed and a lot of ambiguous favoritism.
I understand this site is called "Hacker" news and there's some mystique around the "hacker" building "just for fun" , the purism around intellectual curiosity that you don't want tainted by dirty commercialism. I just think that once the website has decided it's going to be the media arm of one of the most powerful venture capital firms in the world, the ship has sailed.If people really want pure tech news, they should go to https://lobste.rs/ . I've personally found in recent years quality of interesting conversation is much higher on /r/saas, Indie Hackers board, and Small Bets campfire, as well as various Discords, all because they allow self-promotion and don't encourage the "self-promotion police" who frequently show up aghast someone would try to make money on the internet (unless it's their daddy FAANG employer).
Another rule I've seen in various places be very effective is a simple guideline to contribute 10x as much non-promotional content as promotional content. If someone only posts links to their projects and nothing else, I see how that gets spammy. But if someone regularly contributes they should get a pass. I understand that's partially how the submission system works via algorithmic enforcement, but , see above about its opaque and ambiguous nature.
Show HN is a "place" for self-promotion but it's a pretty bad place if 99% of submissions get entirely lost and ignored and I think you should encourage more places for promotion without inflicting a caste system where only YC companies and certain golden children get special rules.
Overall, HN's guidelines against self-promotion are too rigid, there's too few opportunties for small players to promote, which makes the discussion here less egalitarian, more corporate, and less interesting. You'd be better served encouraging more self-promotion in threads like these.
Grindset self-promo tactics being pervasively, overly represented in the content submissions and discussions here are the number one reason I take very long breaks from the site.
More genuine conversations are intensely welcome, so if that takes overt guard rails, so be it. If the only enthusiasm someone really wants to share is about their capitalist endeavors, count me out.
> Grindset self-promo tactics being pervasively, overly represented in the content submissions and discussions here are the number one reason I take very long breaks from the site.
"Grindset": I never saw that before. I guess it is a combination of grind plus mindset? Very cool. It rolls off the tongue nicely.
There’s simply no “HN is not for self promotion” policy. You’re asked to not use your account primarily for self-promotion, and repeats are allowed, so you can roll your dice multiple times on your Show HN already as long as you’re otherwise a good contributor to the community and only do it sparingly. Flooding another topic with commercial promos simply turns it into another https://news.ycombinator.com/show, what’s the point then?
As for YC companies getting Launch placements, well too bad, it’s their site, you’re free to leave and start your competing one. I assume most users aren’t bothered — I seldom notice them and hardly ever click on them. I notice job ads more.
One thing I do like: When people call themselves out -- "hey, we buy this software... or I work for this company and you might like this software"... then they share some software that is relevant to the discussion. I rarely see those kinds of contributions downvoted due to their transparency. Plus, I learn about lots of interesting companies and solutions that way.
I’m building a way for developers to easily deploy open source applications (Postgres, redis, sentry, elastic search, etc), plus have a full heroku like workflow for their own applications, all within their kubernetes cluster, with what I hope is a super intuitive and friendly UI.
I’ve ran a start up and saw how SaaS-ified and expensive web tooling is (heroku, datadog, redshift, fivetran, etc), but how difficult it was to move off of them. We had a few years of over 1 million in infrastructure spend.
I’m hoping just making Kubernetes easier to use gives us a way out.
It’s fully open source and a hosted version is free to use! https://canine.sh.
Would love feedback on it, including how the overall pitch could be better, or if it actually solves people’s problems.
I'm building a wayland sleep and gamma handler that has lua scripting integration. It bothers me that it's so hard to set different timeout handlers. So I recently integrated wljoywake, which allows me to handle timeout on joystick commands and am in the process of adding flux like functionality.
The reason why I want scripting is between I want the color to pause while I'm playing videos without having to add scripting logic to other tools.
I'm also planning to add rofi like functionality with layershell. Rofi is the only tool that has first party support for keybindings and other functionalities, but it's all done through strings. I'd rather have a lua scripting interface that can call other scripts and communicate with json or something similar.
I'm building Pastmaps - striving to eventually be the world's largest online collection of old maps, aerials, and photos all packaged into a public historical research platform that's as easy to use as Google Maps. This has been a labor of love now for about a year, but I still have a huge mountain to climb to realize the full vision. Give it a try and give me your harsh criticisms - that's the greatest gift you could give me!
Even in it's current state, it's being used by geneologists, urban explorers, search & rescue teams, real estate developers, government agencies, etc. The number of exploding use-cases continues to astound me and keeps me motivated to continue.
At work, busy adding internationalisation and localising an Angular 16 application. Figured out you can do runtime language switches, without having to maintain separate builds for each locale. Angular's documentation is rubbish.
In my spare time, building an OpenAI wrapper to create SEO meta descriptions for websites. It's mostly a tool for me to use because at work the marketing people don't do this very well and I am too lazy to do it with ChatGPT (copying the prompt and setting it up every time). Plus, the API is way cheaper for me to use. Building it with Laravel and InertiaJs is so much fun. The marketing people at work said they'll find a tool like this super useful, so I already have a user haha.
I created KopiMap (https://kopimap.com) to help people discover great cafés in Jakarta Indonesia, but I wanted to take the UX further by automatically organizing user-submitted photos into meaningful categories (menu, food/drinks, ambiance).
The challenge is how to classify images as cost efficient as possible without compromising performance. I decided to go with running ML models on the client-side.
Technical implementation:
- Built and trained a compact TensorflowJS model (~3MB) that runs entirely in-browser
- Model lazy loads only when users are submitting reviews
- Classifies uploaded photos into Menu, Food & Drink, or Vibes (interior/exterior)
- Zero server costs for inference, quick enough classification feedback
This approached solved several problems:
1. Reduced server costs by moving inference to the client
2. Improved UX with immediate photo categorization
3. Maintained app performance by lazy loading the model
Would love feedback from the HN community on:
- Optimizing the model size further
- Alternative approaches to client-side ML
- General UX improvements for local discovery apps
I had no prior ML experience, so this was a fun challenge :)
Currently, I’m focused on helping students with their academic tasks, providing reliable support for those who need a bit of extra guidance. If you're feeling swamped with assignments, check out Do My Assignment for me at https://myassignmenthelp.expert/do-my-assignment.html. It’s a resourceful platform for quality, timely assistance tailored to meet various academic requirements. Perfect for those managing tight deadlines and complex assignments!
Essentially a PR review flow for production access, which allows you to enforce a second pair of eyes workflow. I was always a bit scared when I was on call and had all the power in my finger tips to ruin everyone's day. I think this helps alleviate the risk of human error significantly. Also helps with compliance of course.
I've been getting my indie game Asterogue ready for web release (previously it was Android & Windows only). Last night I pushed the final build live yay! You can play it at:
It’s a native macOS AI chat client. I started it last year and didn’t think much about data synchronization. I didn’t want to store user’s data so I decided to store all chats in a local SQLite database.
It works well but unfortunately without a sync engine, users won’t be able to continue the chat from a different machine.
I have one e-commerce system that ships boxes of organic coffee to people's homes all over the United States.
I have another ecommerce system that delivers boxes of organic produce all over the Seattle region.
So I am working on building an integration between the two systems. When a box of coffee is being shipped on the same day that the delivery company is already going to that region, redirect that box's fulfilment process away from USPS/FedEx and deliver it instead.
This saves 50% on shipping costs for the coffee company, and the delivery company gets paid for utilizing extra space in the delivery vans.
It's been 4 months of work so far, and most of the individual pieces are working in production right now, hoping to enable all of it together this week or next. Just in time for the holidays ;)
The hardest part so far was integrating all the custom label generation, and mapping/routing so that it's seamless with the existing workflows of each company. The coffee company doesn't have a "separate" workflow for the new non-shipping orders, and the delivery company doesn't have a "separate" workflow for fulfilling orders they did not pack.
The real cherry on top is that it's built in such a way that N number of stores could integrate their stores into our fulfillment. This lets many local food producers who cant do their own fulfillment still participate in the local food economy without having "scale". It's kinda like an upside down Fulfillment By Amazon: they'll do your delivery for you as long as you sell through their store (and take their ever-increasing cut of the sale). This version lets the store owner maintain their own store, URL, branding, prices, availability, customer relationship, and margins, but then hook into our last-mile fulfillment.
I am working on the Vanta for sustainability and climate disclosures. Climate and sustainability disclosures are starting to come online in many sectors and parts of the world. We offer compliance-as-a-service so that startups and covered entities can fulfill their compliance requirements in a mostly self-serve manner without having to hire expensive consultants or undergo significant restructurings. Our platform provides a single source of truth for your climate, sustainability, and emissions data. For example, if you are an American company trying to go-to-market in Europe, all it takes is purchasing an additional module and we will automatically generate the compliance documents and checklists for you based on the existing data we have on your company. We also offer managed “Climate Trust Center” dashboards that you can subdomain on your website for investors reporting and to satisfy disclosure requirements.
If you are in an EPA-regulated (or equivalents in Canada and Europe) industry (such as mining, oil and gas, minerals, rare earths, metal processing, airlines, construction, shipping/marine, logistics, heavy industries, agriculture/farming/food production, data center, power generation including renewables, adjacent ones like consumer goods, real estate, large scale AI training, climate derivatives etc.) or require sustainability consulting support in general, we would love to talk to you:
hello@carbonimpacthq.com (put “HN:” in the subject line so we know where you are coming from)
I'm building a collator robot [0] to help me pack items I sell for building your own open source split-flap mechanical display [1].
I get custom character flaps printed and die-cut in bulk and then sell them in smaller sets. A full set of flaps for one module has 52 distinct designs (letters, numbers, symbols, etc) and I get them from the manufacturer grouped by design, so they need to be collated to sell as packs of 52 with 1 of each design.
My WIP robot will take a stack of one design and distribute them to a bunch of cubbies, then I'll swap in the next design, and so on, so each cubby ends up with a full set.
It's based on a cheap ~$110 CNC gantry frame from AliExpress and a ~$35 BTT SKR Pico 3d printer main board running GrblHAL. To detect whether the flaps feed successfully I use a visible light break-beam sensor (the typical IR sensors don't work because the PVC flaps happen to be IR transparent!) which acts as the "z probe" - the flap is fed via a G38.3 probe action which returns whether the probe was successful or not, and the "z" coordinate it was first detected.
I have a python script running on a computer to send the gcode to the machine.
Autopilot for my sit-on-top fishing kayak. Designed, modeled, and printed an assembly which attaches to the rudder rod. Moves the rod via a stepper motor connected to a Teensy 4.0 which gets NMEA 2000 messages from a Garmin heading sensor and a Garmin fish finder/chartplotter. Uses PID control to maintain any course I set on the chartplotter, using the cross-track error and heading. I’ve had it out on the water a few times now and it works great. Also put together an iOS app that communicates with the assembly via BLE so I can modify the PID gains as needed depending on conditions.
There was a bit of noise to the sonar transducer since the stepper motor was so noisy, but I mostly eliminated it by routing the motor wires through liquid-tight flexible electrical conduit, connecting the conduit to ground.
I am planning to use the core of this product to create kind of arbitrary dashboard for csv but i am not sure if there is any need for this kind of product.
It is probably not substantial among the projects people have commented on this thread, but I am happy to be working on my first personal website made from plain old HTML and simplecss.
Learning how to arrange things, navigation, and my own blog on my own site gives me the gratification of owning something fully. Everyone should have their own site is truly what I agree with.
An "offline-first" client web app for Github. I don't want to have to wait seconds to load up an issue, and then wait seconds (or keep another tab open) to go back to the list of issues/PRs, ...etc. I want everything to feel instant, with optimistic updates, and a backend sync process that doesn't require me to refresh the page to see new updates.
(Small note: I'm doing it in full-stack Rust, including web frontend, using leptos).
I’m chipping away at a simple storefront solution that’s as low tech, reliable, low cost, and user-friendly as I can make it. I’m really enjoying the no-shiny-tech aspect of it.
1. Working on a 'production ready' version of Conal Elliot's 'compiling to categories' for GHC.
2. This is so I can create a vectorizable model of a datalog-based query language I'm building in Haskell.
3. The query engine will be using a version of monadic optimization as outlined on a blog post somewhere
4. The purpose of the query engine is maintenance of large datasets, all the more important with AI these days, but really general purpose.
5. The motivation for this was a low code tool I had built in Haskell almost a decade ago that I abandoned that I'm bringing up to use ghcs web assembly backend and I need a proper query engine for it now.
Other things:
1. Thinking about binary neural networks and how to train them stochastically.
2. Learning about finite element methods for physical modeling and also reviewing my basic topology so I can think more about non discrete math and algebra which I tend to focus on.
3. I'm building a cloud chamber! Because I want to see space particles. Literally for no other reason than I'm obsessed with these devices ever since seeing one at the exploratorium
4. And raising three kids. I don't know how I have time for anything
I'm working on ways to allow developers and deployers of LLMs to express how and why their overall system is compliant and adversarially robust, and what to do when that's not the case.
Specifically, my team and I are making assurance cases and ontologies that can seamlessly integrate with the system and its guardrails. For example, if you want to deploy some mix of filters underneath a user-facing LLM app, you would able to:
1) express the logic of how they should be deployed and why (e.g., if X=1, then Y, else Z);
2) see how they perform over time and evaluate alternatives;
3) investigate what happened when an attack succeeds;
4) prove to the auditors that you're taking all measures necessary to be robust and compliant with the EU AI Act.
It started as an informal collab early this year, but we have since published a few workshop papers on this concept [1,2]. We're building a Python demo that would show how it all fits together.
I'm building Reasonote, a platform where you can learn anything with personalized, interactive lessons, and podcasts.
Imagine a fusion of Duolingo, Spotify Podcasts, Anki, ChatGPT, and Claude Artifacts.
We have custom AI-generated podcasts that generate faster than NotebookLM, that you can queue up for yourself. (Many more features coming here soon -- like more engaging podcasts and better voices)
Our classroom mode can generate interactive lessons, complete with an AI tutor, on any subject.
Flow mode allows you to practice deeply, with infinite activities to test your skills.
All of this is driven by a dynamically generated and continuously updating "Skill Tree", which keeps track of the domain you're studying, and your progress within it.
I’m working on a zine. The first issue is on system evals for LLM-driven apps. It’s set in a world where Bear and Fox are opening a cafe with an LLM shoggoth generating custom recipes.
Lots of people just going off of vibes to see if their system is working right. That’s a good start, but you’ll need system evals to systematically improve your app. Like Garry says, “don’t raw dog your prompts. Use system evals”
I am playing around with LLMs and Game Theory. Currently, I let them play 5x5 board games in a tournament against Reinforcement Learning Agents and a Random Player. I am capturing the "thoughts" of the agent for behavioral data analysis. My background is Risk Management, I am trying to gather an understanding how such LLMs report their "decision" for applications in human/ai interactions for identifying and reporting governance flaws.
Since I am working on autonomous agents that are given the agency to take an action on their own, I believe having a good understanding of the "psyche" is important (at least to me).
An email client that just “does the right thing” in terms of showing new emails I care about.
I don’t want to configure filters or adopt inbox zero. I want the computer to look at decades of email activity and just figure it out.
Second, working on a single dashboard for attorneys to create and upload filings across different agencies and different states. Trying to improve accuracy and labor costs for mundane work like this.
(Opinions? Suggestions? Want to work together? Email me!)
I'm building an AI Data Engineer @ Ardent AI. It's an autonomous AI Agent that can perform data transformations in your databases (mongodb,postgres,supabase for now) from plain english queries
It drops directly into your stack, no new configuration needed
It has its own compute engine and will soon support spark to be able to dynamically perform large scale ETLs and data manipulation.
I also am working towards supporting automatic data pipeline building and data quality checks.
Finished a project that serves as a launching pad for GoLang HTTP APIs. It does decoding of request parameters into structs using instructions found in tags amongst a bunch of other utilities.
I am learning react-native now. Just finished building a themed components library.
These are for building a simple intelligence platform. Intelligence meaning a way to model entities, events, documents, and the link between them.
I want to use this instead of having thousands of documents on dropbox organized by a random folder hierarchy.
2. An LLM-powered translator specifically optimized for English speakers living in Spanish-speaking countries: https://translate-spanish.com
The first one is purely for fun to scratch my own itch, and the second is solving some frustrations I've had with existing translator apps while living in Mexico City.
I'm hacking away on something I've built recently to improve the native "Publish to Web" feature from Google Docs. Essentially I'm grabbing the document's content and re-rendering it with a full-page background colour and better mobile support.
I'm working on a wearable device with a camera+ultrasonic sensor which is capable of accurate hand pose estimation, which will then result in sign language recognition mainly (extending to gesture recognition and HCI applications). The device should be able to integrate into a smartwatch. I'm only at the 'will it work?' stage, working on the algorithms for recognising ASL words through synthetic data. Would appreciate criticism and pointers on what to keep in mind :)
In many books and talks I hear that ideas are worth nothing until they are executed. I am changing this narrative. Every person, entrepreneur or not, will have the ability to fast-forward their idea to a place of execution within one day. From idea to first dollar in one day. = 1 day.
A tool for the creatives, the crazy ones, the doers, the brave, the weirdos, the average joes, the ones who want to move forward. That's https://www.rapidvisual.ai
I'm developing an implementation of what I call Hydra – Multi-Head Prediction Embeddings [1], which I believe represents the next evolution in transformer architectures.
I'm writing a build tool for SQL. I like to write SQL directly and to use it's more powerful features (like stored procedures and Postgres' ltee extension). But this is gets difficult to manage in a linear, "migrations" based workflow. I want to edit a file tree organized by topic, not a series of scripts run in order. Which is to say, I want to edit it like I would any other codebase.
I've written code allowing me to express dependencies between .sql files and to concatenate them into one big .sql file that builds your schema. I'm working on interrogating the systems tables of the database to analyze the difference between successive versions of a schema, to automatically generate simple migrations (like adding a column or renaming a stored procedure). Eg, `sqlite_master` in SQLite, and `information_schema.*` in Postgres.
I wrote (some) of a Lua interpreter in Rust, which runs PUC Lua 5.1 dumped bytecodes. Now I'm rewrite it all because I want to do type specialization: I'm implementing "Simple and Effective Type Check Removal through Lazy Basic Block Versioning", which is used as the basis of Shopify's YJIT for Ruby. I have a decent idea of how it needs to be implemented and have a prototype kinda working, although some of the jump targets are still wrong right now. Once I get it all sketched out then I'll have to scale it back up to a full Lua implementation again, and then I'll add table shape specialization afterwards (which is a bit trickier, and outlined in a sequel paper).
We're working on a specialised graph compiler for speeding up simulations and computing derivatives automatically (backpropagation/adjoint differentiation). It now supports C++, Python, and C#; AVX2 and AVX512 instruction sets, multithreading; Windows, and Linux.
Essentially, it allows model developers (such as quants in finance, engineers, and ML specialists) to code in Python without needing to think about the performance of repetitive calculations. As we all know, Python is one of the least efficient languages when it comes to complex calculations/simulations - and we help to resolve it. Long story short, with very few tweaks to the code certain types of calculations (such as pricing of derivatives, curve building, computing financial risks, or "small" NNs) can be accelerated by 100+ in Python and x20+ in C++/C#.
We're now looking to add support for Java (but it doesn't have Operator Overloading, so it's tricky), and some customers are asking to support GPU - which is a bit tricky because it's got a closed instruction set.
A long dormant side project of mine to design a realtime raga [1] detector.
For the uninitiated, it can be roughly seen as detection of a sequence of musical notes. Raga is a term for a particular scale of notes (both ascending and descending).
Until now, this has mostly been in the domain of research and there is a ton of published literature out there. At the very basic level, if you have just voice, it is trivial to apply a pitch detection algorithm like YIN to get a pitch estimate and then analyse the sequence to figure out the raga. This doesn't work as well in a concert setup where speeds are higher due to gamakas, different instruments are used alongside and counterpoint melodies may make the music polyphonic. A lot of papers apply a variety of ML models (neural nets and otherwise) using several different features (cepstrum and mel-cepstrum, pitch distributions etc) with varying results.
So this is an interesting exercise in Signal Processing and Machine Learning. If anyone else is working on or has worked on this, I'd love to hear from you.
I've been teaching kids programming 1:1, off and on for 10 years or so. This time around I'm collecting my various impromptu puzzles and exercises into a single app anyone can go through at their own pace on any device, computer or phone (though iOS unfortunately requires jumping through some hoops). All on a platform that is open source and live-editable and lets you write all-new programs with graphics and sound in addition to the puzzles and exercises.
I've completed the draft of Part 1 of my online book "Automated Agents: How effective chatbots work"
I'm writing about my experience building a chatbot at a startup as engineer #1. It started as a blog post, but I had so much more to say. This is the information I wish I had before getting started. A lot of information on the web is about building a wrapper around LLMs, this is one that we built ourselves and were able to resolve millions of customer issues with.
I'm working on Pictera [1], an AI product where users can upload their photos (like selfies) to create high-quality, hyper-realistic images of themselves in just about any style they want.
Originally, I built Pictera for myself to use because I couldn’t find any service that produced decent photos. Besides, I was very concerned that popular products in this space included broad terms allowing them to keep and use users' photos indefinitely for any purposes, including marketing [2]. But I've been enjoying working on the product so much that I've put way more time into polishing it and thought others would find it useful too.
Been working on our startup laudspeaker (an alternative to firebase cloud messaging) [1] as well as trying to write more! I like science fiction thrillers similar to what michael crichton used to write and have been working on a story called Panopticon around encryption, spycraft, and three letter agencies [2]
I've been just screwing around and building little apps, mostly seeing how quickly I can get something going using ChatGPT or Claude. Seems like Claude in particular is great with code. The most recent thing I did was a little app [0] to help one of my parents log their blood pressure readings easily, since they had to do it a few times a day in different positions and such. I've used that as an excuse to learn how to make something really basic, single task, easy to use for folks that aren't so great with technology. I'm also trying to learn a bit more about accessibility in web development, which this is helping me do.
I created a Weird Clock that shows the local sunrise and sunset within a conventional 12-hour clock face. This normally would only work on a 24-hour clock face, which is kind of unfamiliar to most people, so I developed a way to show a 24-hour day within a 12-hour clock face; essentially it shows a 2-turn spiral so both night and day will fit. This needs to know your location in order to compute your local sunrise and sunset, so don't freak out when the browser asks for location permission! Includes option to enter lat/long and other goodies. Works on phones but better on a large screen. https:\\www.coolweird.net
I was supposed to be working on a project called Tagbox... but it feels like it's never gonna see the light of day. I hope I'm wrong though, I still want this to succeed, for once in my life, I want to actually succeed on at least one thing. I want to contribute some good thing to the society.
First, what is it? It's a bookmarking app alternative to Pocket or Raindrop.io. Yeah, you can already tell it's not the most original idea. What makes it different, though, it's supposed to be self-hostable and additionally it's easy to deploy as it's only single binary file with no other runtime dependency--the database uses SQLite, which you can include it as a library in Rust.
What problems I'm facing while developing this? Honestly? I don't know, but I can't finish the last 10% progress of the app. It's funny--I first wrote it in Go, and it almost reached MVP. But, instead, I decided to just rewrite in Rust. Well, at least I got to learn new language while building this app, two birds one stone, or in Bahasa Indonesia, swimming while drinking water.
But now, I just can't force myself to continue. And I don't know why. Maybe perfectionism? It definitely doesn't have to do with skill though.
There are also another thing I'm working on: recovering from depression. One year ago, out of nowhere, I lost all my motivation doing anything--including university. I lost all my friends. Since then, I'm at the lowest point of my life. I visited psychiatrist multiple times. I don't know if it was effective, but recently I'm starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
The Tagbox Project is also one of the efforts for me to recover from depression. The depression phase made me realize that I _want my works to have a positive effect on the world, even for just a little bit_. I don't want my skill to be used for evil companies that throws away moral and ethics. Specifically AI stuff, but that's OOT of this thread.
Even without the other problems, I can assure you that the vast majority of managers will think that a 80% done project is almost done. The truth is the remaining 20% is where you have to fit everything together so you revisit an rewrite most of the project. It's a different kind of work that feels boring because you already did those things maybe 3,4 times already. It helps to understand the phase of the project you are in, to reduce the frustration. It also helps to do something even very small, every day and focus on that. One day you will run out of things to do.
Hey there. Been where you have been and can safely say, there is always a way out of it.
Sounds like you just need a bit of consistency to make some progress. I'd be down to chat once a week for 15 minutes and we can figure out the focus for the week. Hit me if you think that would be helpful, sounds like you can build some good stuff.
If there's one thing I've learn over the last few years is that it's incredibly difficult working on a project when you don't have peace of mind. It can be difficult working on something or staying motivated when you're battling depression, or if you're sad, don't have friends, or if anything is troubling your mind.
I've been there and I know what it feels like. I would try to perhaps solve the mental health problem first perhaps before tackling big projects. Maybe try gym, hiking, somehow finding friends, talk to more people, solve your sleep, eat better - something. Because again, if you don't have peace of mind, working on a project is difficult (at least for me it is).
1. https://typezebra.com : Adding type editor/designer so you can design type-heavy articles and share with others (codepen but for typography)
2. https://boxento.com: Finishing support for server side rendering so users can take the benefit of SEO - also working on adding new blocks like menu (useful for restaurants) so you can have a block that changes based on the day of the week.
Suggestion - you can slow down the hero animation of Boxento.
In general I like the project. It reminded me to Bento.me. I'd guess you are direct competitors? (I'd also suggest adding Boxento as an alternative to Bento.me on SaaSHub https://www.saashub.com/bento-me)
I'm building a social network for humans[1]. I plan to make each user a verified human and disallow AI content as standard. I will also ensure that each human can only have one account, to eliminate the ability of state actors/rich people spreading online propaganda.
I'm building a website with interactive stories (or story-based games), intended for language learners. The idea is to make stories with choices (using Ink script), including features you may expect from adventure games (e.g. inventory, choices that matter).
The text is written in simple language, it is then translated in many languages, and I generate audio files. This provides input for people learning a language, with multiple options to practice reading or listening.
I started experimenting with the speech recognition browser API yesterday (so that the user can listen and repeat sentences), but it's not supported everywhere.
I've been working on some projects in Rust relating to image processing and rendering. I'm between a few projects at the moment though but the biggest one is an image processing application I've been working on for quite some time. A lot of stuff I've programmed and learned about over the last 3 years has been leading up to the goal of making something like this haha. I wanted to leverage OpenCL for compute but I had a lot of trouble getting OpenGL OpenCL interoperability to work.
A big motivation for such a project is my passion for photography. I've taken many thousands of photos over just the last 2 years alone. A lot of them are digital, and so far a few dozen rolls of film. A big challenge for me is that I'm not satisfied with the tools available to develop the raw files that are free or open source. Either they're quite finnicky, or they have noticeable issues with color transformations.
I've done a lot of rendering projects over the last few years relating to color that have been focused on getting a better understanding of working with color spaces. Lots of 2D and 3D fractals haha.
Unfortunately I've had quite a turbulent life the last few years so development is very off/on. Every autumn for me seems to be a period of change, this one no different as I'm moving and I'm a bit uncertain of things. However, a side project to all of this has been an OpenGL project where I'm working on things related to voxels! I did a lot of research on data structures like interval trees, octrees, segment trees, etc. It does seem that a lot of people jump for the octree approach, however I've been able to render a lot of voxels with just a hashmap of chunks and a 3d array haha (albeit, mostly initial implementation of chunk generation, single threaded at that!). With this I'm hoping to explore OpenGL compute as I intend of generating world geometry in compute shaders :D
I havent published a project in a while and I'm hoping to get back to putting things out there, so hopefully some of the stuff I've been working on goes well and I can put it up on GitHub or something
Markdown extraction, improved Google search, workflows - search for this terms, visit the first N links, summarize etc. Big demand for (or rather, expectation of) this lately.
A llm backend fantasy game. It uses structured output and supports Openai, Anthropic and LM Studio. Gemini support is ending, at the moment it is not working reliable.
https://github.com/HabermannR/Fantasy-Tribe-Game
https://www.voxtodo.com
App that generates subtasks from high level tasks. Useful for chunking which is a concept of breaking down highly complex tasks into their atomic bits. Made this for my HS Junior son who has a medical diagnosis of ADHD
I’m building a social network[1]. I recently finished the MySpace-esque music player[2]. It’ll launch in 2025 as a paid service…only way to guarantee real humans sign up.
Organizing all of the information that comes at you in the workplace into a social-style news feed, with AI summaries.
Unlike facebook, we want you to get the most important stuff quickly and get you back to more important things instead of sifting through 100 emails, 5 dashboards, and 10 forums.
- An open version of strongDM/teleport for privileged access management. I am currently testing it out in my org and plan to release the source soon.
- I also run a free HTTPS and TCP tunnel which gets a few users daily (https://webrelay.dev)
I'm trying to make a spreadsheet interface for solving scheduling problems.
Constraint satisfaction and optimization is exactly the sort of problem we should be using computers for, but there's zero chance your neighborhood cafe can figure out prolog or OR-tools or whatever.
I’m on parental leave - first time not working for money for twenty years. Obviously it’s still time consuming, but not even firing up a computer for the last three weeks has been great. I’m fortunate to have this paid leave and a job guarantee, but it’s been a revelation stepping away from out all for so long. For the better, even though I’m exhausted.
Building a VR IFC viewer in C++ without external dependencies.
I just implemented a parser for IFC, and am now looking into extracting BRep and CSG geometry from it, convert that to meshes, and write a simple renderer for Vulkan.
My approach is to write really scrappy, simple code with minimal abstractions.
The hypothesis now is that for generating meshes from BRep, you don't need an entire CAD kernel, as a CAD kernel seems to be focused also on operations, but this will probably lead to a humbling experience and walking back to using either OpenCascade or licensing a commercial kernel like Parasolid.
My goal is to have a simple prototype out before the end of the year, but work might get in the way :)
I built a site that saves time by summarizing YouTube videos or news articles by simply inputting the URL. The tool preserves the original context, allowing users to ask follow-up questions.
I'd like to continue building fun projects like this until I find a market. I work in Phase 1 clinical trials and the end goal would be to implement some of these efficiencies into health technologies.
Iterating on an accessible color palette creator, for custom Tailwind-style palettes of multiple swatches, where you can check your colors have sufficient WCAG/ACPA color contrast on a live UI mockup. You can export the colors for use with Tailwind, CSS, Figma, and Adobe.
I started working on this because for design projects I was almost always getting handed brand style guides that were missing thought into accessible colors pairs and lacked tints/shades, where I had to fill in the gaps. There's lots of color tools out there, but this supports multiple swatches, checking the contrast of multiple color pairs at the same time and the HSLuv based color picker makes it easier to explore accessible colors.
It's really only usable on desktop right now but I'd love any feedback good or bad on if it's useful and what to work on next! There's actually a lot of directions to go in, and it's tricky to balance more features with keeping it simple.
Some tips:
- The "Load examples" menu in the top-left lets you compare the colors from Tailwind, IBM Carbon and United States Web Design System.
- The "contrast" menu lets you see how WCAG 2 contrast checks compare against APCA when "vs black/white" is turned on. WCAG 2 has known inaccuracies, especially for dark mode. APCA is the candidate contrast method for WCAG 3 that's meant to improve on this.
- Use the "..." menu to create a swatch based on a brand color.
- Use the "..." menu to "flip to dark/light palette" to create a dark theme. Or just manually flip the lightness curves horizontally.
I'm a big fan of HSLuv and I've been looking for a way to generate 12 distinct colors for data visualization, so that small points in those colors against a black or dark blue background will be visually distinct to everyone including my red-green colorblind coworker.
I like HSLuv too as its color picker looks familiar while having a Lightness slider that works the way you'd expect compared to HSL. I see color nerds promoting OKLCH but OKLCH color pickers can look intimidating.
> generate 12 distinct colors for data visualization, so that small points in those colors against a black or dark blue background will be visually distinct to everyone including my red-green colorblind coworker.
Did you get anywhere with this? When there's multiple kinds of color blindness changing the perceived colors in different ways, I'm not sure 12 colors that are distinct to everyone is feasible. You could use different symbols though, or changes in size or pattern.
Trying to build a chess club management app for our school/district. It's mostly basic CRUD, though it's an avenue to learn Svelte & SvelteKit. I'm becoming more involved with the club and can't stand that everything is run on paper forms and giant Google Sheets. (If it was all smoothly running, I wouldn't rock the boat. But when I found that we're writing out dozens of match cards by hand every week and have ~0 way to track progress, I couldn't resist.)
I'm working on Selectable, a mobile-friendly database management app, like dbeaver but for the phone.
Working on this project has taught me so much about how Postgres works under the hood, and has given me a deeper appreciation for the folks who work on database tooling in general.
Playing around with LLMs to generate fictional stories and I'm working on a journal of sorts based on a traveler that goes to various parallel worlds not unlike our own except for one or two minor but key differences. He reports on his findings there and how it affects social, political, and economics for that timeline. A new timeline drops every day and I have a lot more planned to take it beyond the simple blog format it's in now but it has been a fun challenge to learn how to do some deep prompting with AI to generate random entries without veering off into crazyiness or getting locked onto the same thing over and over again.
I'm maintaining Basti, an open-source AWS Bastion Host management CLI that lets you connect to RDS and other resources at almost no cost. Check it out: https://github.com/basti-app/basti
This project also inspired me to explore a commercial analytics solution for CLI applications — currently assessing if there's demand for it.
Working on a game engine to help me create my take on some retro games. My first one is a multiplayer bombing puzzle game[1].
It's made with React and Three.js, using WebSocket on a small EC2 instance for now. I hope to be able to reuse all the game mechanisms in other classic games. I'm learning a ton, and I had some fun figuring out latency issues because I recently put my sockets behind Cloudflare. I still haven't gotten it quite right, but I'm hoping to find a good solution soon!
Im exploring helping engineering managers better manage projects and people. If you're leading a team of engineers and feel strapped for time constantly, I'd love your feedback (mention the post in the waitlist form so I know to bubble you to the top of the list and reach out)
Deep Q & A for friends, family, and strangers. My goal is to create a space where people can get to know each other a bit more deeply and spark conversations. Would love some feedback!
I'm trying to start an educational YouTube channel in the vein of CGP Grey or 3b1b with a focus on CS. The first video is taking me a long time. It seemed like a natural leap from blogging, but the effort is exponentially higher.
I'm working on a weekly "tournament game" in which the goal is to select the top 5 open-source projects (in a particular topic) per programming language. The first iteration is going to be a copy of SaaSHub Experts https://www.saashub.com/experts/about but for open-source libraries. If this sounds interesting to you, please let me know, and I can send you an invite this or next week (hopefully).
Yes, it sounds generic but no one is seriously making progress here apart from the LLM providers and I love experimenting in this space and adding capabilities.
This is not about new ideas for humanity, but for me.
I started the development of the game engine.
This was one of the most interesting goal on my list.
I will use vulkan. And my demo goal for this is a super realistic scene with human, hill, grass, tree and sunrise/sunset. But it is needed just to know how/where to develop engine.
since I'm in no hurry + my career is going down the drain, I will try to do my best and power up my software engineer skills.
I'm building a custom NC manufacturing robot from scratch.
I was unhappy with availability, pricing, and business model (SaaS lock-in) of the existing hardware/software solutions. But to my delight, I noticed that you just need better amplifiers to use 3D printer mainboards for driving industrial stepper motors. Everything is controlled with Gcode, which is just text. And sensors can send back logging messages over the same USB connection.
That means the control software can be just a python script with a little state machine inside :)
I've been working on an automatic sky tracking telescope over the past few months. I'm a few weeks behind on blogging but making solid progress. V1 is nearing completion. Then I want to rework some of the electronics to design and get a custom PCB printed. Also the physical design needs a complete redesign to make it more sturdy for long exposures and solve some wiring pains.
The software allows the platform to automatically align to north and working on accounting for imperfect leveling (such as placing it on a slanted surface) through software and accelerometers.
Next challenges I want to solve in software is focus detection and then automatic image stack and post processing.
Primary goals of the project is a deep dive into robotics and electronics, along with brushing up on webdev which I don't touch too frequently being in the gamedev world. Also allowing me to explore things like digital signal processing.
I'm working on a social media post queueing program where you make a post to the queue and it tells you when it goes live. This is so I can let inspiration strike but not make the backlog look inconsistent. Gonna make it Bluesky native to avoid scope creep.
continual learning api, attention entropy sampling API. enabling a low performing LLM to actually be able to be instructed to perform competent task instruction related capabilities.
Strictly hobbyist here. There is nearly zero overlap between game genres I like to work on as a developer and genres I enjoy as a player. I get the itch every now and again but the stuff I like best as a player is either art-intensive (so well outside my skills) or a huge technical undertaking.
A kind of a configuration management tool, helping me manually "reconcile" between three concurrent aspects of the state of a machine (and then apply the result):
- what is "out there" on the machine ("queried"),
- vs. what was the state last recorded in (git) history,
- vs. what I want there to be on the machine (described in Nickel language https://nickel-lang.org/, a statically-typed successor to the Nix language).
I'm building a music file manager using Electron. I'm deferring the actual music playing to VLC, but I need a way to sort through my many audio files to quickly select and launch what I want to hear.
I'm back working on my lighting desk [0]. I stopped a couple of years ago because depression robbed me of all motivation, but now it goes and I've done a few gigs with it. Still lots of bug fixes to do then a backlog of new features, but I'm glad to be back on it
Updating some of my negative core beliefs. Years of Buddhist meditation only got me so far. But two months of this new technique, and I finally see a path to being able to program my emotional self like I program a computer. Here's how it works.
Step one. Identify the negative belief you want to change. This is the core belief. It is something you feel is true. For example, “I am a bad manager.”
Step two. Create a statement related to the belief that you believe is not true. This is the false statement. For example, “No employees Ive managed have thought I did anything right as a manager.”
Step three. This is the training step. You spend a few minutes following your breathe to quiet your mind. Then you think the false statement and watch the emotional reaction the mind has to it. The reaction is an aversion, a kind of disgust. Then, say the false statement and the core belief together. “No employees I’ve managed have thought I did anything right as a manager. I’m a bad manager.” Repay the false statement and core belief together again and again, watching how the mind rejects the false statement and that aversion feeling lingers as the core belief is thought.
Step four. Repeat the training step in daily sessions. During the session, repeated think the false belief and core belief. The session should last at least ten minutes. The daily sessions should be repeated for at least a week, and longer for more deeply held core beliefs. Over time, you come to reject the core belief just like you reject the false statement.
Here's why I think it works. There is a rational part of the mind in the prefrontal cortex. It is what we think with. But it is not where our beliefs are. We can rationalize our way to a new belief or to change a belief. Instead, beliefs are felt. And they’re felt in the limbic emotional part of the brain. The limbic system is mute and cannot think with words. The prefrontal cortex can’t directly talk to the limbic system with words. Instead, the prefrontal cortex must communicate with emotion. You have to train the limbic system to feel differently about a belief. You can’t use positive affirmations because they are not felt as strongly as aversion.
Does that mean you actually know that you're a good manager but can't shake off the feeling that you're not? And this technique is a way to achieve that?
Not working on it yet but can a small box sitting on your counter do LLM, TTS all local with maybe outbound queries to the internet.
First iteration may be box is rpi based and local LLM runs in another room on beefier machine (or even before that just get it working with a cloud Llama).
What would make this cool is to use MemGPT for memory so you can talk to it Monday and then it remembers what you said Friday.
I've been working on the idea of building synthetic workers. I'm trying to implement a planning workflow system for scenarios where the workflow definition, the environment, or the task are not well defined. I also ended up implementing a micro Palentir plugin system to support the action system for the synthetic users.
Its a cool project that gave me immense pleasure to built, however its unfortunately a intellectually masturbatory one, because although the tech is cool, I haven't found a cool application for it. If anyone is interested hit me up.
An entity database (rest api on postgres so dB is a stretch) with a crud frontend for platform engineering. Adding a similar control loop to kubernetes and bash script (or executables) as the extension language.
This way you can write all of your glue code into one platform and create an IDP at the same time.
This came from a lot of situations where I'd need like one random thing to be stored in a database, but adding that complexity is a bit of a hump for just one thing.
Also crossplane is a really cool idea but starting a kubernetes cluster so that you can manage infra sounds insane to me, even as an avid kubernetes fanboy.
Do you have a prose description or repo you'd be interested in sharing? I'm acquainted with Zotero and Omnivore, but I accumulate papers to read much faster than I get through my TBR pile and it's getting pretty unwieldy already.
i like to bounce between projects week to week and am in a huge phase of just trying to build services i pay money for.
the first fun thing i'm working on a roguelite(?) type of petsim in dragonruby for my wife and i to play.
then i'll go back to working on my mtg collection / deck builder app. instead of rewriting in nextjs i decided to just go modern rails with it and i am honestly having a lot of fun. a redesign helps too, but once you get the hang of turbo/hotwire and stuff it really isn't that bad.
another thing i've got kicking is writing up a portfolio site for my old photography since that current hosted plan is about to renew. this is more of a stability and performance issue as i really liked using Format, but every single time i go to show my port to someone irl i would either not load or take forever or have images missing. extremely frustrating.
i'm very tired of SaaS pricing going up (with unwanted features) and user experience and value going down. reallllllly fighting the urge to just build a clone and try to take a cut of the overall business.
I love the idea and thought I'd do a rough check on the math:
Assuming the goal is to match the power delivery of a high power UK kettle, looks like the batteries will need to step in and produce about 1kW of power for the duration of the boil, something like 50% on top of the standard 15A US circuit. I know on paper the circuit ratings are nearly 2x, but in practice it sounds like it's closer to 1.5x for the average kettle comparison.
80% efficiency for the heating coil, 1.6L of water, you need about ~750kJ (200Wh) get to a boil from 10C tap water.
So you'll need at least 70Wh output from your battery, and it needs to provide 1kW continuously. Accounting for conversion losses and some buffer to avoid deep discharge I'll target 80Wh. At 1kW that's a continuous 13C discharge rate, which is pretty high. Hobby-oriented LiPo packs will do it, but I'm not sure how they would hold up for consumer product safety and longevity. LiFePO cells could be a good choice since density is _less_ of a concern, and are readily available with 20+C continuous discharge.
I don't know my power electronics very well, so I'm not sure the best way to merge the outputs. Any conversions are going to eat into total power and thus boil time, just rectifying the AC will take 20%. Maybe it makes the most sense to have two separate coils, one direct from AC and a second from the battery? With smaller cells in series, say 10+, to get a decent voltage it could end up with a manageable current to use directly with the 1kW boost. In that case the only expensive power electronics needed would be to charge the batteries.
Also have to figure out how much recharge time matters to people, since by default it would be an hour or so.
It's going to have a chunky, heavy base, and guessing it will have to be pretty expensive for what it does, but I like it.
The whole idea sounds pretty insane really. Who's going to pay hundreds of dollars for a battery-powered kettle just so they can save 1-2 minutes of time (and less if you're just making enough boiling water for 1 cup). I use a little 100V (900W I think, according to the label) kettle to make tea, either 1 or 2 cups at a time, and while it's certainly not as speedy as those EU/UK market kettles, and a bit slower than a US kettle, it's fast enough.
A battery-powered one might save me 1 minute of time at best, but will cost probably at least 5-10x as much for the kettle, it'll be MUCH larger than my current kettle (that battery pack and power electronics needs space) which is a problem with my tiny kitchen, and I have to worry about how long the battery will last and how to dispose of it later and if I can even replace it.
working on building extremely simple workflow automation software for small and medium sized businesses who are still thinking to adopt automation and AI as they find it quite challenging and overwhelming
I built CryptoGain, an (currently) android app for cryptocurrency market tracking and analysis. Started it after getting frustrated with the limitations other apps put on technical analysis features behind premium tiers.
It offers:
- comprehensive technical analysis tools without artificial limits or cost
- customizable price alerts
- portfolio and watchlist management
- live market data across major exchanges
- available in 15+ languages
Currently serving a few thousand users and actively iterating based on feedback. The focus has been on making advanced trading tools accessible while maintaining a clean, intuitive interface.
Would love feedback from the HN community, especially around what technical analysis features you find essential but are often paywalled in other apps.
It is almost feature complete, but good enough for my private use, as I’m using it my self to study kanji. I have maybe a three or four more weekends until it is completely finished, with dark-mode, data backups, input by radicals, etc.
I'm building https://exoroad.com to help people find US places that are a better match for them to move to. Like compare stats on SF vs. NYC or find the warm places with good schools and low crime.
Busy market, hard to sell to companies who need to migrate. The main reason for migrations is price (eg. Auth0 being super expensive), which is not a good thing. I'm probably not telling you anything new.
A point anc click model pretraining tool. Simply put all of your data into a directory of directories. Next, point the software to this directory and a few days later you get a pretrained model out.
For the last little while now, I've been spending a lot of my spare time learning to work with a language called AgentSpeak[1] using a platform called Jason[2].
Briefly, Jason is a platform for building intelligent agents based on the BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) software model[3], which is in turn based on the Belief-Desire-Intention cognitive model[4]. Broadly speaking, it's an event based programming model, where "events" are things like "gaining a new belief", "dropping a belief", "selecting a plan to execute" (aka an "intention"), etc. AgentSpeak programs (normally) run "forever" cycling through a "reasoning cycle" that involves perceiving the world, updating beliefs, choosing intentions, executing intentions, communicating with other agents, etc.
And to commit a little self-plagiarism, from a recent post on LinkedIn:
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On the one hand, AgentSpeak is basically a logic programming language with a lot of #prolog in its heritage. On the other hand, the runtime is all Java and to do anything interesting you have to write your custom Environment class and other helper functions in #Java. And while the interop is seamless in a way, getting your head around the execution model and knowing what's really happening at runtime can be a bit tricky.
Still, it's starting to make sense. And I do think this #BDI inspired approach has a lot going for it. I'm just looking forward to getting to the point where I can really start to exercise this. I have a few things that I want to accomplish soon:
1. I want to create a BDI agent that I can connect to an #XMPP server so I can talk with it from anywhere.
2. I want to start working on customized perception, using neural networks and various sensors (web-cam, microphone, accelerometer, distance sensor, etc.) to create an embodied agent that can truly sense its environment.
3. I want to take a stab at integrating some symbolic reasoning. I've given thought to trying to adapt the "belief base" to be an #RDF triplestore (probably #Apache #Jena) and include a reasoning engine or two. This all starts to get really speculative from here, but I spent a lot of time working on abductive inference a couple of years ago, and I'd like this thing to be able to use abductive inference, along with deductive reasoning, rule induction, possibly case based reasoning, etc. all in one system.
4. Might experiment with implementing a #Blackboard architecture and have specialized "problem solving" agents that collaborate by using the Blackboard in some situations. What would be really interesting here would be to figure out how to seamlessly translate in and out of a structured representation that lets you use existing specialized code for things like, eg. R for statistical operations.
5. And of course, experimenting with continual learning, as opposed to the "batch training job" stuff that we all use for ANN's today. This gets really speculative as well, but I want to explore contrastive learning, Hebbian learning, associative learning, operant conditioning (ala Pavlov), etc.
[5] above is why you'll see me spending as much time lately with Developmental Psychology, Infant Development, and Cognitive Psychology books, as with "AI" books per-se. I still believe that getting an AI that can learn from its environment, and build up useful mental representations with the minimal set of hard-coded behaviors, will be the best way to make progress with regards to #AGI.
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I didn't mention it in the LinkedIn post, but as part of all of this, I've been building a hardware platform for some time now as well, where said platform is meant to support "perceiving the environment" so the system can learn from the physical world. It's not finished yet, but today it includes a GPS receiver so it can "know" it's location in physical space, a 6-DOF accelerometer/magnetometer/gyroscope board so it can sense movement (of itself), and two microphones (for stereo audio input). Future plans include one or two webcams to emulate vision, and possibly some other sensors: IR and/or ultrasonic distance sensors, temperature sensor, humidity and barometric pressure sensors, etc.
Also in the "speculative / for the future" category: AgentSpeak programs don't have any inherent notion of learning built into the model. All "plans" (aka "desires" or "candidate intentions") have to be coded by the developer up-front. This is obviously pretty limiting if you're trying to create truly autonomous agents, so another area I want to dig into is how we might combine work on "AI Planning"[5] to dynamically create new plans.
And since this has kind of turned into a big brain-dump of stuff that's on my mind, I'll finish by saying that I've been chewing on some ideas about explicitly modeling other "mental states" that aren't part of the base BDI model. Things like "attitudes", "values", different emotional states (eg "boredom", "frustration", etc.), "curiosity", "confusion" / "cognitive dissonance", and so on.
For a fun weekend project, I built Boardle - a daily wordle-like game where you guess popular boardgames using stats from Board Game Geek. The games are from BGG's top 150 games as voted by the community, so fair warning if you aren't already someone who plays a lot of modern boardgames this will be very hard as all the games are very nerdy
I am building a digital replacement of all universities in the world with full courses across any subject, in any language, tailored to your individual learning style all.
I revived an old collision detection library of mine and pretty much rewrote it with a C API: https://github.com/pfirsich/wuzy
I fixed a bunch of bugs and streamlined things and I'll build a nice high level API on top next. It uses GJK/EPA and AABB Trees for acceleration.
Currently, I’m focused on helping students with their academic tasks, providing reliable support for those who need a bit of extra guidance. If you're feeling swamped with assignments, check out Do My Assignment for me at https://myassignmenthelp.expert/do-my-assignment.html. It’s a resourceful platform for quality, timely assistance tailored to meet various academic requirements. Perfect for those managing tight deadlines and complex assignments!
Useful Resources: https://bbs.superbuy.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=658080... https://pastewall.com/sticker/4b3cd04b197a4a10a04fab43a7dc6a...
A new YouTube app/player, for my kids.
It allows us to control the algorithm. It’s all LLM translating to YouTube search queries under the hood.
Visually it looks the same.
The suggested videos come from predefined buckets on topics they love.
E.g. 33% fun math, 33% DIY engineering, 33% creative activities.
Video recommendations that have a banned word in the title/desc don't get displayed e.g. MrBeast, anything with Minecraft in it, never gets surfaced.
For anyone interested in using it, send me an email.
jim.jones1@gmail.com
For anyone wanting interesting YT videos for their kids (and not wanting to take anything away from OP's project), I highly highly recommend thekidshouldseethis.com. It's basically a curated stream of cool videos, and I would feel totally safe letting my daughter browse it alone (she never does because we usually watch them together, but the curation is that good). Videos on all sorts of topics, and good enough to be really entertaining for both kids and adults - I can spend an evening there easily. They also have a really fantastic gift guide.
YouTube recommendations for kids shouldn't be driven by engagement (e.g. "oh, you watched 20 hours of MrBeast videos. You probably need another hour.")
If my kid watches an hour of unboxing toy videos, I shouldn't have to try and disable 3,000 channels of toy unboxings in an effort for that topic to never surface again.
The thumbs down button essentially has zero effect.
https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-dislike-button-mozilla-r...
Diversity of thought and topic is much more critical when they are kids.
Todd Beaupré, the product lead for the YouTube homepage, says "We love exploration, have multiple teams dedicated to it."
But from my kids' viewing habits, I don't see it. The algorithm is seems super narrowly focused.
https://x.com/hitsman/status/1845168160691061121
Andrej Karpathy commented on the narrowness of the algorithm just the other day.
https://x.com/karpathy/status/1844449291282284925
I’d go further and say nobody should be subjected to this stuff. Engagement is a euphemism for addiction. Self improving addiction machines are a horrible idea. They’re actively bad for people and society for a laundry list of reasons.
Anyone who works on this stuff should be ashamed of yourselves. You’re modern day cigarette companies.
What do you feel is an appropriate and ethical way to surface content?
How would you go about writing the recommendation algorithm?
One thing I would like to see is an algorithm based on expressed rather than revealed preferences.
De-jargoned, that means clicking the like button means I want to see more things like that, and the dislike button means I don't want to see things like that. If I watched something all the way through, but clicked the dislike button, that means I don't want to see things that produced a similar response from people who tend to react the way I do.
This kind of algorithm is not going to increase watch time over the short term, and might not over the long term either, which makes it unlikely to be adopted by any for-profit service.
As a parent with a couple of kids about to be the age of wanting to watch YT I'm very interested in this!
Please email me, I need testers.
jim.jones1@gmail.com
sent you mail, I would love to be associated with this project. I was looking for a solution for some time, at least one which allows to restrict the content from the main youtube. Youtube kids app they have is a joke.
Would an app like this work with TV? Would be super cool if it would.
No TV support.
iOS and Android.
This is very interesting. I would paid for something like that, that could work for any popular video social media platform.
Email me, jim.jones1@gmail.com
Would love your input.
it would be great if this project is open source
I'm still working on https://reciperium.com where people can write recipes with a custom language and create forks of other recipes and modify them.
I'm currently working on supporting images on the recipes.
I'm proud of having launched on producthunt and now trying to figure out how to attract more users
Putting the finishing touches on my LLM based town simulator. Once it's finished I'll have it simulate 4 hours in the town every 2 hours in reality.
It is designed to solve the problem of "RPG hero just killed a dragon in front of the town and no one says anything about it." All the NPCs realistically react and talk about the Hero's exploits.
Visitors to the site can vote on what quest the hero undertakes next.
I'm running into the problem what the site isn't much fun. I'm honestly not sure what to do about that!
An only slightly buggy build is at https://www.generativestorytelling.ai/tinyllmtown/index.html
Importantly, I am aiming to have everything (except voice gen) working on a small model that can be ran locally.
Nice idea, but right now the villagers mostly say some variation on "I eagerly await the valiant hero's return!". Beside the fact that no villagers would ever speak so formally, this seems to fall into the standard fantasy problem that the normal people in the world only exist to further the hero's agency. Could you give the villagers a sense of their own agency, meaning that they have lives of their own that would continue whether the hero returns or not?
I'm working on synthesizing a genome at home! Here is a video with more details, as well as a picture of my home lab. I've always wanted to build life from scratch, and I finally have a chance to do it.
Video on what I'm doing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCiuS1oHnKw
Picture of my home lab - https://x.com/koeng101/status/1844150979484319842
I'm trying to build a DNA assembly company right now (been lots of ups and downs lately...), and one thing I need to do is validate the specs of my oligo pool synthesis provider, Agilent, before I release to customers / raise a seed round. So as a stress-test run of my system, I'm synthesizing a genome, and am thinking about trying to livestream it. The unique technology is variety of ways to assemble and validate DNA from oligo pools for a lot cheaper, pretty much enabling a 10x reduction in DNA synthesis cost vs commercial suppliers. I've worked my ass off for nearly 2 years to get to this moment and am so excited!
Very impressive work. Are you still able to proceed with operating your lab despite the injunction passed against you for theft of trade secrets? [1]
[1] https://www.sideman.com/ronald-fisher-and-ellen-leonida-achi...
Wow this is very exciting! Always makes me happy when I see your comments on HN, you're always up to something interesting! Are you hiring developers or aspiring bioengineers? (I'm a developer and an aspiring bioengineer)
This is incredible. I have a biochemistry and bioinformatics background, and I've always been curious about how easy and cheap it could be to do various experiments at home. Godspeed!
> I've always wanted to build life from scratch, and I finally have a chance to do it.
I'm pretty sure I saw this movie... and it didn't end well for existing life on Earth, as I recall. :p
a literal home lab!
I'm building a simple app to let friends and loved ones know how you're doing. I know many people in some of the current troubled regions of the world, and whenever a particular event happens it's really nerve-wracking for those of us not there, wondering if our loved ones are okay.
WhatsApp and messenger groups don't work for this kind of thing because 1) people are often members of many different groups that they would have to constantly notify if they were "okay" during a particular event and 2) many troubles in the world are ongoing, and constantly spamming a message group saying "I'm still okay" doesn't work.
My app just lets people hit a single button to tell any interested friends / family that they are safe. They can do this as many times as they like.
Normally I would be worried about premature optimization, what I've been spending extra time making the tech stack initially very performant. It's working for my family but once I deploy to the world I want it to be solid and stable, or it loses a lot of its value.
This is an ongoing experiment that david927 has been helping with (thanks!). The two previous in the sequence were:
Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41690087 - Sept 2024 (1041 comments)
Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41342017 - Aug 2024 (1424 comments)
One thing I'd like to hone in on is that these threads aren't intended for promotion, but rather for the just-because sort of project, driven by idle interest or weird obsession—the sort of thing people might spend their free time on.
I'm not sure yet what the official "rule" should be (if any), but if you're working on a startup or have had attention via Show HN, maybe abstain from these discussions? It wouldn't be good for the thread to get taken over by things HN already has a place for.
Thanks, Dan, for that clarification. The question each month is actually two-fold: what have you been tinkering around with and what new ideas are thinking about. It's an invitation to dialogue.
We know our history and the role collaboration has played in it. Whether at Xerox PARC or Bell Labs, bouncing ideas off of other colleagues has spurred incredible innovation.
I submit that HN is a giant Xerox PARC. We have all of the ingredients for this recipe here on HN. We have the brilliant minds; we have the joy of creation. I submit that what we lack is mixing those ingredients. We lack dialogue and collaboration, and it's all completely unnecessary. It's here. Please use it.
Why isn't it intended for promotion?
I find this "anti-promotion" attitude to be doing a disservice to this HN community for a few reasons.
Clearly, this whole website is funded and exists in part to promote YC's portfolio companies, as evidenced by "Launch HN" threads getting auto-front paged whereas "Show HN" plebians have to earn the upvotes from /new (which most agree required an exceptionally good post and a lot of luck to even get that goodness noticed). And we're not talking promotion of a few posts, YC is now doing multiple batches a year and has hundreds of companies per batch meaning we're seeing a LOT of promotion / advertisements on this site coming via Launch HN threads as well as jobs ad threads.
I don't think Xerox park would have done as well if 5% of the people get got the opportunity for a microphone in the auditorium every week and the other 95% did not. That would seem like a caste system. I understand that YC funds this website so the caste system is inevitable but I don't see why moderation should further stratify it - unless you're prioritizing advertising YC companies over a great community.
Next, I see this "HN is not for self promotion" do a lot of downstream damage on the community in the sense that it's much better for big, existing trillion dollar companies than smaller players. If a small bootstrapped startup writes a blog post and mentions there product, people will complain about "blogspam" and "this blog post is really just an ad for a link at the end". But if Google or Amazon have a new announcement for a new product, nobody complains that it's an advertisement, even though it's often as much or more one. The end result is that the website tends to focus more "corporate" news than "hacker" news as a downstream consequence of a well-meaning "no self-promotion" rule.
Finally, as we've discussed over email, the rules around self-promotion are extremely opaque and in many cases algorithmically enforced by closed algorithms. This leads to a lot of confusion around what's allowed and a lot of ambiguous favoritism.
I understand this site is called "Hacker" news and there's some mystique around the "hacker" building "just for fun" , the purism around intellectual curiosity that you don't want tainted by dirty commercialism. I just think that once the website has decided it's going to be the media arm of one of the most powerful venture capital firms in the world, the ship has sailed.If people really want pure tech news, they should go to https://lobste.rs/ . I've personally found in recent years quality of interesting conversation is much higher on /r/saas, Indie Hackers board, and Small Bets campfire, as well as various Discords, all because they allow self-promotion and don't encourage the "self-promotion police" who frequently show up aghast someone would try to make money on the internet (unless it's their daddy FAANG employer).
Another rule I've seen in various places be very effective is a simple guideline to contribute 10x as much non-promotional content as promotional content. If someone only posts links to their projects and nothing else, I see how that gets spammy. But if someone regularly contributes they should get a pass. I understand that's partially how the submission system works via algorithmic enforcement, but , see above about its opaque and ambiguous nature.
Show HN is a "place" for self-promotion but it's a pretty bad place if 99% of submissions get entirely lost and ignored and I think you should encourage more places for promotion without inflicting a caste system where only YC companies and certain golden children get special rules.
Overall, HN's guidelines against self-promotion are too rigid, there's too few opportunties for small players to promote, which makes the discussion here less egalitarian, more corporate, and less interesting. You'd be better served encouraging more self-promotion in threads like these.
Grindset self-promo tactics being pervasively, overly represented in the content submissions and discussions here are the number one reason I take very long breaks from the site.
More genuine conversations are intensely welcome, so if that takes overt guard rails, so be it. If the only enthusiasm someone really wants to share is about their capitalist endeavors, count me out.
There’s simply no “HN is not for self promotion” policy. You’re asked to not use your account primarily for self-promotion, and repeats are allowed, so you can roll your dice multiple times on your Show HN already as long as you’re otherwise a good contributor to the community and only do it sparingly. Flooding another topic with commercial promos simply turns it into another https://news.ycombinator.com/show, what’s the point then?
As for YC companies getting Launch placements, well too bad, it’s their site, you’re free to leave and start your competing one. I assume most users aren’t bothered — I seldom notice them and hardly ever click on them. I notice job ads more.
One thing I do like: When people call themselves out -- "hey, we buy this software... or I work for this company and you might like this software"... then they share some software that is relevant to the discussion. I rarely see those kinds of contributions downvoted due to their transparency. Plus, I learn about lots of interesting companies and solutions that way.
I’m building a way for developers to easily deploy open source applications (Postgres, redis, sentry, elastic search, etc), plus have a full heroku like workflow for their own applications, all within their kubernetes cluster, with what I hope is a super intuitive and friendly UI.
I’ve ran a start up and saw how SaaS-ified and expensive web tooling is (heroku, datadog, redshift, fivetran, etc), but how difficult it was to move off of them. We had a few years of over 1 million in infrastructure spend.
I’m hoping just making Kubernetes easier to use gives us a way out.
It’s fully open source and a hosted version is free to use! https://canine.sh.
Would love feedback on it, including how the overall pitch could be better, or if it actually solves people’s problems.
I cant access the github repo for some reason
whoops! Made it private, facepalm should be fixed now
I'm building a wayland sleep and gamma handler that has lua scripting integration. It bothers me that it's so hard to set different timeout handlers. So I recently integrated wljoywake, which allows me to handle timeout on joystick commands and am in the process of adding flux like functionality.
The reason why I want scripting is between I want the color to pause while I'm playing videos without having to add scripting logic to other tools.
I'm also planning to add rofi like functionality with layershell. Rofi is the only tool that has first party support for keybindings and other functionalities, but it's all done through strings. I'd rather have a lua scripting interface that can call other scripts and communicate with json or something similar.
https://github.com/fishman/wlsleephandler-rs
I am working on Injee - The no configuration instant database for frontend developers.
https://injee.codeberg.page/
https://pastmaps.com
I'm building Pastmaps - striving to eventually be the world's largest online collection of old maps, aerials, and photos all packaged into a public historical research platform that's as easy to use as Google Maps. This has been a labor of love now for about a year, but I still have a huge mountain to climb to realize the full vision. Give it a try and give me your harsh criticisms - that's the greatest gift you could give me!
Even in it's current state, it's being used by geneologists, urban explorers, search & rescue teams, real estate developers, government agencies, etc. The number of exploding use-cases continues to astound me and keeps me motivated to continue.
Criticism: This is going to suck. Too much of my time, that is. This is super cool, thank you for doing this!
Nice collection but very US-centric. Is there a plan to extend it to other countries? Thinking tourists, historians and the like.
This is badass. love it. Wish you could make an account with a regular email address, though, and not just with Google.
I love pastmaps! Nice to see you on HN!
At work, busy adding internationalisation and localising an Angular 16 application. Figured out you can do runtime language switches, without having to maintain separate builds for each locale. Angular's documentation is rubbish.
In my spare time, building an OpenAI wrapper to create SEO meta descriptions for websites. It's mostly a tool for me to use because at work the marketing people don't do this very well and I am too lazy to do it with ChatGPT (copying the prompt and setting it up every time). Plus, the API is way cheaper for me to use. Building it with Laravel and InertiaJs is so much fun. The marketing people at work said they'll find a tool like this super useful, so I already have a user haha.
Are you using existing libraries for your angular i18n?
I created KopiMap (https://kopimap.com) to help people discover great cafés in Jakarta Indonesia, but I wanted to take the UX further by automatically organizing user-submitted photos into meaningful categories (menu, food/drinks, ambiance).
The challenge is how to classify images as cost efficient as possible without compromising performance. I decided to go with running ML models on the client-side.
Technical implementation: - Built and trained a compact TensorflowJS model (~3MB) that runs entirely in-browser - Model lazy loads only when users are submitting reviews - Classifies uploaded photos into Menu, Food & Drink, or Vibes (interior/exterior) - Zero server costs for inference, quick enough classification feedback
This approached solved several problems: 1. Reduced server costs by moving inference to the client 2. Improved UX with immediate photo categorization 3. Maintained app performance by lazy loading the model
Would love feedback from the HN community on: - Optimizing the model size further - Alternative approaches to client-side ML - General UX improvements for local discovery apps
I had no prior ML experience, so this was a fun challenge :)
Currently, I’m focused on helping students with their academic tasks, providing reliable support for those who need a bit of extra guidance. If you're feeling swamped with assignments, check out Do My Assignment for me at https://myassignmenthelp.expert/do-my-assignment.html. It’s a resourceful platform for quality, timely assistance tailored to meet various academic requirements. Perfect for those managing tight deadlines and complex assignments!
I'm trying to prevent anyone from ever dropping a table in production again or executing a delete without a where clause.
https://github.com/kviklet/kviklet
Essentially a PR review flow for production access, which allows you to enforce a second pair of eyes workflow. I was always a bit scared when I was on call and had all the power in my finger tips to ruin everyone's day. I think this helps alleviate the risk of human error significantly. Also helps with compliance of course.
I've been getting my indie game Asterogue ready for web release (previously it was Android & Windows only). Last night I pushed the final build live yay! You can play it at:
https://asterogue.com
I continue to work on BoltAI (https://boltai.com)
It’s a native macOS AI chat client. I started it last year and didn’t think much about data synchronization. I didn’t want to store user’s data so I decided to store all chats in a local SQLite database.
It works well but unfortunately without a sync engine, users won’t be able to continue the chat from a different machine.
I’m working on supporting cloud sync now.
I have one e-commerce system that ships boxes of organic coffee to people's homes all over the United States.
I have another ecommerce system that delivers boxes of organic produce all over the Seattle region.
So I am working on building an integration between the two systems. When a box of coffee is being shipped on the same day that the delivery company is already going to that region, redirect that box's fulfilment process away from USPS/FedEx and deliver it instead.
This saves 50% on shipping costs for the coffee company, and the delivery company gets paid for utilizing extra space in the delivery vans. It's been 4 months of work so far, and most of the individual pieces are working in production right now, hoping to enable all of it together this week or next. Just in time for the holidays ;)
The hardest part so far was integrating all the custom label generation, and mapping/routing so that it's seamless with the existing workflows of each company. The coffee company doesn't have a "separate" workflow for the new non-shipping orders, and the delivery company doesn't have a "separate" workflow for fulfilling orders they did not pack.
The real cherry on top is that it's built in such a way that N number of stores could integrate their stores into our fulfillment. This lets many local food producers who cant do their own fulfillment still participate in the local food economy without having "scale". It's kinda like an upside down Fulfillment By Amazon: they'll do your delivery for you as long as you sell through their store (and take their ever-increasing cut of the sale). This version lets the store owner maintain their own store, URL, branding, prices, availability, customer relationship, and margins, but then hook into our last-mile fulfillment.
I am working on the Vanta for sustainability and climate disclosures. Climate and sustainability disclosures are starting to come online in many sectors and parts of the world. We offer compliance-as-a-service so that startups and covered entities can fulfill their compliance requirements in a mostly self-serve manner without having to hire expensive consultants or undergo significant restructurings. Our platform provides a single source of truth for your climate, sustainability, and emissions data. For example, if you are an American company trying to go-to-market in Europe, all it takes is purchasing an additional module and we will automatically generate the compliance documents and checklists for you based on the existing data we have on your company. We also offer managed “Climate Trust Center” dashboards that you can subdomain on your website for investors reporting and to satisfy disclosure requirements.
If you are in an EPA-regulated (or equivalents in Canada and Europe) industry (such as mining, oil and gas, minerals, rare earths, metal processing, airlines, construction, shipping/marine, logistics, heavy industries, agriculture/farming/food production, data center, power generation including renewables, adjacent ones like consumer goods, real estate, large scale AI training, climate derivatives etc.) or require sustainability consulting support in general, we would love to talk to you: hello@carbonimpacthq.com (put “HN:” in the subject line so we know where you are coming from)
https://carbonimpacthq.com (the landing page is still a work-in-progress but you can check out our blog for more information https://carbonimpacthq.com/esg-and-your-business/)
I'm building a collator robot [0] to help me pack items I sell for building your own open source split-flap mechanical display [1].
I get custom character flaps printed and die-cut in bulk and then sell them in smaller sets. A full set of flaps for one module has 52 distinct designs (letters, numbers, symbols, etc) and I get them from the manufacturer grouped by design, so they need to be collated to sell as packs of 52 with 1 of each design.
My WIP robot will take a stack of one design and distribute them to a bunch of cubbies, then I'll swap in the next design, and so on, so each cubby ends up with a full set.
It's based on a cheap ~$110 CNC gantry frame from AliExpress and a ~$35 BTT SKR Pico 3d printer main board running GrblHAL. To detect whether the flaps feed successfully I use a visible light break-beam sensor (the typical IR sensors don't work because the PVC flaps happen to be IR transparent!) which acts as the "z probe" - the flap is fed via a G38.3 probe action which returns whether the probe was successful or not, and the "z" coordinate it was first detected.
I have a python script running on a computer to send the gcode to the machine.
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/scottbez1.bsky.social/post/3l737hme...
[1] https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap
Autopilot for my sit-on-top fishing kayak. Designed, modeled, and printed an assembly which attaches to the rudder rod. Moves the rod via a stepper motor connected to a Teensy 4.0 which gets NMEA 2000 messages from a Garmin heading sensor and a Garmin fish finder/chartplotter. Uses PID control to maintain any course I set on the chartplotter, using the cross-track error and heading. I’ve had it out on the water a few times now and it works great. Also put together an iOS app that communicates with the assembly via BLE so I can modify the PID gains as needed depending on conditions.
There was a bit of noise to the sonar transducer since the stepper motor was so noisy, but I mostly eliminated it by routing the motor wires through liquid-tight flexible electrical conduit, connecting the conduit to ground.
https://newbeeleaarn.com/tools/csvonline free csv viewer with charts and tables with usual sorting/searching/filtering etc.
I am planning to use the core of this product to create kind of arbitrary dashboard for csv but i am not sure if there is any need for this kind of product.
It is probably not substantial among the projects people have commented on this thread, but I am happy to be working on my first personal website made from plain old HTML and simplecss.
Learning how to arrange things, navigation, and my own blog on my own site gives me the gratification of owning something fully. Everyone should have their own site is truly what I agree with.
https://spacesanjeet.me
An "offline-first" client web app for Github. I don't want to have to wait seconds to load up an issue, and then wait seconds (or keep another tab open) to go back to the list of issues/PRs, ...etc. I want everything to feel instant, with optimistic updates, and a backend sync process that doesn't require me to refresh the page to see new updates.
(Small note: I'm doing it in full-stack Rust, including web frontend, using leptos).
The same project I'm working on since about 5 years. Using thermal printer as TTRPG utility :)
https://sales-and-dungeons.app/
Working on a solution for low touch categorization and archival of online data. Currently focused on one click tagging and archiving tweets.
You can check out the Chrome extension here https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jgglahegfmldmibegm...
Future versions will have online storage and low touch tagging of archiving/tagging any online data. A mobile app is also planned.
Will be hosted at archivant.com
I’m chipping away at a simple storefront solution that’s as low tech, reliable, low cost, and user-friendly as I can make it. I’m really enjoying the no-shiny-tech aspect of it.
Several things:
1. Working on a 'production ready' version of Conal Elliot's 'compiling to categories' for GHC.
2. This is so I can create a vectorizable model of a datalog-based query language I'm building in Haskell.
3. The query engine will be using a version of monadic optimization as outlined on a blog post somewhere
4. The purpose of the query engine is maintenance of large datasets, all the more important with AI these days, but really general purpose.
5. The motivation for this was a low code tool I had built in Haskell almost a decade ago that I abandoned that I'm bringing up to use ghcs web assembly backend and I need a proper query engine for it now.
Other things:
1. Thinking about binary neural networks and how to train them stochastically.
2. Learning about finite element methods for physical modeling and also reviewing my basic topology so I can think more about non discrete math and algebra which I tend to focus on.
3. I'm building a cloud chamber! Because I want to see space particles. Literally for no other reason than I'm obsessed with these devices ever since seeing one at the exploratorium
4. And raising three kids. I don't know how I have time for anything
I'm working on ways to allow developers and deployers of LLMs to express how and why their overall system is compliant and adversarially robust, and what to do when that's not the case.
Specifically, my team and I are making assurance cases and ontologies that can seamlessly integrate with the system and its guardrails. For example, if you want to deploy some mix of filters underneath a user-facing LLM app, you would able to: 1) express the logic of how they should be deployed and why (e.g., if X=1, then Y, else Z); 2) see how they perform over time and evaluate alternatives; 3) investigate what happened when an attack succeeds; 4) prove to the auditors that you're taking all measures necessary to be robust and compliant with the EU AI Act.
It started as an informal collab early this year, but we have since published a few workshop papers on this concept [1,2]. We're building a Python demo that would show how it all fits together.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09078 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05304
I'm building Reasonote, a platform where you can learn anything with personalized, interactive lessons, and podcasts.
Imagine a fusion of Duolingo, Spotify Podcasts, Anki, ChatGPT, and Claude Artifacts.
We have custom AI-generated podcasts that generate faster than NotebookLM, that you can queue up for yourself. (Many more features coming here soon -- like more engaging podcasts and better voices)
Our classroom mode can generate interactive lessons, complete with an AI tutor, on any subject.
Flow mode allows you to practice deeply, with infinite activities to test your skills.
All of this is driven by a dynamically generated and continuously updating "Skill Tree", which keeps track of the domain you're studying, and your progress within it.
try it at: https://reasonote.com
I’m working on a zine. The first issue is on system evals for LLM-driven apps. It’s set in a world where Bear and Fox are opening a cafe with an LLM shoggoth generating custom recipes.
Lots of people just going off of vibes to see if their system is working right. That’s a good start, but you’ll need system evals to systematically improve your app. Like Garry says, “don’t raw dog your prompts. Use system evals”
https://forestfriends.tech
I am playing around with LLMs and Game Theory. Currently, I let them play 5x5 board games in a tournament against Reinforcement Learning Agents and a Random Player. I am capturing the "thoughts" of the agent for behavioral data analysis. My background is Risk Management, I am trying to gather an understanding how such LLMs report their "decision" for applications in human/ai interactions for identifying and reporting governance flaws.
Since I am working on autonomous agents that are given the agency to take an action on their own, I believe having a good understanding of the "psyche" is important (at least to me).
[1]https://jdsemrau.substack.com/
I am teaching myself how to build a robot quadruped (aka 'robot dog') from scratch, including an ML controller to make it move in animated ways.
I'm also documenting every step of the process and uploading it to YouTube, which means I am also teaching myself how to edit videos :)
If anyone wants to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL55VZ7oDEoRnXKSYTiGlN...
An email client that just “does the right thing” in terms of showing new emails I care about.
I don’t want to configure filters or adopt inbox zero. I want the computer to look at decades of email activity and just figure it out.
Second, working on a single dashboard for attorneys to create and upload filings across different agencies and different states. Trying to improve accuracy and labor costs for mundane work like this.
(Opinions? Suggestions? Want to work together? Email me!)
yea this is smart. It should be obvious who i communicate with or which emails have an urgency to them.
I'm building an AI Data Engineer @ Ardent AI. It's an autonomous AI Agent that can perform data transformations in your databases (mongodb,postgres,supabase for now) from plain english queries
It drops directly into your stack, no new configuration needed
It has its own compute engine and will soon support spark to be able to dynamically perform large scale ETLs and data manipulation.
I also am working towards supporting automatic data pipeline building and data quality checks.
It's live right now @ https://Ardentai.io
Check it out :)
Knitting hats. The fall/winter is when I bury myself in knitting projects to fight seasonal depression and cabin fever. Audiobook + knitting == bliss.
The work most of us do isn't tangible. You have nothing to "prove" that you made something. Creating something in meat space is really rewarding.
I'm also knitting! Working on my very first cardigan.
Finished a project that serves as a launching pad for GoLang HTTP APIs. It does decoding of request parameters into structs using instructions found in tags amongst a bunch of other utilities.
I am learning react-native now. Just finished building a themed components library.
These are for building a simple intelligence platform. Intelligence meaning a way to model entities, events, documents, and the link between them.
I want to use this instead of having thousands of documents on dropbox organized by a random folder hierarchy.
The API part of this project sounds interesting - do you have a sharable repo ?
I'm still plugging away on Arbite Robotics (arbite.io). Working on lowish level hardware and software for high performance robots.
Working on my Mill build tool, a new JVM build tool that aims to provide a faster, easier alternative than the status quo tools of Gradle and Maven.
I just gave my first conference talk about it, and response was positive. Hope others find it interesting as well!
https://mill-build.org/mill/index.html
Still working on https://folge me - one time priced alternative to step by step guide, sop builders like scribehow, tango, etc.
My app is fully desktop, offline and respects your privacy
Link doesn't work for me, might be an errant space?
Thank you for pointing it out!
The link should be https://folge.me
Two completely unrelated things:
1. An infinite realtime canvas for people all over the world to collaborate on pixel art: https://everyonedraw.com/6/4298/8439
2. An LLM-powered translator specifically optimized for English speakers living in Spanish-speaking countries: https://translate-spanish.com
The first one is purely for fun to scratch my own itch, and the second is solving some frustrations I've had with existing translator apps while living in Mexico City.
1. It's my idea!!11 Nicely done!
I'm hacking away on something I've built recently to improve the native "Publish to Web" feature from Google Docs. Essentially I'm grabbing the document's content and re-rendering it with a full-page background colour and better mobile support.
Link: https://voltdocs.com
I’m working on my ESP32 based ZXSpectrum recreation. https://www.crowdsupply.com/cmg-research/esp32-rainbow
Just finishing off a few bits of setup and the crowd funding should be live.
I'm working on a wearable device with a camera+ultrasonic sensor which is capable of accurate hand pose estimation, which will then result in sign language recognition mainly (extending to gesture recognition and HCI applications). The device should be able to integrate into a smartwatch. I'm only at the 'will it work?' stage, working on the algorithms for recognising ASL words through synthetic data. Would appreciate criticism and pointers on what to keep in mind :)
In many books and talks I hear that ideas are worth nothing until they are executed. I am changing this narrative. Every person, entrepreneur or not, will have the ability to fast-forward their idea to a place of execution within one day. From idea to first dollar in one day. = 1 day.
A tool for the creatives, the crazy ones, the doers, the brave, the weirdos, the average joes, the ones who want to move forward. That's https://www.rapidvisual.ai
I'm developing an implementation of what I call Hydra – Multi-Head Prediction Embeddings [1], which I believe represents the next evolution in transformer architectures.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381009719_Hydra_Enh...
I'm writing a build tool for SQL. I like to write SQL directly and to use it's more powerful features (like stored procedures and Postgres' ltee extension). But this is gets difficult to manage in a linear, "migrations" based workflow. I want to edit a file tree organized by topic, not a series of scripts run in order. Which is to say, I want to edit it like I would any other codebase.
I've written code allowing me to express dependencies between .sql files and to concatenate them into one big .sql file that builds your schema. I'm working on interrogating the systems tables of the database to analyze the difference between successive versions of a schema, to automatically generate simple migrations (like adding a column or renaming a stored procedure). Eg, `sqlite_master` in SQLite, and `information_schema.*` in Postgres.
This sounds very cool - I'm really interested in this angle. Got a sharable repo?
I wrote (some) of a Lua interpreter in Rust, which runs PUC Lua 5.1 dumped bytecodes. Now I'm rewrite it all because I want to do type specialization: I'm implementing "Simple and Effective Type Check Removal through Lazy Basic Block Versioning", which is used as the basis of Shopify's YJIT for Ruby. I have a decent idea of how it needs to be implemented and have a prototype kinda working, although some of the jump targets are still wrong right now. Once I get it all sketched out then I'll have to scale it back up to a full Lua implementation again, and then I'll add table shape specialization afterwards (which is a bit trickier, and outlined in a sequel paper).
We're working on a specialised graph compiler for speeding up simulations and computing derivatives automatically (backpropagation/adjoint differentiation). It now supports C++, Python, and C#; AVX2 and AVX512 instruction sets, multithreading; Windows, and Linux.
Essentially, it allows model developers (such as quants in finance, engineers, and ML specialists) to code in Python without needing to think about the performance of repetitive calculations. As we all know, Python is one of the least efficient languages when it comes to complex calculations/simulations - and we help to resolve it. Long story short, with very few tweaks to the code certain types of calculations (such as pricing of derivatives, curve building, computing financial risks, or "small" NNs) can be accelerated by 100+ in Python and x20+ in C++/C#.
We're now looking to add support for Java (but it doesn't have Operator Overloading, so it's tricky), and some customers are asking to support GPU - which is a bit tricky because it's got a closed instruction set.
Forgot to add GitHub: https://github.com/matlogica/AADC-Python
A long dormant side project of mine to design a realtime raga [1] detector.
For the uninitiated, it can be roughly seen as detection of a sequence of musical notes. Raga is a term for a particular scale of notes (both ascending and descending).
Until now, this has mostly been in the domain of research and there is a ton of published literature out there. At the very basic level, if you have just voice, it is trivial to apply a pitch detection algorithm like YIN to get a pitch estimate and then analyse the sequence to figure out the raga. This doesn't work as well in a concert setup where speeds are higher due to gamakas, different instruments are used alongside and counterpoint melodies may make the music polyphonic. A lot of papers apply a variety of ML models (neural nets and otherwise) using several different features (cepstrum and mel-cepstrum, pitch distributions etc) with varying results.
So this is an interesting exercise in Signal Processing and Machine Learning. If anyone else is working on or has worked on this, I'd love to hear from you.
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raga)
I've been teaching kids programming 1:1, off and on for 10 years or so. This time around I'm collecting my various impromptu puzzles and exercises into a single app anyone can go through at their own pace on any device, computer or phone (though iOS unfortunately requires jumping through some hoops). All on a platform that is open source and live-editable and lets you write all-new programs with graphics and sound in addition to the puzzles and exercises.
Download: https://akkartik.name/carousel-cards.love (really just a zip file containing source code, 169KB)
Installation instructions: same as https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel
Repo for the core app: https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/carousel.love
So far I have 111 little "levels", each good for between a few seconds and a minute. I think a full curriculum/game will need maybe 2000 levels?
I've completed the draft of Part 1 of my online book "Automated Agents: How effective chatbots work"
I'm writing about my experience building a chatbot at a startup as engineer #1. It started as a blog post, but I had so much more to say. This is the information I wish I had before getting started. A lot of information on the web is about building a wrapper around LLMs, this is one that we built ourselves and were able to resolve millions of customer issues with.
You can follow along on github: https://github.com/ibudiallo/automated-agents-book
I'm working on Pictera [1], an AI product where users can upload their photos (like selfies) to create high-quality, hyper-realistic images of themselves in just about any style they want.
Originally, I built Pictera for myself to use because I couldn’t find any service that produced decent photos. Besides, I was very concerned that popular products in this space included broad terms allowing them to keep and use users' photos indefinitely for any purposes, including marketing [2]. But I've been enjoying working on the product so much that I've put way more time into polishing it and thought others would find it useful too.
Would love any feedback from folks!
[1] https://pictera.ai [2] https://pictera.ai/about
Been working on our startup laudspeaker (an alternative to firebase cloud messaging) [1] as well as trying to write more! I like science fiction thrillers similar to what michael crichton used to write and have been working on a story called Panopticon around encryption, spycraft, and three letter agencies [2]
[1] https://laudspeaker.com/ , https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker [2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VRI4X5fCUpwurUDvKmvzJpT7...
I've been just screwing around and building little apps, mostly seeing how quickly I can get something going using ChatGPT or Claude. Seems like Claude in particular is great with code. The most recent thing I did was a little app [0] to help one of my parents log their blood pressure readings easily, since they had to do it a few times a day in different positions and such. I've used that as an excuse to learn how to make something really basic, single task, easy to use for folks that aren't so great with technology. I'm also trying to learn a bit more about accessibility in web development, which this is helping me do.
[0]: https://www.logmybp.com/
I created a Weird Clock that shows the local sunrise and sunset within a conventional 12-hour clock face. This normally would only work on a 24-hour clock face, which is kind of unfamiliar to most people, so I developed a way to show a 24-hour day within a 12-hour clock face; essentially it shows a 2-turn spiral so both night and day will fit. This needs to know your location in order to compute your local sunrise and sunset, so don't freak out when the browser asks for location permission! Includes option to enter lat/long and other goodies. Works on phones but better on a large screen. https:\\www.coolweird.net
F*ck it, I'm not gonna sugar coat it.
I was supposed to be working on a project called Tagbox... but it feels like it's never gonna see the light of day. I hope I'm wrong though, I still want this to succeed, for once in my life, I want to actually succeed on at least one thing. I want to contribute some good thing to the society.
First, what is it? It's a bookmarking app alternative to Pocket or Raindrop.io. Yeah, you can already tell it's not the most original idea. What makes it different, though, it's supposed to be self-hostable and additionally it's easy to deploy as it's only single binary file with no other runtime dependency--the database uses SQLite, which you can include it as a library in Rust.
What problems I'm facing while developing this? Honestly? I don't know, but I can't finish the last 10% progress of the app. It's funny--I first wrote it in Go, and it almost reached MVP. But, instead, I decided to just rewrite in Rust. Well, at least I got to learn new language while building this app, two birds one stone, or in Bahasa Indonesia, swimming while drinking water.
But now, I just can't force myself to continue. And I don't know why. Maybe perfectionism? It definitely doesn't have to do with skill though.
There are also another thing I'm working on: recovering from depression. One year ago, out of nowhere, I lost all my motivation doing anything--including university. I lost all my friends. Since then, I'm at the lowest point of my life. I visited psychiatrist multiple times. I don't know if it was effective, but recently I'm starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
The Tagbox Project is also one of the efforts for me to recover from depression. The depression phase made me realize that I _want my works to have a positive effect on the world, even for just a little bit_. I don't want my skill to be used for evil companies that throws away moral and ethics. Specifically AI stuff, but that's OOT of this thread.
Here are the links if you're interested,
https://gitlab.com/muhrizqiardi/tagbox_rs/
This link is only the Rust rewrite version. The original version is private right now.
Even without the other problems, I can assure you that the vast majority of managers will think that a 80% done project is almost done. The truth is the remaining 20% is where you have to fit everything together so you revisit an rewrite most of the project. It's a different kind of work that feels boring because you already did those things maybe 3,4 times already. It helps to understand the phase of the project you are in, to reduce the frustration. It also helps to do something even very small, every day and focus on that. One day you will run out of things to do.
Hey there. Been where you have been and can safely say, there is always a way out of it.
Sounds like you just need a bit of consistency to make some progress. I'd be down to chat once a week for 15 minutes and we can figure out the focus for the week. Hit me if you think that would be helpful, sounds like you can build some good stuff.
If there's one thing I've learn over the last few years is that it's incredibly difficult working on a project when you don't have peace of mind. It can be difficult working on something or staying motivated when you're battling depression, or if you're sad, don't have friends, or if anything is troubling your mind.
I've been there and I know what it feels like. I would try to perhaps solve the mental health problem first perhaps before tackling big projects. Maybe try gym, hiking, somehow finding friends, talk to more people, solve your sleep, eat better - something. Because again, if you don't have peace of mind, working on a project is difficult (at least for me it is).
Hope that helps.
I am working on:
1. https://typezebra.com : Adding type editor/designer so you can design type-heavy articles and share with others (codepen but for typography)
2. https://boxento.com: Finishing support for server side rendering so users can take the benefit of SEO - also working on adding new blocks like menu (useful for restaurants) so you can have a block that changes based on the day of the week.
Suggestions and feedback welcome :)
Suggestion - you can slow down the hero animation of Boxento. In general I like the project. It reminded me to Bento.me. I'd guess you are direct competitors? (I'd also suggest adding Boxento as an alternative to Bento.me on SaaSHub https://www.saashub.com/bento-me)
Thank you!
I wasn't aware the animation was too fast for users. I will get it fixed in next release :)
A web-to-print app. Customers upload their images, and then the business prints them off.
There's a major competitor in this space, so I'll be targeting small businesses that need lower overhead.
I'm building a social network for humans[1]. I plan to make each user a verified human and disallow AI content as standard. I will also ensure that each human can only have one account, to eliminate the ability of state actors/rich people spreading online propaganda.
1 - https://onlyhumanhub.com
> disallow AI content
How do you know something is AI content?
It is statistically similar to human content.
> each human can only have one account
Sounds like you'll need some eyeball scanners.
> Sounds like you'll need some eyeball scanners.
Nope. All I need is a passport :)
> How do you know something is AI content?
I won't. But I will certainly ban anyone who is found to definitively be sharing AI content.
I’ve been wondering about the opposite! Imagine having thousands of virtual Ai followers.
I've always wanted to be hugely popular among nobody.
https://lingostories.org (not a business, just a side-project, entirely free)
I'm building a website with interactive stories (or story-based games), intended for language learners. The idea is to make stories with choices (using Ink script), including features you may expect from adventure games (e.g. inventory, choices that matter).
The text is written in simple language, it is then translated in many languages, and I generate audio files. This provides input for people learning a language, with multiple options to practice reading or listening.
Heads up: your link is blank when I opened it in Firefox
Thanks a lot! This should be fixed now.
I started experimenting with the speech recognition browser API yesterday (so that the user can listen and repeat sentences), but it's not supported everywhere.
I've been working on some projects in Rust relating to image processing and rendering. I'm between a few projects at the moment though but the biggest one is an image processing application I've been working on for quite some time. A lot of stuff I've programmed and learned about over the last 3 years has been leading up to the goal of making something like this haha. I wanted to leverage OpenCL for compute but I had a lot of trouble getting OpenGL OpenCL interoperability to work.
A big motivation for such a project is my passion for photography. I've taken many thousands of photos over just the last 2 years alone. A lot of them are digital, and so far a few dozen rolls of film. A big challenge for me is that I'm not satisfied with the tools available to develop the raw files that are free or open source. Either they're quite finnicky, or they have noticeable issues with color transformations.
I've done a lot of rendering projects over the last few years relating to color that have been focused on getting a better understanding of working with color spaces. Lots of 2D and 3D fractals haha.
Unfortunately I've had quite a turbulent life the last few years so development is very off/on. Every autumn for me seems to be a period of change, this one no different as I'm moving and I'm a bit uncertain of things. However, a side project to all of this has been an OpenGL project where I'm working on things related to voxels! I did a lot of research on data structures like interval trees, octrees, segment trees, etc. It does seem that a lot of people jump for the octree approach, however I've been able to render a lot of voxels with just a hashmap of chunks and a 3d array haha (albeit, mostly initial implementation of chunk generation, single threaded at that!). With this I'm hoping to explore OpenGL compute as I intend of generating world geometry in compute shaders :D
I havent published a project in a while and I'm hoping to get back to putting things out there, so hopefully some of the stuff I've been working on goes well and I can put it up on GitHub or something
Making my data extraction Saas (https://simplescraper.io) more LLM friendly.
Markdown extraction, improved Google search, workflows - search for this terms, visit the first N links, summarize etc. Big demand for (or rather, expectation of) this lately.
We are building out a better character AI/Replika using the latest advancements in ML and LLMs.
try it at: https://makebelieve.lol
A rich text CRDT in Swift. I don’t know what it’s for yet but am enjoying optimising it.
A llm backend fantasy game. It uses structured output and supports Openai, Anthropic and LM Studio. Gemini support is ending, at the moment it is not working reliable. https://github.com/HabermannR/Fantasy-Tribe-Game
https://www.voxtodo.com App that generates subtasks from high level tasks. Useful for chunking which is a concept of breaking down highly complex tasks into their atomic bits. Made this for my HS Junior son who has a medical diagnosis of ADHD
Grasshopper tab manager for firefox.
Currently it has 688 settings and 485 commands.
I think it's a good foundation for something great.
https://addons.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/addon/grasshopper-u...
I’m building a social network[1]. I recently finished the MySpace-esque music player[2]. It’ll launch in 2025 as a paid service…only way to guarantee real humans sign up.
[1]: https://socii.network
[2]: https://social.coop/@netopwibby/113329030542527807
Organizing all of the information that comes at you in the workplace into a social-style news feed, with AI summaries.
Unlike facebook, we want you to get the most important stuff quickly and get you back to more important things instead of sifting through 100 emails, 5 dashboards, and 10 forums.
https://aimcast.com
I am working on a couple of things.
- An open version of strongDM/teleport for privileged access management. I am currently testing it out in my org and plan to release the source soon. - I also run a free HTTPS and TCP tunnel which gets a few users daily (https://webrelay.dev)
I'm trying to make a spreadsheet interface for solving scheduling problems.
Constraint satisfaction and optimization is exactly the sort of problem we should be using computers for, but there's zero chance your neighborhood cafe can figure out prolog or OR-tools or whatever.
I’m on parental leave - first time not working for money for twenty years. Obviously it’s still time consuming, but not even firing up a computer for the last three weeks has been great. I’m fortunate to have this paid leave and a job guarantee, but it’s been a revelation stepping away from out all for so long. For the better, even though I’m exhausted.
Building a VR IFC viewer in C++ without external dependencies.
I just implemented a parser for IFC, and am now looking into extracting BRep and CSG geometry from it, convert that to meshes, and write a simple renderer for Vulkan.
My approach is to write really scrappy, simple code with minimal abstractions.
The hypothesis now is that for generating meshes from BRep, you don't need an entire CAD kernel, as a CAD kernel seems to be focused also on operations, but this will probably lead to a humbling experience and walking back to using either OpenCascade or licensing a commercial kernel like Parasolid.
My goal is to have a simple prototype out before the end of the year, but work might get in the way :)
(here's some experiments I did with Metal and Vulkan: https://github.com/arjonagelhout/graphics-experiment, the IFC parser is currently not open source yet)
https://rockyai.me/ chat with any webpage in chrome using LLMs
I built a site that saves time by summarizing YouTube videos or news articles by simply inputting the URL. The tool preserves the original context, allowing users to ask follow-up questions.
I'd like to continue building fun projects like this until I find a market. I work in Phase 1 clinical trials and the end goal would be to implement some of these efficiencies into health technologies.
https://tldw.pw/
https://www.inclusivecolors.com/
Iterating on an accessible color palette creator, for custom Tailwind-style palettes of multiple swatches, where you can check your colors have sufficient WCAG/ACPA color contrast on a live UI mockup. You can export the colors for use with Tailwind, CSS, Figma, and Adobe.
I started working on this because for design projects I was almost always getting handed brand style guides that were missing thought into accessible colors pairs and lacked tints/shades, where I had to fill in the gaps. There's lots of color tools out there, but this supports multiple swatches, checking the contrast of multiple color pairs at the same time and the HSLuv based color picker makes it easier to explore accessible colors.
It's really only usable on desktop right now but I'd love any feedback good or bad on if it's useful and what to work on next! There's actually a lot of directions to go in, and it's tricky to balance more features with keeping it simple. Some tips:
- The "Load examples" menu in the top-left lets you compare the colors from Tailwind, IBM Carbon and United States Web Design System.
- The "contrast" menu lets you see how WCAG 2 contrast checks compare against APCA when "vs black/white" is turned on. WCAG 2 has known inaccuracies, especially for dark mode. APCA is the candidate contrast method for WCAG 3 that's meant to improve on this.
- Use the "..." menu to create a swatch based on a brand color.
- Use the "..." menu to "flip to dark/light palette" to create a dark theme. Or just manually flip the lightness curves horizontally.
I'm a big fan of HSLuv and I've been looking for a way to generate 12 distinct colors for data visualization, so that small points in those colors against a black or dark blue background will be visually distinct to everyone including my red-green colorblind coworker.
I like HSLuv too as its color picker looks familiar while having a Lightness slider that works the way you'd expect compared to HSL. I see color nerds promoting OKLCH but OKLCH color pickers can look intimidating.
> generate 12 distinct colors for data visualization, so that small points in those colors against a black or dark blue background will be visually distinct to everyone including my red-green colorblind coworker.
Did you get anywhere with this? When there's multiple kinds of color blindness changing the perceived colors in different ways, I'm not sure 12 colors that are distinct to everyone is feasible. You could use different symbols though, or changes in size or pattern.
Trying to build a chess club management app for our school/district. It's mostly basic CRUD, though it's an avenue to learn Svelte & SvelteKit. I'm becoming more involved with the club and can't stand that everything is run on paper forms and giant Google Sheets. (If it was all smoothly running, I wouldn't rock the boat. But when I found that we're writing out dozens of match cards by hand every week and have ~0 way to track progress, I couldn't resist.)
https://getselectable.com/
I'm working on Selectable, a mobile-friendly database management app, like dbeaver but for the phone.
Working on this project has taught me so much about how Postgres works under the hood, and has given me a deeper appreciation for the folks who work on database tooling in general.
Playing around with LLMs to generate fictional stories and I'm working on a journal of sorts based on a traveler that goes to various parallel worlds not unlike our own except for one or two minor but key differences. He reports on his findings there and how it affects social, political, and economics for that timeline. A new timeline drops every day and I have a lot more planned to take it beyond the simple blog format it's in now but it has been a fun challenge to learn how to do some deep prompting with AI to generate random entries without veering off into crazyiness or getting locked onto the same thing over and over again.
Here is the site: https://twistedtimeline.com/ - Feedback is always welcome!
Continuing working on my project - TextSniper https://textsniper.app/ macOS application for text recognition
nice! I've been looking in to how people are doing OCR in 2024. Is TextSniper scriptable?
I'm maintaining Basti, an open-source AWS Bastion Host management CLI that lets you connect to RDS and other resources at almost no cost. Check it out: https://github.com/basti-app/basti
This project also inspired me to explore a commercial analytics solution for CLI applications — currently assessing if there's demand for it.
Working on a game engine to help me create my take on some retro games. My first one is a multiplayer bombing puzzle game[1].
It's made with React and Three.js, using WebSocket on a small EC2 instance for now. I hope to be able to reuse all the game mechanisms in other classic games. I'm learning a ton, and I had some fun figuring out latency issues because I recently put my sockets behind Cloudflare. I still haven't gotten it quite right, but I'm hoping to find a good solution soon!
[1] https://pixelbrawlgames.com/game/blast
https://NomonAI.com
Im exploring helping engineering managers better manage projects and people. If you're leading a team of engineers and feel strapped for time constantly, I'd love your feedback (mention the post in the waitlist form so I know to bubble you to the top of the list and reach out)
Currently working on:
- A database design copilot: https://nabubit.com
- A database management for Sqlite databases: https://litequeen.com
Deep Q & A for friends, family, and strangers. My goal is to create a space where people can get to know each other a bit more deeply and spark conversations. Would love some feedback!
App: https://hey.shaya.so/ Website: https://www.shaya.so/
I'm trying to start an educational YouTube channel in the vein of CGP Grey or 3b1b with a focus on CS. The first video is taking me a long time. It seemed like a natural leap from blogging, but the effort is exponentially higher.
Oh wow! this is _exactly_ I was looking for (and still am) a couple of days ago. Please let us know once its ready.
This is such a great idea! I’d love 3b1b style explanations of different algorithms and how big oh notation works!
A series of articles on writing parsers using:
- Hand rolled recursive descent in TypeScript
- PLY, Python Lex Yacc
- FParsec, parser combinator library for F#
The goal is to compare each approach while tackling some common use cases for parsing strings of text.
I'm working on a weekly "tournament game" in which the goal is to select the top 5 open-source projects (in a particular topic) per programming language. The first iteration is going to be a copy of SaaSHub Experts https://www.saashub.com/experts/about but for open-source libraries. If this sounds interesting to you, please let me know, and I can send you an invite this or next week (hopefully).
So if I was to be insultingly reductive, is the vibe of the idea sort of "fantasy football league for GitHub stars"?
Maybe… I’d say Yes to some extend. Yet, highly simplified.
Lots of different projects. Recently finished: beatcode: https://github.com/yudataguy/beatcode
this is built w/ the help of claude 3.5 sonnet (new) and cursor. The idea came from want to space repetition memorization for leetcode.
I'm working on a serverless VPN that works without relay even for those behind symmetric NAT (most of the time).
I'm not aware that it exists at the moment and would love to be proven wrong.
So, like NAT punching? A rendezvous server for both the parties to communicate so they can establish a connection?
I'm working on an email verifier project in Go. https://github.com/hsnice16/email-verifier
It already has checks for Regex, MX record, and SMTP server running. And, in side, I write blogs - https://hsnice16.medium.com/
A useful personal assistant.
Yes, it sounds generic but no one is seriously making progress here apart from the LLM providers and I love experimenting in this space and adding capabilities.
https://olly.bot
This is not about new ideas for humanity, but for me.
I started the development of the game engine. This was one of the most interesting goal on my list.
I will use vulkan. And my demo goal for this is a super realistic scene with human, hill, grass, tree and sunrise/sunset. But it is needed just to know how/where to develop engine.
since I'm in no hurry + my career is going down the drain, I will try to do my best and power up my software engineer skills.
I'm building a custom NC manufacturing robot from scratch.
I was unhappy with availability, pricing, and business model (SaaS lock-in) of the existing hardware/software solutions. But to my delight, I noticed that you just need better amplifiers to use 3D printer mainboards for driving industrial stepper motors. Everything is controlled with Gcode, which is just text. And sensors can send back logging messages over the same USB connection.
That means the control software can be just a python script with a little state machine inside :)
Interesting! The use of 3D printer electronics is a great idea as they are cheap(ish) and get reasonable accuracy.
I'm curious what you mean by a custom NC manufacturing robot? A CNC mill?
I've been working on an automatic sky tracking telescope over the past few months. I'm a few weeks behind on blogging but making solid progress. V1 is nearing completion. Then I want to rework some of the electronics to design and get a custom PCB printed. Also the physical design needs a complete redesign to make it more sturdy for long exposures and solve some wiring pains.
The software allows the platform to automatically align to north and working on accounting for imperfect leveling (such as placing it on a slanted surface) through software and accelerometers.
Next challenges I want to solve in software is focus detection and then automatic image stack and post processing.
Primary goals of the project is a deep dive into robotics and electronics, along with brushing up on webdev which I don't touch too frequently being in the gamedev world. Also allowing me to explore things like digital signal processing.
I'm keeping a bit of a running blog here. [0]
[0] https://gdcorner.notion.site/Stargaze-Telescope-Build-Log-6f...
My own spiking neural network in everyones favourite language to hate (JS). Purely for fun & curiosity.
An app that creates web, mobile and background apps via voice / text requirements.
https://www.tiram.ai
Working on a macOS app for the empty space around the MacBook notch.
https://github.com/navtoj/NotchBar
Need some ideas for what kind of widgets would be useful...
I'm working on a social media post queueing program where you make a post to the queue and it tells you when it goes live. This is so I can let inspiration strike but not make the backlog look inconsistent. Gonna make it Bluesky native to avoid scope creep.
Collaborative management software. I’ve got experience in this space and I want to offer software that’s customizable and smart.
Finishing my basement, one weekend at a time.
Maintain your basement and its waterproofing kids! Otherwise the next owner will hate you.
Yeah but I’ll be long gone :)
continual learning api, attention entropy sampling API. enabling a low performing LLM to actually be able to be instructed to perform competent task instruction related capabilities.
I'm developing a game, developing a game that I don't like to play myself. It's sad. If I had the money, I'd be working on a game I like to play.
Strictly hobbyist here. There is nearly zero overlap between game genres I like to work on as a developer and genres I enjoy as a player. I get the itch every now and again but the stuff I like best as a player is either art-intensive (so well outside my skills) or a huge technical undertaking.
What style of game is it that you're working on?
what would you do with the money and how much would you need?
https://hitt.ai/
A kind of a configuration management tool, helping me manually "reconcile" between three concurrent aspects of the state of a machine (and then apply the result):
- what is "out there" on the machine ("queried"),
- vs. what was the state last recorded in (git) history,
- vs. what I want there to be on the machine (described in Nickel language https://nickel-lang.org/, a statically-typed successor to the Nix language).
https://github.com/akavel/mana
Sounds very cool!
I'm building a music file manager using Electron. I'm deferring the actual music playing to VLC, but I need a way to sort through my many audio files to quickly select and launch what I want to hear.
Building cloud agnostic platform to run batch/HPC workloads. Can even connect your own compute and run jobs.
Launching next month @ https://daemonstack.com/
I'm back working on my lighting desk [0]. I stopped a couple of years ago because depression robbed me of all motivation, but now it goes and I've done a few gigs with it. Still lots of bug fixes to do then a backlog of new features, but I'm glad to be back on it
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35737795
Improving RAG system and trying to create an agent to access to DB via apis,
A map of Ironman events - https://www.tricutlets.com
Updating some of my negative core beliefs. Years of Buddhist meditation only got me so far. But two months of this new technique, and I finally see a path to being able to program my emotional self like I program a computer. Here's how it works.
Step one. Identify the negative belief you want to change. This is the core belief. It is something you feel is true. For example, “I am a bad manager.”
Step two. Create a statement related to the belief that you believe is not true. This is the false statement. For example, “No employees Ive managed have thought I did anything right as a manager.”
Step three. This is the training step. You spend a few minutes following your breathe to quiet your mind. Then you think the false statement and watch the emotional reaction the mind has to it. The reaction is an aversion, a kind of disgust. Then, say the false statement and the core belief together. “No employees I’ve managed have thought I did anything right as a manager. I’m a bad manager.” Repay the false statement and core belief together again and again, watching how the mind rejects the false statement and that aversion feeling lingers as the core belief is thought.
Step four. Repeat the training step in daily sessions. During the session, repeated think the false belief and core belief. The session should last at least ten minutes. The daily sessions should be repeated for at least a week, and longer for more deeply held core beliefs. Over time, you come to reject the core belief just like you reject the false statement.
Here's why I think it works. There is a rational part of the mind in the prefrontal cortex. It is what we think with. But it is not where our beliefs are. We can rationalize our way to a new belief or to change a belief. Instead, beliefs are felt. And they’re felt in the limbic emotional part of the brain. The limbic system is mute and cannot think with words. The prefrontal cortex can’t directly talk to the limbic system with words. Instead, the prefrontal cortex must communicate with emotion. You have to train the limbic system to feel differently about a belief. You can’t use positive affirmations because they are not felt as strongly as aversion.
Does that mean you actually know that you're a good manager but can't shake off the feeling that you're not? And this technique is a way to achieve that?
did you come up with this technique?
Not working on it yet but can a small box sitting on your counter do LLM, TTS all local with maybe outbound queries to the internet.
First iteration may be box is rpi based and local LLM runs in another room on beefier machine (or even before that just get it working with a cloud Llama).
What would make this cool is to use MemGPT for memory so you can talk to it Monday and then it remembers what you said Friday.
Being all local it could be always listening.
I've been working on the idea of building synthetic workers. I'm trying to implement a planning workflow system for scenarios where the workflow definition, the environment, or the task are not well defined. I also ended up implementing a micro Palentir plugin system to support the action system for the synthetic users.
Its a cool project that gave me immense pleasure to built, however its unfortunately a intellectually masturbatory one, because although the tech is cool, I haven't found a cool application for it. If anyone is interested hit me up.
my current graphic novel http://egypt.urnash.com/npol/
and apparently I am doing a set of fan covers for Roger Zelazny's Amber books? https://egypt.urnash.com/blog/2024/10/24/nine-princes-in-amb...
An entity database (rest api on postgres so dB is a stretch) with a crud frontend for platform engineering. Adding a similar control loop to kubernetes and bash script (or executables) as the extension language.
This way you can write all of your glue code into one platform and create an IDP at the same time.
This came from a lot of situations where I'd need like one random thing to be stored in a database, but adding that complexity is a bit of a hump for just one thing.
Also crossplane is a really cool idea but starting a kubernetes cluster so that you can manage infra sounds insane to me, even as an avid kubernetes fanboy.
A research paper organizer https://youtu.be/YjiJ_61_zzM?feature=shared
Do you have a prose description or repo you'd be interested in sharing? I'm acquainted with Zotero and Omnivore, but I accumulate papers to read much faster than I get through my TBR pile and it's getting pretty unwieldy already.
i like to bounce between projects week to week and am in a huge phase of just trying to build services i pay money for.
the first fun thing i'm working on a roguelite(?) type of petsim in dragonruby for my wife and i to play.
then i'll go back to working on my mtg collection / deck builder app. instead of rewriting in nextjs i decided to just go modern rails with it and i am honestly having a lot of fun. a redesign helps too, but once you get the hang of turbo/hotwire and stuff it really isn't that bad.
another thing i've got kicking is writing up a portfolio site for my old photography since that current hosted plan is about to renew. this is more of a stability and performance issue as i really liked using Format, but every single time i go to show my port to someone irl i would either not load or take forever or have images missing. extremely frustrating.
i'm very tired of SaaS pricing going up (with unwanted features) and user experience and value going down. reallllllly fighting the urge to just build a clone and try to take a cut of the overall business.
Pondering doing a hardware startup to offer a battery buffered electric kettle.
110 volt plug, 220 volt power.
(You could use the same concept for lots of other appliances too)
I love the idea and thought I'd do a rough check on the math:
Assuming the goal is to match the power delivery of a high power UK kettle, looks like the batteries will need to step in and produce about 1kW of power for the duration of the boil, something like 50% on top of the standard 15A US circuit. I know on paper the circuit ratings are nearly 2x, but in practice it sounds like it's closer to 1.5x for the average kettle comparison.
80% efficiency for the heating coil, 1.6L of water, you need about ~750kJ (200Wh) get to a boil from 10C tap water.
So you'll need at least 70Wh output from your battery, and it needs to provide 1kW continuously. Accounting for conversion losses and some buffer to avoid deep discharge I'll target 80Wh. At 1kW that's a continuous 13C discharge rate, which is pretty high. Hobby-oriented LiPo packs will do it, but I'm not sure how they would hold up for consumer product safety and longevity. LiFePO cells could be a good choice since density is _less_ of a concern, and are readily available with 20+C continuous discharge.
I don't know my power electronics very well, so I'm not sure the best way to merge the outputs. Any conversions are going to eat into total power and thus boil time, just rectifying the AC will take 20%. Maybe it makes the most sense to have two separate coils, one direct from AC and a second from the battery? With smaller cells in series, say 10+, to get a decent voltage it could end up with a manageable current to use directly with the 1kW boost. In that case the only expensive power electronics needed would be to charge the batteries.
Also have to figure out how much recharge time matters to people, since by default it would be an hour or so.
It's going to have a chunky, heavy base, and guessing it will have to be pretty expensive for what it does, but I like it.
The whole idea sounds pretty insane really. Who's going to pay hundreds of dollars for a battery-powered kettle just so they can save 1-2 minutes of time (and less if you're just making enough boiling water for 1 cup). I use a little 100V (900W I think, according to the label) kettle to make tea, either 1 or 2 cups at a time, and while it's certainly not as speedy as those EU/UK market kettles, and a bit slower than a US kettle, it's fast enough.
A battery-powered one might save me 1 minute of time at best, but will cost probably at least 5-10x as much for the kettle, it'll be MUCH larger than my current kettle (that battery pack and power electronics needs space) which is a problem with my tiny kitchen, and I have to worry about how long the battery will last and how to dispose of it later and if I can even replace it.
This is really a solution in search of a problem.
I have a battery-powered espresso machine.
It spends ~33% of its battery on one cup.
It sort of works if you bring pre-heated water in a thermo.
Heating water with conventional batteries is a terrible idea.
Interesting idea! Supercaps might be a better fit than batteries.
Trying to make C/C++ memory safe. Full compatibility + memory safety with no escape hatches.
Currently working on redoing the underlying object model to eliminate the top perf overheads.
https://www.youtube.com/live/_VF3pISRYRc?t=4862s
cool
Does it have any relation to safe c++ [1] proposal?
[1] https://safecpp.org/draft.html
ScrollHub - https://hub.scroll.pub
In <1 second get:
[x] Live website
[x] Custom domains
[x] Static + Writeable
[x] 3D traffic vis
[x] Git repo
[x] Instant clones
[x] Instant Data science
[x] Blogs, RSS, Sitemaps, SEO, TXT versions, PDFS
[x] QR Codes, Maps, Charts
[x] Local + Live Dev
[x] Run on Your own server
No signup. Just build.
I started a game company and now working on our first game after leaving my FAANG job on a sabbatical: https://www.galantrix.com/blog/
Learning very basic HTML, I converted from RSS then TXT to a free book about the freedom to reject painful psychiatry https://antipsychiatry.yay.boo/
working on building extremely simple workflow automation software for small and medium sized businesses who are still thinking to adopt automation and AI as they find it quite challenging and overwhelming
A sidebar for LLM power users. Use one prompt to query all models:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabgpt-ask-chatgpt-...
A small cli tool that helps to clean a messy dev folder with lots of git repositories:
https://github.com/olzhasar/mess
FlyShirley.com - AI Copilot for Pilots. Starting with flight sim users, working our way up to in-flight and ultimately context aware AI for robotics.
I built CryptoGain, an (currently) android app for cryptocurrency market tracking and analysis. Started it after getting frustrated with the limitations other apps put on technical analysis features behind premium tiers.
It offers:
- comprehensive technical analysis tools without artificial limits or cost
- customizable price alerts
- portfolio and watchlist management
- live market data across major exchanges
- available in 15+ languages
Currently serving a few thousand users and actively iterating based on feedback. The focus has been on making advanced trading tools accessible while maintaining a clean, intuitive interface.
Store link if anyone wants to check it out: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cryptogain...
Would love feedback from the HN community, especially around what technical analysis features you find essential but are often paywalled in other apps.
I am building a kanji learning webapp (soon to be a PWA) using open dictionary data, indexeddb, and vue.
https://shodoku.app/
It is almost feature complete, but good enough for my private use, as I’m using it my self to study kanji. I have maybe a three or four more weekends until it is completely finished, with dark-mode, data backups, input by radicals, etc.
Floating a startup idea where we coordinate Airbnbs to offer coworking during vacant times.
I'm building https://exoroad.com to help people find US places that are a better match for them to move to. Like compare stats on SF vs. NYC or find the warm places with good schools and low crime.
I'm working on a passwordless authentication SaaS.
Busy market, hard to sell to companies who need to migrate. The main reason for migrations is price (eg. Auth0 being super expensive), which is not a good thing. I'm probably not telling you anything new.
Care to expand? Is it alternative to magic link / OAuth?
A point anc click model pretraining tool. Simply put all of your data into a directory of directories. Next, point the software to this directory and a few days later you get a pretrained model out.
LLM experiments.
For the last little while now, I've been spending a lot of my spare time learning to work with a language called AgentSpeak[1] using a platform called Jason[2].
Briefly, Jason is a platform for building intelligent agents based on the BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) software model[3], which is in turn based on the Belief-Desire-Intention cognitive model[4]. Broadly speaking, it's an event based programming model, where "events" are things like "gaining a new belief", "dropping a belief", "selecting a plan to execute" (aka an "intention"), etc. AgentSpeak programs (normally) run "forever" cycling through a "reasoning cycle" that involves perceiving the world, updating beliefs, choosing intentions, executing intentions, communicating with other agents, etc.
And to commit a little self-plagiarism, from a recent post on LinkedIn:
----
On the one hand, AgentSpeak is basically a logic programming language with a lot of #prolog in its heritage. On the other hand, the runtime is all Java and to do anything interesting you have to write your custom Environment class and other helper functions in #Java. And while the interop is seamless in a way, getting your head around the execution model and knowing what's really happening at runtime can be a bit tricky.
Still, it's starting to make sense. And I do think this #BDI inspired approach has a lot going for it. I'm just looking forward to getting to the point where I can really start to exercise this. I have a few things that I want to accomplish soon:
1. I want to create a BDI agent that I can connect to an #XMPP server so I can talk with it from anywhere.
2. I want to start working on customized perception, using neural networks and various sensors (web-cam, microphone, accelerometer, distance sensor, etc.) to create an embodied agent that can truly sense its environment.
3. I want to take a stab at integrating some symbolic reasoning. I've given thought to trying to adapt the "belief base" to be an #RDF triplestore (probably #Apache #Jena) and include a reasoning engine or two. This all starts to get really speculative from here, but I spent a lot of time working on abductive inference a couple of years ago, and I'd like this thing to be able to use abductive inference, along with deductive reasoning, rule induction, possibly case based reasoning, etc. all in one system.
4. Might experiment with implementing a #Blackboard architecture and have specialized "problem solving" agents that collaborate by using the Blackboard in some situations. What would be really interesting here would be to figure out how to seamlessly translate in and out of a structured representation that lets you use existing specialized code for things like, eg. R for statistical operations.
5. And of course, experimenting with continual learning, as opposed to the "batch training job" stuff that we all use for ANN's today. This gets really speculative as well, but I want to explore contrastive learning, Hebbian learning, associative learning, operant conditioning (ala Pavlov), etc.
[5] above is why you'll see me spending as much time lately with Developmental Psychology, Infant Development, and Cognitive Psychology books, as with "AI" books per-se. I still believe that getting an AI that can learn from its environment, and build up useful mental representations with the minimal set of hard-coded behaviors, will be the best way to make progress with regards to #AGI.
----
I didn't mention it in the LinkedIn post, but as part of all of this, I've been building a hardware platform for some time now as well, where said platform is meant to support "perceiving the environment" so the system can learn from the physical world. It's not finished yet, but today it includes a GPS receiver so it can "know" it's location in physical space, a 6-DOF accelerometer/magnetometer/gyroscope board so it can sense movement (of itself), and two microphones (for stereo audio input). Future plans include one or two webcams to emulate vision, and possibly some other sensors: IR and/or ultrasonic distance sensors, temperature sensor, humidity and barometric pressure sensors, etc.
Also in the "speculative / for the future" category: AgentSpeak programs don't have any inherent notion of learning built into the model. All "plans" (aka "desires" or "candidate intentions") have to be coded by the developer up-front. This is obviously pretty limiting if you're trying to create truly autonomous agents, so another area I want to dig into is how we might combine work on "AI Planning"[5] to dynamically create new plans.
And since this has kind of turned into a big brain-dump of stuff that's on my mind, I'll finish by saying that I've been chewing on some ideas about explicitly modeling other "mental states" that aren't part of the base BDI model. Things like "attitudes", "values", different emotional states (eg "boredom", "frustration", etc.), "curiosity", "confusion" / "cognitive dissonance", and so on.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AgentSpeak
[2]: https://jason-lang.github.io/
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief%E2%80%93desire%E2%80%93...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief%E2%80%93desire%E2%80%93...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_planning_and_schedul...
For a fun weekend project, I built Boardle - a daily wordle-like game where you guess popular boardgames using stats from Board Game Geek. The games are from BGG's top 150 games as voted by the community, so fair warning if you aren't already someone who plays a lot of modern boardgames this will be very hard as all the games are very nerdy
https://boardle.org/
I am building a digital replacement of all universities in the world with full courses across any subject, in any language, tailored to your individual learning style all.
Sal Khan, is that you?
Oh please do not compare me with an absolute legend.
So... Youtube? :-)
I'm working on not working!
Isn't this what everyone is working on?
I don't mind working. But I would be rather working on my own terms, and that's what I'm working towards.
I like working, so I am working on working more.