Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)
No synthesized answer yet. Check the discussion below.
https://www.inclusivecolors.com/
- You can precisely tweak every shade/tint so you can incorporate your own brand colors. No AI or auto generation!
- It helps you build palettes that have simple to follow color contrast guarantees by design e.g. all grade 600 colors have 4.5:1 WCAG contrast (for body text) against all grade 50 colors, such as red-600 vs gray-50, or green-600 vs gray-50.
- There's export options for plain CSS, Tailwind, Figma, and Adobe.
- It uses HSLuv for the color picker, which makes it easier to explore accessible color combinations because only the lightness slider impacts the WCAG contrast. A lot of design tools still use HSL, where the WCAG contrast goes everywhere when you change any slider which makes finding contrasting colors much harder.
- Check out the included example open source palettes and what their hue, saturation and lightness curves look like to get some hints on designing your own palettes.
It's probably more for advanced users right now but I'm hoping to simplify it and add more handholding later.
Really open to any feedback, feature requests, and discussing challenges people have with creating accessible designs. :)
There's so much more to do with tools like this, and I'm really glad to see it.
- Drag the hue and saturation curves to customise the tints/shades of a color. Look at the UI mockup as you do this to make sure the tints/shades look good together.
- The color pairings used in the UI mockup all initially pass WCAG contrast checks but this can break if you tweak the lightness curve of a color. The mockup will show warning outlines if this happens. Click on a warning and it'll tell you which color pairs need to have their lightness values moved further apart to fix it.
- Once you're happy, use the export menu to use your colors in your CSS or Figma designs. You can use the mockup as a guide for which color pairs are accessible for body text, headings, button outlines and so on.
Does that make more sense? You really need to be on desktop as well because the mobile UI is more of a demo.
COLOR='#000000' # Okabe-Ito: 1 black
COLOR='#e69f00' # Okabe-Ito: 2 orange
COLOR='#56b4e9' # Okabe-Ito: 3 skyblue
COLOR='#009e73' # Okabe-Ito: 4 bluish-green
COLOR='#f0e442' # Okabe-Ito: 5 yellow
COLOR='#0072b2' # Okabe-Ito: 6 blue/darkerblue
COLOR='#d55e00' # Okabe-Ito: 7 vermilion/red
COLOR='#cc79a7' # Okabe-Ito: 8 reddish-purplehttps://www.inclusivecolors.com/?style_dictionary=eyJjb2xvci...
I've sorted the colors by luminance/lightness and added a gray swatch for comparison so can explore which color pairs pass WCAG contrast checks.
I haven't really gotten into colorblind safe colors like this yet where the colors mostly differ by hue and not luminance. Colorblind and non-colorblind people should be able to tell colors apart based on luminance difference i.e. luminance contrast. Hue perception is impacted by the several different kinds of color blindness so it's much trickier to find a set of colors that everyone can tell apart. This relates to the WCAG recommendation you don't rely on hue (contrast) to convey essential information (https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/use-of-color.htm...).
The gray swatch above could be called colorblind safe for example because as long as you pick color pairs with enough luminance contrast between them, colorblind and non-colorblind people should be able to tell them apart. You could even vary the hue and saturation of each shade to make it really colorful, as a long as you don't change the luminance values the WCAG contrast between pairings should still pass.
There are some Amish people who rebuild Dewalt, Milwaukee etc battery packs. I'd like a repairable/sustainable platform where I can actually check the health of the battery packs and replace worn out cells as needed.
To give you an idea of the market, original batteries are about $149, and their knockoffs are around $100.
Battery-powered hand tools are heavier, clumsier, generally of lower quality, less power and are less long-lived than AC-powered tools.
To be honest, there's a little Amish in me: I have hand-powered tools as backup for all my AC tools.
I've been wondering for a while if the display on ebikes could also be a more open and durable part of it.
We have a fun group working on it on Discord (find the discord invite in the How To)
- No sign-up, works entirely in-browser
- Live PDF preview + instant download
- VAT EU support
- Shareable invoice links
- Multi-language (10+) & multi-currency
- Multiple templates (incl. Stripe-style)
- Mobile-friendly
GitHub: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf
Would love feedback, contributions, or ideas for other templates/features.
https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf/blob/main/LICENS...
=)
I'm putting a bunch of security tools / data feeds together as a service. The goal is to help teams and individuals run scans/analysis/security project management for "freemium" (certain number of scans/projects for free each month, haven't locked in on how it'll pan out fully $$ wise).
I want to help lower the technical hurdles to running and maintaining security tools for teams and individuals. There are a ton of great open source tools out there, most people either don't know or don't have the time to do a technical deep dive into each. So I'm adding utilities and tools by the day to the platform.
Likewise, there's a built in expert platform for you to get help on your security problems built into the system. (Currently an expert team consisting of [me]). Longer term, I'm working on some AI plugins to help alert on CVEs custom to you, generate automated scans, and some other fun stuff.
https://meldsecurity.com/ycombinator (if you're interested in free credits)
It is a tool that lets you create whiteboard explainers.
You can prompt it with an idea or upload a document and it will create a video with illustrations and voiceover. All the design and animations are done by using AI apis, you dont need any design skills.
Here is a video explainer of the popular "Attention is all you need" paper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x_jIK3kqfA
Would love to hear some feedback
The animations / drawings themselves are solid too. I think there's more to play with wrt the dimensions and space of the background. It would be nice to see it zoom in and out for example.
how does it work with long papers? will it ever work with small books?
will try it out tomorrow again
yes it should work.
> i can’t upload the document
Could you please drop an email to rahul at magnetron dot ai with the document. I will set things up for you
last month’s “what are you working on” thread impulsed me to upload this game to itch and 1 month later, i’ve got a small community, lots of feedback and iterations. It brought a whole new life to a project that was on the verge of abandoning.
So, I’m really grateful for this thread. https://explodi.itch.io/microlandia
I heard that the SimCity devs have had to fudge that out for gameplay's sake ever since the oldest versions
This weekend I have plans to start playing a lot Subway Builder (https://www.subwaybuilder.com) which I'm really excited about, and maybe get some books on the subject, in order to get it right
Parking space simulation is coming soon. I feel I will completely miss the point if I leave that out. The idea is to have street parking (with configurable profit for the city) parking lots, and buildings with underground parking, that should conflict, of course, with metro lines.
https://microlandia.tubatuba.net/simulation_details
Quite interesting details.
I wonder if you simulate at individual level or group? Would be cool at individual level each one making decisions individually and see some emerging behavior.
Also how corruption emerges in gov etc
Also if no job maybe they could try uber/food delivery crappy jobs like that or start their own business.
Maybe also less money less likely to have kids? Would be nice to show how poverty helps or not population growth. If too poor might have no education and would make kids, if average citizen and can’t save money will avoid kids. That’s why at individual level simulation could find these emerging patterns. But probably too expensive computationally ?
If you are referring to the citizens, yes, at individual level. However for traffic I'm using a sampling rate.
> Also if no job maybe they could try uber/food delivery crappy jobs like that or start their own business.
That's an awesome idea, I added it to my backlog :)
> less money less likely to have kids?
This is mega tricky, because it happens very differently across the world. Yes, can be expensive computationally that's why the city is so small (for now) but as I start to distribute the simulation into many cores, players with high core CPU will be able to choose a bigger city size :) I agree that individual level simulation is what makes it interesting and I plan to keep it like that.
Some are small tech jokes, while others were born from curiosity to see how LLMs would behave in specific scenarios and interactions.
I also tried to use this collection of experiments as a way to land a new job, but I'm starting to realize it might not be serious enough :)
Happy to hear what you think!
Last year, PlasticList found plastic chemicals in 86% of tested foods—including 100% of baby foods they tested. Around the same time, the EU lowered its “safe” BPA limit by 20,000×, while the FDA still allows levels roughly 100× higher than Europe’s new standard.
That seemed solvable.
Laboratory.love lets you crowdfund independent lab testing of the specific products you actually buy. Think Consumer Reports × Kickstarter, but focused on detecting endocrine disruptors in your yogurt, your kid’s snacks, or whatever you’re curious about.
Find a product (or suggest one), contribute to its testing fund, and get full lab results when testing completes. If a product doesn’t reach its goal within 365 days, you’re automatically refunded. All results are published publicly.
We use the same ISO 17025-accredited methodology as PlasticList.org, testing three separate production lots per product and detecting down to parts-per-billion. The entire protocol is open.
Since last month’s “What are you working on?” post:
- 4 more products have been fully funded (now 10 total!)
- That’s 30 individual samples (we do triplicate testing on different batches) and 60 total chemical panels (two separate tests for each sample, BPA/BPS/BPF and phthalates)
- 6 results published, 4 in progress
The goal is simple: make supply chains transparent enough that cleaner ones win. When consumers have real data, markets shift.
Browse funded tests, propose your own, or just follow along: https://laboratory.love
It's interesting that a bunch of the funded products have been funded by a single person.
Do you know if it's the producers themselves? Worried rich people?
I've yet to have any product funded by a manufacturer. I'm open to this, but I would only publish data for products that were acquired through normal consumer supply chains anonymously.
I hope we can agree that we are better off than that now.
What I'm curious about is whether you think it's been a steady stream of improvements, and we just need to improve further? Or if you think there was some point between 1900 and now where food health and safety was maximized, greater than either 1900 or now, and we've regressed since then?
Or put another way: it was a simple question that the ggp can answer or not as they choose. I was just curious for their perspective.
My instinct is that things have largely gotten better over time. At a super-macro level, in 1900 we had directly adulterated food that e.g. the soldiers receiving Chicago meat called "embalmed". In the mid-20th century we had waterways that caught fire and leaded gas.
By the late 20th we had clean(er) air (this is all from a U.S. perspective) and largely safe food. I think if we were to claim a regression, the high point would have to be around 2000, but I can't point to anything specific going on now that wasn't also going on then -- e.g. I think microplastics were a thing then as well, we just weren't paying attention.
2. If you find regulation-violating (or otherwise serious) levels of undesirable chemicals, do you... (a) report it to FDA; (b) initiate a class-action lawsuit; (c) short the brand's stock and then news blitz; or (d) make a Web page with the test results for people to do with it what they will?
3. Is 3 tests enough? On the several product test results I clicked, there's often wide variation among the 3 samples. Or would the visualization/rating tell me that all 3 numbers are unacceptably bad, whether it's 635.8 or 6728.6?
4. If I know that plastic contamination is a widespread problem, can I secretly fund testing of my competitors' products, to generate bad press for them?
5. Could this project be shut down by a lawsuit? Could the labs be?
1. I'm still working to make results more digestible and actionable. This will include the %TDI toggle (total daily intake, for child vs adult and USA vs EU) as seen on PlasticList, but I'm also tinkering with an even more consumer-friendly 'chemical report card'. The final results page would have both the card and the detailed table of results.
2. I have not found any regulation-violating levels yet, so in some sense, I'll cross that bridge when I get there. Part of the issue here is that many believe the FDA levels are far too relaxed which is part of why demand for a service like laboratory.love exists.
3. This is part of the challenge that PlasticList faced, and additionally a lot of my thinking around the chemical report card are related to this. Some folks think a single test would be sufficient to catch major red flags. I think triplicate testing is a reasonable balance of statistically robust while not being completely cost-prohibitive.
4. Yes, I suppose one could do that, as long as the funded products can be acquired by laboratory.love anonymously through their normal consumer supply chains. Laboratory.love merely acquires three separate batches of a given product from different sources, tests them at an ISO/IEC 17025-accredited lab, and publishes the data.
5. I suppose any project can be shut down by a lawsuit, but laboratory.love is not currently breaking any laws as far as I'm aware.
Donated funds are pooled and allocated to the leading unfunded product anytime the pool can get that product to its funding goal.
Here is a Stripe link: https://donate.stripe.com/9B614o4NWdhN83l9r06c001
I'll add subscriptions as a more formal option on laboratory.love soon!
Disclaimer: I don't think I can have a 365-day refund with a recurring donations like this. The financial infrastructure would add too much complexity.
Bit confused as to your position on funding.
I certainly want to avoid any weird incentive misalignment. Because the testing is done by an accredited lab that provides an official Certificate of Analysis, I think I could reasonably accept funding from manufacturers once I build out a feature that would will allow visitors to download the COA PDF.
No manufacturer has reached out directly yet, presumably because a) this project is small and still gaining trust and b) they would probably want to do testing privately and avoid publication of 'bad' results anyway.
Personally I wouldn't have problem with companies funding if it's via the normal route, i.e. via the web interface, such that they are just providing funds and then the normal testing/reporting takes place. But I fear this is idealistic. I can well imagine companies wanting to send you samples directly, wanting you to remove results and even threatening legal action if they don't like the results.
Here is something I'm struggling with as a user. I look at a product (this tofu for example [0]) and see the amounts. And then I have absolutely no clue what it means. Is it bad? How bad? I see nanograms one place and μg in an info menu - is μg a nanogram? And what is LOQ? Virtually 0? Simply less than the recommended amount?
I think 99% of people will have the same reaction. They will have no idea what the information means.
I clicked on some info icons to try and get more context. The context is good (explains what the different categories are) but it still didnt help me understand the amounts. I went to "About" and it didnt help with this. I went to the FAQ and and the closest I can find is:
>What makes a result 'concerning'? We don't make safety judgments. Instead, we compare results to established regulatory limits from FDA, EPA, and EFSA, noting when products exceed these thresholds. We also flag when regulatory limits themselves may be outdated based on new research.
I understand that you don't want to make the judgement and it's about transparency and getting the information. But the information is worthless if people dont know what it meant.
I want to see the results of the test compared to the EU/US/Whoever recommendations. I want explanations of what the different chemicals are and preferably linked to peer reviewed studies explaining side effects.
Once even more tests are ran I want comparisons between product brands.
Overall still great but very much an engineer presentation to complex data. Not that its a bad thing, being transparent with data is important, but we aren't all experts.
I'm working to make results more digestible and actionable. This will include the %TDI toggle (total daily intake, for child vs adult and USA vs EU) as seen on PlasticList, but I'm also tinkering with an even more consumer-friendly 'chemical report card'. The final results page would have both the card and the detailed table of results.
I'm working to make results more digestible and actionable. This will include the %TDI toggle (total daily intake, for child vs adult and USA vs EU) as seen on PlasticList, but I'm also tinkering with an even more consumer-friendly 'chemical report card'. The final results page would have both the card and the detailed table of results.
Some testing has been done on https://labdoor.com/ where they basically fund the testing with affiliate links, which I think could be another revenue source for your site. I did contact them in January and they said they would add the brands I requested to the list, it's just not crowdsourced the same way your site is. They received some form of backing from Mark Cuban [4].
(edit) To make this more clear - If you are looking for expansion or making it a little wider, allowing users to request other types of testing besides the plastics would be cool.
[1] - https://www.texashealth.org/areyouawellbeing/Eating-Right/Le... [2] - https://www.erc501c3.org/settlements/6f2zxji0o3m2k4jhcwgg7hd... [3] - https://www.erc501c3.org/settlements/k7p29rie5whpc5qek5kdha2... [4] - https://markcubancompanies.com/companies/labdoor/
I have considered creating specific ad-hoc campaign pages for folks with special interests and let them drive people to the page (like a more focused Kickstarter or GoFundMe with a lab on the back end).
If anyone has a special interest I'm happy to mock up what funding targets would be.
It would be so boring - no funding accepted, everything would be freely available, no political initiatives, no recommendations, nothing. Just a treasure trove of data
A man can dream - kudos to you for actually making it a reality - great inspiration
Question for you: in general, how much does this stuff cost? what if you wanted to expand to testing beyond plastic, e.g., verifying the potency of ingredients in supplements, verifying cleaning product ingredients, etc., is that possible?
My partner lab specifically offers 300+ unique tests across the following categories: Contaminants, Elemental, Allergen, Preservatives and Additives, Microbial, and Phytochemical, Vitamin, and Actives"
So yes, expansion is definitely possible! If a billionaire wanted to fund a project like this it could certainly convert dollars into data, it's just a matter of choosing which products and contaminants to start chewing through first to ensure the data creates positive change in the real world.
At a minimum it needs glyphosate testing. I suspect the avocado oil has no plastics but high glyphosate, it's one of the many reasons I only use high-quality olive oil and coconut oil in cooking.
What bugs me is that plastics manufacturers advertise "BPA-free", which is technically correct, but then add a very similar chemical from the same family that has the same effect on the plastic - which is good - but also has the same effect on your endocrine system
For example, there are two individuals who own the same $100k machine for testing the performance of loudspeakers.
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php
https://www.erinsaudiocorner.com/
Both of them do measurements and YouTube videos. Neither one has a particularly good index of their completed reviews, let alone tools to compare the data.
I wish I could subscribe to support a domain like “loud speaker spin tests” and then have my donation paid out to these reviewers based on them publishing new high quality reviews with good data that is published to a common store.
a tool to help California home owners to lower their property taxes. This works for people who bought in the past years low interest environment and are overpaying in taxes because of that.
Feel free to email me, if you have questions: phl.berner@gmail.com
I started this out of frustration that there is no good tool I could use to share photos from my travel and of my kids with friends and family. I wanted to have a beautiful web gallery that works on all devices, where I can add rich descriptions and that I could share with a simple link.
Turned out more people wanted this (got 200+ GitHub stars for the V1) so I recently released the V2 and I'm working on it with another dev. Down the road we plan a SaaS offer for people that don't want to fiddle with the CLI and self-host the gallery.
I also tried the vertical masonry layout, which looks good, but makes no sense if your photos have a chronological order...
The magic happens here: https://github.com/SimplePhotoGallery/core/blob/a3564e30bcb6...
I stumbled across it looking for CSS flex masonry examples.
The insight: your architecture diagram shouldn't be a stale PNG in Confluence. It should be your war room during incidents.
Going to be available as both web app and native desktop.
For example, 1 PCR reaction (a common reaction used to amplify DNA) costs about $1 each, and we're doing tons every day. Since it is $1, nobody really tries to do anything about it - even if you do 20 PCRs in one day, eh it's not that expensive vs everything else you're doing in lab. But that calculus changes once you start scaling up with robots, and that's where I want to be.
Approximately $30 of culture media can produce >10,000,000 reactions worth of PCR enzyme, but you need the right strain and the right equipment. So, I'm producing the strain and I have the equipment! I'm working on automating the QC (usually very expensive if done by hand) and lyophilizing for super simple logistics.
My idea is that every day you can just put a tube on your robot and it can do however many PCR reactions you need that day, and when the next day, you just throw it out! Bring the price from $1 each to $0.01 + greatly simplify logistics!
Of course, you can't really make that much money off of this... but will still be fun and impactful :)
Some things that would be cool
- Along your lines: In general, cheap automated setups for PCR and gels
- Cheap/automatic quantifiable gels. E.g. without needing a kV supply capillary, expensive QPCR machines etc.
- Cheaper enzymes in general
- More options for -80 freezers
- Cheaper/more automated DNA quantification. I got a v1 Quibit which gets the job done, but new ones are very expensive, and reagent costs add up.
- Cheaper shaking incubator options. You can get cheap shakers and baters, but not cheap combined ones... which you need for pretty much everything. Placing one in the other can work, but is sub-optimal due to size and power-cord considerations.
- More centrifuges that can do 10kG... this is the minimum for many protocols.
- Ability to buy pure ethanol without outrageous prices or hazardous shipping fees.1. You can purchase gel boxes that do 48 to 96 lanes at once. I'd ideally have it on a robot whose only purpose is to load and run these once or twice a day. All the samples coming through get batched together and run
2. Bioanalyzer seems nice for quantification of like PCRs to make sure you're getting the right size. But if I'll be honest I haven't though that much about it. But qPCRs actually become very cheap, if you can keep the machines full. You can also use something like a nanodrop and it is much much cheaper
3. Pichia pastoris expression ^
4. You can use a plate reader (another thing that goes bulk nicely), but the reagents you can't really get around (but cheaper in bulk from China)
5. If you aggregate, these become really cheap. The complicated bits are getting the proper cytomat parts for shaking, as they are limited on the used market
6. These can't be automated well, so I honestly haven't thought too much about it.
7. Reagents cheaper in bulk China
8. ehhhh, maybe? But not really. But if you think about a scaled centralized system, you can get away with not using oligos for a lot of things
Anyhow good luck. Would love to follow if you do anything with this in the future. Do you have a blog or anything?
- 30k requests/month for free
- simple, stable, and fast API
- MCP Server for AI-related workloads
It’s an iOS app to help tracking events and stats about my day as simple dots. How many cups of coffee? Did I take my supplements? How did I sleep? Did I have a migraine? Think of it like a digital bullet journal.
Then visualizing all those dots together helps me see patterns and correlations. It’s helped me cut down my occurrence of migraines significantly. I’m still just in the public beta phase but looking forward to a full release fairly soon.
Would love to hear more feedback on how to improve the app!
One of the best I’ve seen in this thread!
Good luck with your mission!
25-Hydroxyvitamin D, also known as calcidiol, regulates calcium absorption in the intestines, promotes bone formation and mineralization, and supports immune function.
Apolipoprotein B (ApoB) is a protein that binds to LDL receptors on cells, allowing lipoproteins to deliver cholesterol and triglycerides to tissues for energy or storage.
Lipoprotein(a) is a low-density lipoprotein variant identified as a risk factor for atherosclerosis and related diseases, such as coronary heart disease and stroke.
etc.
man, myself needs work
My first career was in sales. And most of the time these interactions began with grabbing a sheet of paper and writing to one another. I think small LLMs can help here.
Currently making use of api’s but I think small models on phones will be good enough soon. Just completed my MVP.
Drones are real bastards - there's a lot of startups working on anti drone systems and interceptors, but most of them are using synthetic data. The data I'm collecting is designed to augment the synthetic data, so anti drone systems are closer to field testing
https://github.com/skanga/Conductor
Conductor is a LLM agnostic framework for building sophisticated AI applications using a subagent architecture. It provides a robust platform for orchestrating multiple specialized AI agents to accomplish complex tasks, with features like LLM-based planning, memory persistence, and dynamic tool use.
It provides a robust and flexible platform for orchestrating multiple specialized AI agents to accomplish complex tasks. This project is inspired by the concepts outlined in "The Rise of Subagents" by Phil Schmid at https://www.philschmid.de/the-rise-of-subagents and it aims to provide a practical implementation of this powerful architectural pattern.
To provide trading insights for users.
Haunted house trope, but it's a chatbot. Not done yet, but it's going well. The only real blocker is that I ran into the parental controls on the commercial models right away when trying to make gory images, so I had to spin up my own generators. (Compositing by hand definitely taking forever).
It's already working, and slightly faster than the CPU version, but that's far from an acceptable result. The occupancy (which is a term I first learned this week) is currently at a disappointing 50%, so there's a clear target for optimisation.
Once I'm satisfied with how the code runs on my modest GPU at home, the plan is to use some online GPU renting service to make it go brrrrrrrrrr and see how many new elements I can find in the series.
AI sprite animator for 2D video games.
Building a new layer of hyper-personalization over the web. Instead of generating more content, it helps you reformat and interact with what already exists, turning any page, paper, or YouTube video into a summary, mind-map, podcast, infographic or chat.
The broader idea is to make the web adaptive to how each person thinks and learns.
https://apu.software/truegain/
Then it’s on to the next project.
My partner shares our journey on X (@hustle_fred), while I’ve been focused on building the product (yep, the techie here :). We’re excited to have onboarded 43 users in our first month, and we're looking forward to getting feedback from the HN community!
Write a dev blog in Word format using Tritium, jot down bugs or needs, post blog, improve and repeat.
Working on faceted search for logs and CLI client now and trying to share my progress on X.
Next in the plans is adding more models and compare which one gives better results.
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