Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
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I wouldn't worry about it too much though - almost all of the people I know with finger injuries were trying to push into really being competitive climbers, not just doing it casually for fun/fitness.
Oh also to keep from tearing your skin don't climb tired. (That won't keep you from typing, it's just painful.)
I never had a serious injury. Instead it would be minor injuries, that would make my ring finger 20% less responsive, that would totally mess up my typing cadence.
I tried capoeira, a non-contact martial art, for a while. This wasn’t as good for me as Taekwondo.
I am almost done with flappy bird (2nd challenge)
Why? I love the old arcade and game boy games, and I want to recreate them to my liking. I also love mechanical systems and space rovers, and I want ro build worlds to explore and simulate these things
State manager isn't there yet, but it's coming.
Biggest trick is incorporate deep-sleep as much as possible and "waking up by interrupts". That has a big impact on your software designs.
It's called Stagehand (https://github.com/browserbase/stagehand) and we just released v3, which is a total rewrite.
(1) build a bunch of automation scripts that we can reliably run as part of our product. This is closest to my day-to-day, you're (mis?)using selenium or playwright to make a known set of "click here, fill that, click there" scripts, and then expose some interface that calls them. At a company usually this will be a fastAPI / microservice, and your set of automation scripts is part of what makes the product possible. In my case, I'm currently working on registering my Tkinter/Pyinstaller app with windows so people can run my .exe and click the "do the script" button. There's also a slightly different approach to the selenium/playwright jam that runs curl requests which mimic the network requests of performing some action. You'll be able to see what I mean by clicking into your browser devtools "network" tab and clicking around the web. Imagine having a library of known API calls, you save a users cookie, and run script to achieve result.
(2) build a browser agent that we can use to run all of our (1) scripts. This is stuff that I iterate on as needed, and in my experience is best done by having a bunch of "helper functions" that spawn/kill/season different selenium webdrivers. It will depend on whether your (1) scripts are dealing with JS-heavy websites, bot detection, or just constantly changing UI's, but the deep rabbit holes here end up in places where you're building your own browser agent on top of webkit/chromium, implementing some kind of captcha solver, or trying to automagically discover what buttons exist by fuzzing the API or DOM.
(3) use a (2) to get us every PDF we need for our upcoming RAG chatbot. This is something I do by executing on (1), and I only bother to note the difference because it's a great example of the kind of actualy end product goal that all of this leads to.
Academically, the problems happening in web automation broadly fall into discovery and reproduceability. Discovery, meaning API fuzzing (how do we get that library of known API calls? / the equivalent buttons in a DOM?); Reproduceability, meaning running-without-errors. (How do we wait for the target's server to be ready to send the next command? How do we avoid getting blocked? How do we detect/recover when the target updates their website?) The most interesting opportunity IMO is inserting an LLM to build a self-healing scraper, and the edges of your tes/prod environments will be defined by your product's tolerance for wrong/nondeterministic behavior. I've got a great blogpost draft about a "railroad model of software development", where an LLM is a hammer nondeterministically pounding in railway ties, and an end product is a deterministic piece of code that can have trains run over it all day long. (effectively, LLM as test-environment devtool thesis, I don't think I'm saying anything that hasn't been said before.)
Practically, the problems that are facing me as an engineer are in packaging these tools for sale/distribution. My current state-of-the-art is to wrap up a .exe with Pyinstaller, build a GUI with Tkinter, and register with Windows so I'm not showing scary "This program is made of evil" messages when people try to run it. From there the plan is to give away free trials and after a month of people clicking their magic buttons they all disable and demand you purchase a license to re-enable (like if winRar was evil, but sorry yall I gotta eat). I'm also trying to sell building these tools as a service but that's very word of mouth, I haven't found a viable web/storefront model for that yet.
IM-Practically, most companies with a browser automation component are struggling with the same HR/Onboarding issues everyone else is. In the past ~2 months I've Interviewed at ~4 serious companies that profit from their browser automation, and every process has been unique: 1) firecrawl.dev; a black mirror hourlong AI-chatbot-zoom-interview, followed by a human call scheduled 3 weeks out, only to then be told that really they want someone fully specialized on breaking captchas, with a vaugely condescending suggestion that I'm "customer facing" and no followup when I lean into that 2) atomic.financial; actual-human-zoom-calls with engineers who I get along with great only to have no idea why I'm getting a rejection email the next week 3) sheer.health; a very contentious first call that demands I name a salary, followed by a trivially easy take-home test, followed by my 3rd round, 1/2 hour call with the CEO being cancelled the morning of because they filled the role. 4) Mozilla; where a principal/staff engr cold DM'd me, to schedule a call with an HR rep that told me they're paying 350k base 420k total and another staff eng who's leaving to start a startup, only to then tell me I'm not senior enough but could maybe come on as a contractor, only to then tell me they're using internal resources for the contractors.
Overall, I think the best opportunity in the space is going to look something like https://ui.vision/, which is an open-source tool!
I rewrote Playwright to run completely in a Chrome Extension without CDP or chrome.devtools for no practical reason at all. I started to do it like Forest Gump started running. It can't get past bot protection so pretty worthless from a browser automation point of view. [0]
What I don't understand is why the need to rewrite Playwright instead of just patching it. Playwright (or Puppeteer) has addressed every edge case that has come -- especially race conditions which are a monster to deal with -- up over the years and by the time you do the same you will have Playwright.
Why is rewriting or rebuilding Playwright from the ground up needed?
[0] https://github.com/adam-s/cordyceps/tree/main/pages/side-pan...
I recently added FSRS (besides also having Anki integration). Now I'm working on replacing the need for reviewing flashcards by having reading activity automatically mark flashcards (current and future) as reviewed, so that you can get many of your reviews in just by reading native materials that interest you instead of sacrificing most of your study time to contextless flashcard grind.
I'm also working on a manga mode using a new manga OCR tech I have licensed out of academia that is ahead of state of the art alternatives.
This project now sustains my full-time focus.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...
The game has a farily simple frontend, but there is a fairly complex constraint solving algorithm as part of the puzzle making process. What makes the puzzle quite unique is that you can't "guess". You can only make guesses that are provable by logic. The algorithm ensuring this has worked flawlessly for months now (though I've manually inserted some silly mistakes once or twice).
Today's puzzle is one of the hardest to date. The difficulty resets on Mondays, and then gets harder again towards Sunday.
It looks inside each file to see what it’s about, then moves it to the right folder with a single click. Everything happens on your Mac, so nothing leaves your computer. No clouds, no servers.
It already works with images, Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) PDFs, ePubs, text, Markdown, and many other file types (30+) in English. Next I’m adding multi-language support.
If you have messy folders anywhere on your Mac, Floxtop can help.
Try it for free - requires macOS 14+ with Apple Silicon: https://github.com/taranntell/fallinorg/releases/download/1....
Just for clarity, it looks like image content itself isn't addressed, but rather just any text that might be in an image, correct?
Also: "Your sensitive data never leaves your Mac." Does anything leave the mac? Any metrics? I don't want this to have network capabilities at all.
Regarding privacy: everything runs locally on your Mac. No files or metadata are uploaded anywhere. The only network request is from Sparkle to check for updates. If you prefer, you can disable update checks and Floxtop will have zero network activity.
If you have questions or want to share feedback, you can reach me anytime at floxtop@proton.me.
This is already useful. If you do wind up adding image classification, first, I'd like it distinguish photos, screenshots, and graphics. Then, I'd like broad categories, like people, places, animals, memes, etc. Base case is I want sort out my downloads since I generally download something and then not bother putting it where it belongs or deleting it.
It would also be handy if, in addition to moving the items, it could tag them via Finder tags/xattrs.
If you want to stay updated when these features are ready, feel free to subscribe to the newsletter.
It's an explorable database of films, TV shows, books and board games based around their historical setting: where and when the thing is set. It's been incredibly complex and interesting getting the (messy) data, making sense of it and trying to design a UI to explore it.
https://stevebennett.me/2025/08/26/whenever-exploring-times-...
This is a pet project for myself. I love listening to online radio while at work, helps me focus. But I didn't really click with any of the current selection of web apps out there so decided to build one myself.
It uses the great API available at radio-browser.info for all the radio information.
Been using it as a way to learn how to market a website as well. Learning a lot.
I welcome any constructive feedback.
Would suggest that you filter out any radio stations where the URL isn't working if possible.
For example I filtered down to "United Kingdom" and then "bass" - 3 of the 6 worked and would rather see ones that are active.
Also if possible to apply the country filter within the search bar, took me a second to realise I had to open the filter for country, select that, then go back to my search.
When clearing my search of "Bass" in the example above, it reset the search to default (didn't have my country filter) even though the filter was still applied when opening the filter section.
Super easy interface to use though, really well done.
It is annoying when some of the stations don't work. I've done an initial try at filtering them out without much luck but will try again.
Good idea about the country filter.
Thanks for the feedback really appreciate it!
Do you flash the game to a custom cartridge for testing?
It relies on “modern” (2009) extensions to minimise traffic and avoids polling entirely (relying on the server to notify of new messages or changes as they happen).
It’s currently quite stable. The only known issue is that it can take a while to detect a timeout when the system is suspended and woken up again (there’s no portable API to detect suspend/resume).
Since then, I’ve been working on a simple TUI email client based on notmuch and maildir. So far it works really well for processing email, but lacks any capabilities for handling attachments, composing, sending (these are obviously on the roadmap).
One thing I think may be cool, is put a thumbs up/thumbs down link in the email to track sentiment of the links you share. Some links are really cool, others I am not interested in at all, it may be useful to capture that info.
I would visit a site daily if you expose some of that info publicly (like 49% positive 51% negative for a link), to see how my sentiment matches your wider audience.
Create video game sprites and animations via prompts.
Pretty excited because I've started to get high volume, repeat customers.
Not a fan of signing up before seeing how much I'd have to pay. The examples look great though.
Prices are about to drop dramatically. Many of the models dropped >80% in price since initial launch. Any time I have a reduction in cost, I pass the savings directly on to users.
Not sure if you just added this in or I overlooked it, but exactly the kind of transparency I love. Will give this a try.
--
EDIT - Did an image generation using the OpenAI 4o model, then ran through the lowest quality animation. This is awesome and first pass is very strong and usable (around 100 diamonds used).
I look forward to seeing prices drop more and the asset pack area fill up. Keep going man, really awesome stuff.
I would say it combines the best parts of Duolingo and Anki. Anki is great for memorizing words, but you don't see the words in the context of novel sentences. Duolingo is great for exposure to new sentences, but it's oriented around "lessons" and SRS is an afterthought. (Duolingo is also not designed for people serious about learning a language IMO, it's too easy and goes too slowly.)
Had to do quite a bit to get it to work well.
1. At first you would think that if you know all the words in a sentence, that should be enough to understand the sentence. But it doesn't work like that. For starters, words can have multiple meanings. The french word "bois" can mean "(you) drink" or "wood". You want to learn these separately. I trained an NLP model (a gemma3 finetune) that I use to understand the manner each word is used in each sentence: https://huggingface.co/collections/anchpop/lexide-nlp-models
2. Even then, what about a sentence like "you'd better not"? Even if you know the words "you" "had" "better" and "not", you still won't really get this. So I use the wiktionary "multiword terms" category for each language to get a huge list of terms like "'d better" , "you better believe it", etc, and teach these in addition to individual words. And then I only show sentences where you know all the individual words as well as all the terms.
By the way, I have a suggestion, the examples on the answers could be listenable to keep the brain on a learning mode all the time even on side words
And I'm not planning to get rich off of it haha. Right now there's no monetization at all. If lots of people use it to learn a language and avoid wasting their time on duolingo, I'll be happy
Few pieces of feedback:
* I would expect light/dark mode to follow system by default
* I'm not sure why I need to keep clicking "learn one more new card" after nearly every card I learn
* AI grading is actually done quite well, but is a little slow for the normal "flow" I'm used to when doing cards in Anki.
Think this is great overall though, feels actually unique in a crowded space. Best of luck!
The main question is which P2P overlay network to use, if any: the prior incarnation used Pinecone (a variant of Yggdrasil), whereas this time we're pondering keeping it simpler and more scalable and using Matrix itself as the backbone to connect together smallish local P2P meshes - so by default you try to route via Matrix, but failing that you look on your LAN or BLE to see if you can talk directly to whoever you're addressing. Time will tell if this works :)
Edit: another option on our todo list to look into more is Iroh (https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh)
As simple to use as a notes app, with clever culinary capabilities :)
I am building a community driven data aggregation platform for the Michigan tech ecosystem. This is just a promo page.
On launch there will be a company index, curated newsletter, educational resources in michigan like CS programs, and much more!
It's still a small closed alpha, if anyone is interested: https://testers.birdlego.com
Here is a rough trailer of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVpR8aafFjI
LISTERS: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zl-wAqplQAo
1.9m view | 2mo ago | 2hr long (buckle in, documentary by a couple young goofball brothers)
It’s basically a gamified version of Merlin. Would love any and all feedback!
Birdle Go seems really cool, very impressed and would love to test that!
When Romania announced that the Lesser Kestrel had returned after 100 years iNaturalist actually had several of the observations in the nearby area. [2]
[1] https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?subview=map&taxon_i...
[2] https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?subview=map&taxon_i...
Can check it out at https://dailybaffle.com
I'm still working on growing the audience. App coming soon!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-Fz5T5c0OQ
Best of luck =3
Last year the 550W panels here dropped to 90eur, and so I just added some more panels to remove the need for the switchover. I saw last week 600W panels going for 80eur but no space left, but tempting. Good luck! It's a nice feeling to have energy independence.
What about compressed air? It might not be too hard to find a small brushless low power air pump that could drive pistons directly.
You could mount the pump controller onto the back of the panels and use an accelerometer to measure angle, and run the pump until it's where you want it.
You'd probably need to do some testing and make sure it couldn't get jammed, then build up pressure, then suddenly unstick and move unsafely.
An Intent is a self-contained document that describes a user request. It is composed of three main sections: WHY (the motivation), WHAT (the requirements, often in Gherkin language), and HOW (a detailed, step-by-step implementation plan defined with tasks). This approach ensures clarity and alignment before any code is written.
1: https://github.com/google/leveldb
Also building a CMS and static site generator that runs entirely client side in the browser. Pick themes, model content an publish to clean HTML. It also makes content available beyond just the browser, eg in a command line TUI.
Create a script for a product demo or tutorial for your app using an extension. The script is used to generate your product content in multiple formats (narrated video, interactive demo, looping animation, and in-app guide). Whenever your product changes, just update the script and regenerate everything. No manual re-recording of video, syncing of audio, or any other post-production steps.
Market is brutal though man. She hasnt gotten an offer after so much trying
Right now my app allows users to export build metadata as JSON which can be interpreted by LLMs for analysis, but I'd like to have this work on-device.
Would be great to collaborate with others on it. In particular I want to explore building the "alpha arena for AI house price prediction"
Dreaming about a new programming language made for coding gameplay logic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45865379
And an iOS expense tracker focused for frequent travelers, and macOS photos viewer based on the filesystem instead of a monolithic opaque "library", 2 needs that I had since forever but could never get through Apple's atrocious developer documentation far enough to finish making them :')
Early use case is replacing API keys with identity tokens that expire, delegate, and prove possession and then can be used for easy step up to fine-grained authorization. There's some pretty interesting authorization stuff you can do, like having multiple parties sign off before a token is valid or requiring a series of micro-services sign a token for it to be valid.
The project has been a huge learning curve for me - I started out as a skeptic of how generative AI could solve real problems (rather than just create noise) but now think that, like the internet, it can create a new kind of abundance that will be harnessable in all sorts of interesting ways.
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring
Edit: oops nevermind it's a goner.
Also planning on adding more tools to help development teams.
I maintain a dev log: https://world.hey.com/cdecatheu/javelit-diary-00-building-a-...
And here’s an article about the project by a Google Cloud devrel :)
https://glaforge.dev/posts/2025/10/24/javelit-to-create-quic...
- Transcribe voice to text (especially useful when you need to explain something to Claude code )
- (soon) select text to instantly Check grammar / Improve writing / change tone of text
- (soon) select text to Translate between languages
I discovered that I have a few 10/20$ subscriptions (grammarly, raycast, wisperflow) that do embarrassingly simple stuff I can one shot with cheap SLM. So I decided to build a one app specialized in small repetitive tasks on computer.
It's coming together really nicely, targeting a beta release later this month. If anyone is interested in game development and wants to be a beta tester, lmk :)
Test system uses ADCs, DACs and a DDS to produce a sine wave that simulates wheel speed.
I would rather be fishing.
Also making personalised Christmas t-shirts in Inkscape. I love what you can do with open source tools!
It's off to a rocky start though, as I've initially populated it with YouTube-8M and AudioSet, neither of which are music-specific. The search results can be... Weird.
I'm building Your Next Store (YNS); it's a Shopify alternative built with React and Next.js.
We provide an opinionated boilerplate tailored for tools like Claude or Codex, so designers and developers can build storefronts faster and more easily. It enforces a clear structure to start from while keeping full control over design, animations, and the overall storefront experience. It’s built on top of Stripe, with our higher-level commerce abstractions, like "add to cart", "checkout", "pay", "browse products" etc; plus a Commerce CMS so merchants can manage everything smoothly once their store is live.
If youre planning to sell something online and want a modern solution, hit me up! :)
Has 90% test coverage, makes use of web platform tests to verify compatibility, and is in use by some larger companies already with the Navigation API soon to become a baseline in evergreen browsers.
The Navigation API effectively is async state navigations. The likes of React has recently added Navigation API support to make use of the browser reload indicator.
https://github.com/virtualstate/navigation
Along with working on a startup day to day :)
Apart from that I have a personal SaaS idea I want to release soon. Its something that started as a joke but the joke is still not finished
Thinking on good export formats (except of taking screenshots and Pull Requests, obviosuly). LaTeX and Typst? A remark plugin?
IMDB? Ads everywhere. Actor's Access? Ancient.
Human first, AI optional. A great way for actors, writers, and directors to represent themselves.
Feedback welcome! -M@
It’s mostly free with only old Reddit features gated behind a one time $5 fee. The app has a few hundred thousand users on the Apple platforms but recently it was invited to join Mozilla’s Recommended Extensions program so I’m hoping to grow the non-Apple user base.
Unlike traditional accounting platforms we expose the ledger model directly which enables our customers to model complex transactions even when we do not have direct support for it.
Been working on this for a month, and it uses Elixir, Phoenix and InertiaJS with React.
A non-bloated HTML, CSS and pure Vanilla JS framework to create dashboards.
A cross-platform JSONL viewer where I am learning ImGUI. Haven’t found any other open source GUI framework that‘s small, provides out of the box components for tables, sorting
A law professionals helper - aggregates judicial case info into a single place, gives visibility and notifications - asistentul.ro
A scheduling platform for self-employed professionals that offer services (think hair-cutting, nails, psychlogists). (Not yet live)
Aaand something in compliance that I want to keep a bit stealthy right now.
https://coolinary.app, simplifying cooking and recipe ideas
https://capi.tax, preparing capital gains tax reports from foreign brokers for German income tax (still closed)
One project is for building rhythm games in multiple game engines and multiple platforms. Currently, it works in Unity, Unreal, Godot, SDL (or any C++ game engine), and MonoGame (or any C# game engine), and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. I'm working on adding Love2d (or any Lua game engine) and Bevy (or any Rust game engine). I have a few local prototypes of it working in Unity and Godot, but nothing public yet. Still trying to figure out what kind of game I want to make with it.
https://github.com/neogeek/rhythm-game-utilities
The other is a general purpose game engine in C++ with SDL. It's far enough along that I'm building games in it, but it's more of an exploration into how games are made than a replacement for Unity or Godot. I suppose it could be eventually, but I'm trying to be realistic with what it can do. One thing I'm pretty happy with regarding this engine is that one of the demo repos will automatically build to WebGL and publish to itch.io when changes are pushed.
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