Outside of personal stuff, I'd like to shill my consultancy, G&K Software. (IDK if this is even allowed, but its what i'm working on so I think its fair.)
We had:
an ai asset generation site;
a trading tool for a fund in dubai;
an endorsed sales data tool;
Those are all out of business now due to global market craziness, tarrifs, and AI advancements... so I guess we've got nothing right now.
(Please somebody give us business lol) gibson@gnk.software
I've been working on a minimal, keyboard-driven Mac app that records and transcribes your meetings on device, similar to MacWhisper but way more minimal and simple. I originally built it for myself because I kept forgetting to start MacWhisper before calls. It uses Apple APIs to capture the mic and system audio, diarises it, and gives you a markdown transcript at the end. What I quite like about it is that during the call you can mark key moments, which then get inserted into the transcript at the right time. So if you do hand it to an LLM to summarise, it knows what was important.
Finished my little hobbyist, analog computer project. It consists of PCB modules that you plug into a breadboard and wire inputs and outputs together in order to program it.
The most novel thing about it (besides the breadboard being a central component) is probably eschewing panel meters or oscilloscopes and using an ESP32 and LCD display (and a bit of digital code) to display the various voltages/values that you connect up to it.
Kind of an open, learning platform to satisfy my curiosity about what analog computing was all about. It succeeded.
This month I am putting together a couple of dozen kits, preparing some YouTube videos, and generally trying to roll it out by July. (Still more modules could be built for it though—a log/anti-log module would be nice, sine/cosine is not out of the question… It's open, so perhaps someone else will create these or other modules. Or maybe I'll come back to it this Winter and add a few of those.)
Just a little example here, wired up (programmed) for Lotka-Volterra simulation (only a few dozen wires of code!). It's using a kind of strip-chart mode programmed on the ESP32 to display the voltage inputs representing predator and prey populations:
I have been building tools; VT Code is my latest, and I'm very proud of it.
VT Code: https://github.com/vinhnx/VTCode > An open-source coding agent with LLM-native code understanding and robust shell safety. Supports multiple LLM providers with automatic failover and efficient context management. => Recently it just got the 500th tagged release. The project has been started since August 2025, and the coding agent VT Code itself I believe to be stable and ready to use. Thankfully, I got help from the community; recently, we pushed quite a lot of releases, enhancements, and bug fixes.
Everyone is working on personal agents but their identity model is wrong. They act as you, risk your reputation, your data and more. Nym is a personal agent that has (and can make) all of its own accounts and only gets selective read only access to yours.
The goal is to make reliable agents that are able to operate safely in the world to help you do what you want, without exposing your accounts and personal identity to potential harms.
For instance nyms have their own e-mail addresses at nym-mail.com, you can CC them on chains and they can only respond to people on that chain with a lease of 5 days, or permanently for people you specifically add.
The most surprising thing from the last month has been building a Discord app/activity has driven the most amount of engagement. Once it’s in your chat it tends to become a daily habit!
I've been deep in the IntelliJ plugin rabbit hole.
My primary project is Mermaid Studio, an IDE grade Mermaid diagram authoring experience for both humans and agents built for JetBrains IDEs. Semantic highlighting, refactoring, 120+ inspections covering everything from common rendering issues and foot-guns to obscure syntax quirks, contextual completions, interactive (drag-and-drop) diagram editing and styling. A suite of included MCP tools surfaces the plugin's intelligence and rendering capabilities, so your preferred agent (even using relatively small local models) can generate correct diagrams, even the newest or more obscure ones with ease.
Tinkering with several other IntelliJ plugin ideas that may or may not end up being released.
Still occasionally pushing up new features Tachi Code, my browser extension that brings a feature rich, highly customizable, Monaco Editor based code editor to the browser surfaces you always wished would be less of a pain to read. These days, I mostly use it for reading and printing Markdown files.
You bid against other investors in a show similar to the Shark Tank and then you assign advisors to help the startup grow and finally cash out after IPO.
The ideas that startups have are wacky for the fun factor, but the economic simulation underneath is realistic.
While waiting for another developer to finish something for a project I’m working on, I’m working on an MCP server in Go that provides a Home Assistant voice assistant with basic functionality that is missing from the default feature set, like telling jokes, flipping a coin, choosing between N options, making equations, and other things I consider essential for a voice assistant.
I’ll probably go further and include things like Apple Weather support[1], and Plex, YouTube, and Kagi search, if I have the time.
[1]: Because in Home Assistant you can only ask about the weather in the location you have configured, not in other locations. At least that’s how it works here at home.
Modern game development has become slow, expensive, and fragile. Teams are larger, timelines are longer, budgets are higher, and even highly produced games still frequently fail. I think one reason is that content production has not scaled well enough. The industry still relies heavily on bespoke hand-authored content, even in genres where structure, variation, and validation could be much more systematic. What's more, the authored content rarely appeals to everybody, which often results in commercial disaster. (See, e.g., Veilguard.)
I'm working on a procedural authoring system for party-based cRPGs. The idea is to treat RPG content as structured, validated data rather than loose text or one-off scripting. A procedurally generated location has encounters, hazards, NPCs, rewards, state changes, and a validation report. A generated quest has a hook, possible approaches, consequences, rewards, and failure states. Main campaign questlines, which can be modeled on the old "Adventure Path" system from Dungeon Magazine, are typically revealed in a stepwise way. The system automatically plays through and rejects content that is logically broken, unrewarding, or impossible to complete.
The broader goal is to build better authoring tools for RPGs: Tools that help small teams create large, reactive games very quickly, without giving up structure or design control.
So I'm starting a new company to push the boundaries of procedural generation and related technologies in games. No link to share yet. Maybe in a month or two. We do have playable games already, though.
To blow off steam I'm working on a self-hosted language learning app, primarily for Afrikaans, but soon expanding into German and Spanish down the line. I was sick of paying for Lingq and Clozemaster and resources for learning Afrikaans online are very sparse. I also wanted something that tightly integrated with Anki: https://github.com/heuwels/lector/
I'm working toward making a Hacker News simulator in the vein of https://reddit.com/r/subsimulatorgpt2 (but using HN's code instead of a subreddit).
To do that, I'm building sharc, a port of Hacker News that runs on Common Lisp, implementing all the latest features of HN. (That last bit is the hard part.) https://github.com/shawwn/sharc
Implementing Tierra [1] in Zig a learning exercise. Trying to push all allocations to compile time and not use LLMs for coding. Repo: https://github.com/iwhalen/zierra
I’ve been working on a bottom-to-top rewrite of an app that’s been shipping for the last couple of years. The initial version took over two years to write.
It’s coming along great. I’ve only been working on it since February, and it’s very complete, functionally. I’ve been using an LLM, extensively.
The original server took over seven months to write, but with the LLM, I had it done in about a month. The PHP code is great quality.
It’s not all bunnies and flowers, though. I’m spending the next few days, rewriting a Swift viewcontroller that the LLM wrote. It works, but the code is awful. It looks like it was written by a jargon-addled high schooler on Adderall. I just can’t bear to have that level of junk in my app. I asked it to refactor the code to improve the quality, and reduce the size, and it removed all the documentation and logging; leaving the thread- and delay-riddled garbage behind.
If someone that worked for me had done that, I would have evicted them, with a trebuchet.
I realized that I can't count on the LLM to help me maintain its mess, so I'd better just suck it up, and do it myself.
The good news is, is that I’m so far ahead of schedule (a position that I’ve never been in, in forty years of development), that I can afford to do this.
I built my own version of Kill the Newsletter. Been testing it with various newsletters. Learning that a lot of the popular email newsletters are horrific, but if you have any, popular or ones only two people read that you like, I want to know!
I also bought some steel table legs and rebuilt our kitchen table and bench yesterday. The table came with wooden legs that always seemed unstable, I would confidently stand on my table now.
how are you solving the problem that a number of newsletter owners purge emails which are not opening/reading the emails? are you sending a signal that the email was read?
Personal AI. Step by step evolving something I worked on for 10 years from an open source Go framework to APIs to apps and now agents. It's been an interesting journey. It's not finished yet. It's also not going to be a billion dollar company or have breakout success like OpenClaw but when you tackle personal problems I think they turn into more valuable opportunities. The opportunity to learn or have something that benefits a few people. I can't take off my entrepreneurial hat though. I keep trying to figure out how to make it work for everyone but I think that's the trap. Build for yourself. The rest will come.
We are building local (Baltics) marketplace for teambuilding events.
Ever since I took on teamlead responsibilities in my daily job, it's been a recurring challenge to organize fun and engaging activities for a team. Providers are usually small businesses, so they all handle enquires, booking and payments to the best of their ability. That usually means exhausting back and forth to get and compare multiple offers.
Instead, we provide curated list of activity providers to choose from, and then handle communication, invoicing and disputes\returns, if needed.
We have got overwhelmingly good feedback from HRs, responsible for team event bookings, and now trying to grow vendors to launch publicly.
I'm building a context engine for all the code and docs in your company, and expose it via a collaborative zoomable UI + CLI , where you can collaborate with your co-workers and agents.
We map technical debt, agent readiness, code complexity, security scanning, bus factor so you can easily see how all the software in your company runs.
Got the top spot in What Are You Working On in Feb 2025 and then started a company around it at https://getcomper.ai . We got a pre-seed investment, then got some ex-Miro folk on board and are building the product at breakneck speed.
One of the coolest things is that we've got an incremental git blame engine built on top of GitOxide as our backend is fully built on Rust.
https://getkakeibo.com - an extremely simple app to get your finances in order, based on the kakeibo method. You make a plan for your month (income, fixed expenses) and then you track your expenses daily, categorising them into simple buckets: wants, needs, culture and unexpected.
At the end of the month, the app guides you through a reflection flow where you can learn about your habits and think about what you want to improve. 100% offline, fully private, no AI.
The app is paid, but I actually made a page for HN readers to get it for free, I'm having a lot of trouble with distribution: https://getkakeibo.com/hn/
interesting. without an account, from my browser, I can see it in the fifth place. are you searching from your phone, iPad, laptop...?
but this checks out with my experience: extremely low visibility on the stores, I think I need to improve description/keywords and get more reviews. thanks for sharing!
Is there a way to import expenses? It's a bit annoying if I have to enter them one by one on my phone, when I can easily get an export from my bank account on my desktop
it’s technically possible, as you can download export and import the SQLite database as you like, but my vision for the app is that logging each expense individually (with the annoyance that it entails) is one of the core points. There are a lot of apps right now that will be able to parse the data from your bank (even connect to it) and give you beautiful stats about your expenses, but my experience with those is that you see the graphs, think 2 minutes about them and forget instantly.
I wanted to make something totally different, with the hopes that it can make you a bit more conscious about your spending and habits.
It’s a good point. Going over each item is what works for us. But I still extract from the bank and into a spreadsheet so we have full control. The only thing spreadsheets lack is double entry.
oh no, I'm so sorry about this. I generated the codes some time ago when I posted a "Show HN" post, and forgot that they expired at the end of May. I'll generate new ones and let you know when available. thanks a lot for the heads up!
https://motionparty.net/ - motion controlled web games, by analyzing the Webcam feed locally. In the vein of eye toys for ps2. Works quite well I think, but some elements need improvement. Want to add more games as well.
Personally, a voxel space renderer for the PlayStation (Comanche terrain style rendering).
In theory, it's really not suited for this because (at least back then) this was designed for computers with:
- relatively large amounts of RAM (uncompressed color+heightmap data takes a lot of space),
- fast CPUs with data caches (it's a 2D trapezoidal walk of a top-down projected fustrum with plenty of additions, multiplications and divisions),
- memory-mapped linear framebuffers (for software rendering).
The PlayStation has none of these things: only 2 MiB of main RAM; an in-order scalar 33 MHz MIPS III processor without a FPU or a data cache, where any CPU load from main RAM stalls the pipeline for 5 cycles, multiplications have a 6 to 13 cycles latency and divisions have a 36 cycles latency; and the only way to touch VRAM is to send commands to the 2D GPU.
What it does have is 4 KiB of I-cache (direct-mapped), 1 KiB of scratchpad with no wait states and a fixed-point GTE coprocessor which is mostly geared towards projecting 3D points onto a 2D screen and not general matrix/vector processing. Meaning that if I get my hot loop within 1024 instructions (and no function calls), fit my working set+stack within 1 KiB and can pipeline the GTE for transformations and the CPU for map scanning/GPU submissions, it might just work.
So far I'm getting decent framerates (like 10-15 FPS at 256x240) with just software projection and GPU line rendering. Right now I'm wrestling with the GTE and various ways to trick it into transforming more points than it's supposed to be able to do, by looking at the fixed-hardware math equations for the various instructions and trying to fit my equations into them (doing stuff like putting relative altitude into X/Y vector registers instead of coordinates and massaging the rest of the values to get screen Y coordinates out of it).
Kind of a hardcore topic to pick for my first homebrew ever, but I craved a simpler, low-level optimization challenge as a pipe cleaner, after working on ghidra-delinker-extension for so long.
YtreeNova an XTreeGold-inspired, FOSS, keyboard-first Linux file manager built for fast, precise file work. Developed with AI assistance, but it does not run AI itself. https://github.com/robkam/ytreenova
I keep saving blogs and articles but almost never revisit them.
So I’m building an Android app designed to help me actually read what I save. You only get one saved article per day. Finish today’s read to unlock the next one. You can also save Twitter, Reddit, etc. posts separately and revisit them anytime.
Right now I’m mainly validating whether people would actually want something like this. If there’s enough interest, I’ll run a small closed beta for Android.
Build complex Spotify playlists by wiring together components in a visual editor. Mix, filter, and sort tracks from any source (with Last.fm and Musicbrainz support). Combine multiple playlists, saved tracks, and recommendations. Filter by genre, audio features, popularity, and more. Schedule programs to keep playlists updated automatically.
You play a duck in a small shared town. You pick a job, pay rent, post on a Twitter-style feed, vote in local elections. The simulation keeps running when you close the tab. No PvP, no loot boxes, no combat. Playtime is a few minutes a day by design.
whenever i want to play a video game with someone, theres no way to just pick up a couple of controllers and jump into a game without waiting for something to start, or update, or sync, or...
im building a tiny handheld video game (think GBA) where simply turning it on starts the game and you can immediately start playing. no os to boot, bios checksum screen to wait through, or scripts between you and the game. if another person turns their handheld on, they join your game and it becomes multiplayer seamlessly
esp32-s3 based for dual cores (screen updates / game loop) and bluetooth for "local" wireless multiplayer matchmaking, currently making the game itself be like a cross between puyo pop and tetris (an actual mashup of the rules, not just two games in one cartridge)
A user reports a location bug on their morning commute. You're 2,000 miles away. Instead of flying out to reproduce it, you replay their exact GPS trip on your simulator. Same route. Same speed. Same timing.
https://raizensoft.com - Game development tutorials and resources for code-centric frameworks (libGDX, LWJGL, MonoGame, etc). All articles are written by me and I've been running the site for 10 months to share my passion and technical knowledge. 200+ articles so far and I'm planning to add more.
It's possible if you have wide or deep domain knowledge. Back in 2007 I made a Q&A website related to the open source FirebirdSQL database with around 350 articles in about one month. Although, those were very short and I had a huge archive from a mailing list with multiple years of questions and answers to source from.
10 months is a long time. You can write one article per day and do it easily.
I was frustrated with not being able to properly review code changes that agents make, looking for a middle ground between VSC and Claude Code. So I built one. Still in early development but its working (mostly) and I hope dogfooding will get me all the way to something great :)
Terminal hunks speed by and I want to review the changes locally before they are on GitHub. Looking through VSC is very slow because it's aimed at writing, not reading, code. In cotect you can move through the repository quickly with WASD and you can approve/comment on hunks that you've viewed and any comments you leave you can copy all at once so you can pipe them down to your agent at once instead of interrupting its work every time you find an issue (or otherwise you forget about that issue - yes I have ADHD).
- a self-hosted PaaS with CI-driven deployments, managed by terraform (and possibly other IaC in the future) - think Coolify but with IaC or Komodo but easier to run full-stack apps (databases, queues and OTEL support built in)
- a benchmark for AI agents where they have to iteratively build an application - it shows how bad design decisions compound over time
Gnoseed.com - https://gnoseed.com flashcards for learning. I like to learn the topics in a way the aws certification was done. I started with kubernetes topics and slowly adding more (docker atm). It's free to use, no registration. You can check and give me a feedback of you want.
This looks nice. Ran through a 5 question Go scenario and got 4/5 right. Which feels about right with my current depth of knowledge.
One of the very first pieces of code I wrote when I was figuring out if I liked development was a flashcard program to help me study in college. I really wish I still had that code.
I sometimes need to have a quick but realistic model of an optical system without paying a few thousand for some of the well known commercial offerings, so I've been building this.
I developed an AI agent (https://github.com/chunqiuyiyu/sekrun) from scratch using DeepSeek V4 Flash to complete some simple tasks. I'll continue to improve it over the weekend.
https://prismstudio.dev. A GitHub and GitLab PR inbox and review UI. Built it to help me tame GitHub notification fatigue and see which PRs really need my attention.
Next I’m working on making reviewing large AI-generated PRs easier, but haven’t gotten there yet.
I made an AI tool to help founder validate their startup ideas base on the user's complain on reddit and analyze their competitor to find the gap in the market - https://painbase.space/
It's a weekly email with all the recently published software engineering conference talks. I also pick a few ones that are featured and write short TLDRs. This month, I'll should hit 10,000 readers, fingers crossed!
https://www.useorganizer.com/ helps you organize stuff primarily but can also double as photo album and private log. Open source and local storage. Not so much working on. It is complete and does what I wanted it to.
https://zenduxai.com - a tool that helps users generate and launch ad creatives across multiple angles, messages, formats, and aspect ratios in 10 minutes or less.
One of the most interesting aspects of this software for me is that it autocalculates an urgency score based on various information about the task which is broadly similar to the Eisenhower matrix: whether a task is a dependent or blocking another task, due date, its priority, etc. You can set it to have urgency inheritance, meaning chains of tasks will inherit the urgency score of tasks they block. I use a personal script inspired by a script someone wrote to bump the urgency of tasks if they are due at a time when a lot of other tasks are due. The original one is here, but my own is a bit more involved: https://github.com/00sapo/TWDensity
I find this approach very helpful as someone with diagnosed ADHD. However, it's not a silver bullet. With my habit of putting a lot of things into the list, the urgency scores can sometimes become a bit of a black box, where some stuff that maybe isn't that urgent gets bumped because it blocks something that is. This is of course it working as intended, but it means you can spend more time fiddling with dependencies and modifying the task list than you do... doing things.
It has some rough edges, and lacks a lot of flexibility. For example, how recurrence currently works (though there are some ongoing PRs to address this). Or that your tasks are kind of isolated and hard to link up to notes, files, etc. The list based view in general is not ideal for many kinds of project.
I've tried many other todo tools from kanban boards to things like amazing marvin, and this is really the only one that stuck. Sometimes I neglect interacting with it for a long time and use paper instead.
A rental managment system for university workshops that rent out equipment. Since I have been doing this for 5 years I know all the realworld edge cases and what I have is already better than most competitors.
This is really cool. I'm working on a reading app too, but specifically for language learning. Upload an epub and get language annotations, that kinda thing.
I work too much.
We've got: a language that looks like python but lowers to cpp: https://github.com/wegfawefgawefg/dudu; a site that tracks power outtages in canada: https://www.outagehub.ca/ ; a clone of spelunky in cpp with multiplayer and mods: https://github.com/wegfawefgawefg/splonks-cpp; a shadertoy clone but you code in asm: https://github.com/wegfawefgawefg/asm-shader-toy; a fixed point math lib: https://github.com/wegfawefgawefg/gfxp; a sexpr based json replacement with good perf: https://github.com/wegfawefgawefg/gsexp;
Outside of personal stuff, I'd like to shill my consultancy, G&K Software. (IDK if this is even allowed, but its what i'm working on so I think its fair.) We had: an ai asset generation site; a trading tool for a fund in dubai; an endorsed sales data tool;
Those are all out of business now due to global market craziness, tarrifs, and AI advancements... so I guess we've got nothing right now. (Please somebody give us business lol) gibson@gnk.software
I've been working on a minimal, keyboard-driven Mac app that records and transcribes your meetings on device, similar to MacWhisper but way more minimal and simple. I originally built it for myself because I kept forgetting to start MacWhisper before calls. It uses Apple APIs to capture the mic and system audio, diarises it, and gives you a markdown transcript at the end. What I quite like about it is that during the call you can mark key moments, which then get inserted into the transcript at the right time. So if you do hand it to an LLM to summarise, it knows what was important.
https://traceapp.info
https://apps.apple.com/app/trace-on-device-transcripts/id676...
Finished my little hobbyist, analog computer project. It consists of PCB modules that you plug into a breadboard and wire inputs and outputs together in order to program it.
The most novel thing about it (besides the breadboard being a central component) is probably eschewing panel meters or oscilloscopes and using an ESP32 and LCD display (and a bit of digital code) to display the various voltages/values that you connect up to it.
Kind of an open, learning platform to satisfy my curiosity about what analog computing was all about. It succeeded.
This month I am putting together a couple of dozen kits, preparing some YouTube videos, and generally trying to roll it out by July. (Still more modules could be built for it though—a log/anti-log module would be nice, sine/cosine is not out of the question… It's open, so perhaps someone else will create these or other modules. Or maybe I'll come back to it this Winter and add a few of those.)
Just a little example here, wired up (programmed) for Lotka-Volterra simulation (only a few dozen wires of code!). It's using a kind of strip-chart mode programmed on the ESP32 to display the voltage inputs representing predator and prey populations:
https://youtu.be/CjvM9tRrSNU
I have been building tools; VT Code is my latest, and I'm very proud of it.
VT Code: https://github.com/vinhnx/VTCode > An open-source coding agent with LLM-native code understanding and robust shell safety. Supports multiple LLM providers with automatic failover and efficient context management. => Recently it just got the 500th tagged release. The project has been started since August 2025, and the coding agent VT Code itself I believe to be stable and ready to use. Thankfully, I got help from the community; recently, we pushed quite a lot of releases, enhancements, and bug fixes.
VT Chat: https://github.com/vinhnx/vtchat > A modern, privacy-first AI chat application with security.
VT.ai: https://github.com/vinhnx/vt.ai > Multimodal AI chat app with dynamic conversation routing.
AI:
- spec driven development workflow: https://github.com/sermakarevich/sddw
- fleet, orchestrator for running many coding agents: https://github.com/sermakarevich/fleet
- chunker, which builds smart chunks of the documents with hierarchical organization: https://github.com/sermakarevich/chunker
- ai knowledge wiki, a collection of ai papers and articles organized in hierarchical Wiki
- hierarchical organization of all passed Kaggle competition solutions (write ups and notebooks) - https://github.com/sermakarevich/kaggle_wiki
- claude code workflows, plugin to build custom claude code workflows based on ssd idea: https://github.com/sermakarevich/ccw
https://www.usenym.com/
Everyone is working on personal agents but their identity model is wrong. They act as you, risk your reputation, your data and more. Nym is a personal agent that has (and can make) all of its own accounts and only gets selective read only access to yours.
The goal is to make reliable agents that are able to operate safely in the world to help you do what you want, without exposing your accounts and personal identity to potential harms.
For instance nyms have their own e-mail addresses at nym-mail.com, you can CC them on chains and they can only respond to people on that chain with a lease of 5 days, or permanently for people you specifically add.
Still working on WORDTRAK, a Scrabble/Wordle esque game. I’ve got 25-30 people playing the daily game and trying to grow it!
I wrote about how I built the game’s dictionary and how hard the problem is: https://wordtrak.com/blog/2026-06-05-how-i-built-a-new-dicti...
The most surprising thing from the last month has been building a Discord app/activity has driven the most amount of engagement. Once it’s in your chat it tends to become a daily habit!
Give it a shot here: https://wordtrak.com/daily
I've been deep in the IntelliJ plugin rabbit hole.
My primary project is Mermaid Studio, an IDE grade Mermaid diagram authoring experience for both humans and agents built for JetBrains IDEs. Semantic highlighting, refactoring, 120+ inspections covering everything from common rendering issues and foot-guns to obscure syntax quirks, contextual completions, interactive (drag-and-drop) diagram editing and styling. A suite of included MCP tools surfaces the plugin's intelligence and rendering capabilities, so your preferred agent (even using relatively small local models) can generate correct diagrams, even the newest or more obscure ones with ease.
https://mermaidstudio.dev/ | https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/29870-mermaid-studio
Tinkering with several other IntelliJ plugin ideas that may or may not end up being released.
Still occasionally pushing up new features Tachi Code, my browser extension that brings a feature rich, highly customizable, Monaco Editor based code editor to the browser surfaces you always wished would be less of a pain to read. These days, I mostly use it for reading and printing Markdown files.
https://tachicode.com/
I’m designing a digital orrery display to join the rest of my collection of clocks that don’t tell time.
No pics of it yet but you can see the others here: Https://digitalhorology.com
Angel Investor Simulator:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4771830/Angel_Investor_Si...
You bid against other investors in a show similar to the Shark Tank and then you assign advisors to help the startup grow and finally cash out after IPO.
The ideas that startups have are wacky for the fun factor, but the economic simulation underneath is realistic.
There will be a free playable demo soon.
This looks fun, I love sims like this. Don't suppose you can easily compile for MacOS? GL with the game
While waiting for another developer to finish something for a project I’m working on, I’m working on an MCP server in Go that provides a Home Assistant voice assistant with basic functionality that is missing from the default feature set, like telling jokes, flipping a coin, choosing between N options, making equations, and other things I consider essential for a voice assistant.
I’ll probably go further and include things like Apple Weather support[1], and Plex, YouTube, and Kagi search, if I have the time.
[1]: Because in Home Assistant you can only ask about the weather in the location you have configured, not in other locations. At least that’s how it works here at home.
Modern game development has become slow, expensive, and fragile. Teams are larger, timelines are longer, budgets are higher, and even highly produced games still frequently fail. I think one reason is that content production has not scaled well enough. The industry still relies heavily on bespoke hand-authored content, even in genres where structure, variation, and validation could be much more systematic. What's more, the authored content rarely appeals to everybody, which often results in commercial disaster. (See, e.g., Veilguard.)
I'm working on a procedural authoring system for party-based cRPGs. The idea is to treat RPG content as structured, validated data rather than loose text or one-off scripting. A procedurally generated location has encounters, hazards, NPCs, rewards, state changes, and a validation report. A generated quest has a hook, possible approaches, consequences, rewards, and failure states. Main campaign questlines, which can be modeled on the old "Adventure Path" system from Dungeon Magazine, are typically revealed in a stepwise way. The system automatically plays through and rejects content that is logically broken, unrewarding, or impossible to complete.
The broader goal is to build better authoring tools for RPGs: Tools that help small teams create large, reactive games very quickly, without giving up structure or design control.
So I'm starting a new company to push the boundaries of procedural generation and related technologies in games. No link to share yet. Maybe in a month or two. We do have playable games already, though.
To blow off steam I'm working on a self-hosted language learning app, primarily for Afrikaans, but soon expanding into German and Spanish down the line. I was sick of paying for Lingq and Clozemaster and resources for learning Afrikaans online are very sparse. I also wanted something that tightly integrated with Anki: https://github.com/heuwels/lector/
It's a lot of fun
I'm working toward making a Hacker News simulator in the vein of https://reddit.com/r/subsimulatorgpt2 (but using HN's code instead of a subreddit).
To do that, I'm building sharc, a port of Hacker News that runs on Common Lisp, implementing all the latest features of HN. (That last bit is the hard part.) https://github.com/shawwn/sharc
I just implemented collapsing comments and root/next/prev/context nav links. Also (sitename "https://x.com/jsrailton") now returns "x.com/jsrailton" instead of "x.com". (About to implement HN's "from" endpoint, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com/jsrailton)
You can read the entire changelog here: https://github.com/shawwn/sharc/tree/main/docs/agents/handof...
Implementing Tierra [1] in Zig a learning exercise. Trying to push all allocations to compile time and not use LLMs for coding. Repo: https://github.com/iwhalen/zierra
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation)
I’ve been working on a bottom-to-top rewrite of an app that’s been shipping for the last couple of years. The initial version took over two years to write.
It’s coming along great. I’ve only been working on it since February, and it’s very complete, functionally. I’ve been using an LLM, extensively.
The original server took over seven months to write, but with the LLM, I had it done in about a month. The PHP code is great quality.
It’s not all bunnies and flowers, though. I’m spending the next few days, rewriting a Swift viewcontroller that the LLM wrote. It works, but the code is awful. It looks like it was written by a jargon-addled high schooler on Adderall. I just can’t bear to have that level of junk in my app. I asked it to refactor the code to improve the quality, and reduce the size, and it removed all the documentation and logging; leaving the thread- and delay-riddled garbage behind.
If someone that worked for me had done that, I would have evicted them, with a trebuchet.
I realized that I can't count on the LLM to help me maintain its mess, so I'd better just suck it up, and do it myself.
The good news is, is that I’m so far ahead of schedule (a position that I’ve never been in, in forty years of development), that I can afford to do this.
I built my own version of Kill the Newsletter. Been testing it with various newsletters. Learning that a lot of the popular email newsletters are horrific, but if you have any, popular or ones only two people read that you like, I want to know!
I also bought some steel table legs and rebuilt our kitchen table and bench yesterday. The table came with wooden legs that always seemed unstable, I would confidently stand on my table now.
how are you solving the problem that a number of newsletter owners purge emails which are not opening/reading the emails? are you sending a signal that the email was read?
Personal AI. Step by step evolving something I worked on for 10 years from an open source Go framework to APIs to apps and now agents. It's been an interesting journey. It's not finished yet. It's also not going to be a billion dollar company or have breakout success like OpenClaw but when you tackle personal problems I think they turn into more valuable opportunities. The opportunity to learn or have something that benefits a few people. I can't take off my entrepreneurial hat though. I keep trying to figure out how to make it work for everyone but I think that's the trap. Build for yourself. The rest will come.
https://teamday.lv/en
We are building local (Baltics) marketplace for teambuilding events.
Ever since I took on teamlead responsibilities in my daily job, it's been a recurring challenge to organize fun and engaging activities for a team. Providers are usually small businesses, so they all handle enquires, booking and payments to the best of their ability. That usually means exhausting back and forth to get and compare multiple offers.
Instead, we provide curated list of activity providers to choose from, and then handle communication, invoicing and disputes\returns, if needed.
We have got overwhelmingly good feedback from HRs, responsible for team event bookings, and now trying to grow vendors to launch publicly.
https://github.com/nanowave-player/nanowave-ui
A tiny RISC-V linux-based (buildroot) portable audio player hardware with Software written in Rust / Slint.
Inspired by the iPod Nano 7g and totally WIP.
Will probably never be finished but it is a neat learning project
I'm building a context engine for all the code and docs in your company, and expose it via a collaborative zoomable UI + CLI , where you can collaborate with your co-workers and agents.
We map technical debt, agent readiness, code complexity, security scanning, bus factor so you can easily see how all the software in your company runs.
Got the top spot in What Are You Working On in Feb 2025 and then started a company around it at https://getcomper.ai . We got a pre-seed investment, then got some ex-Miro folk on board and are building the product at breakneck speed.
One of the coolest things is that we've got an incremental git blame engine built on top of GitOxide as our backend is fully built on Rust.
https://getkakeibo.com - an extremely simple app to get your finances in order, based on the kakeibo method. You make a plan for your month (income, fixed expenses) and then you track your expenses daily, categorising them into simple buckets: wants, needs, culture and unexpected.
At the end of the month, the app guides you through a reflection flow where you can learn about your habits and think about what you want to improve. 100% offline, fully private, no AI.
The app is paid, but I actually made a page for HN readers to get it for free, I'm having a lot of trouble with distribution: https://getkakeibo.com/hn/
There are 8 apps on App Store called Kakeibo that are money/finance trackers, none of which have your website logo.
interesting. without an account, from my browser, I can see it in the fifth place. are you searching from your phone, iPad, laptop...?
but this checks out with my experience: extremely low visibility on the stores, I think I need to improve description/keywords and get more reviews. thanks for sharing!
Is there a way to import expenses? It's a bit annoying if I have to enter them one by one on my phone, when I can easily get an export from my bank account on my desktop
it’s technically possible, as you can download export and import the SQLite database as you like, but my vision for the app is that logging each expense individually (with the annoyance that it entails) is one of the core points. There are a lot of apps right now that will be able to parse the data from your bank (even connect to it) and give you beautiful stats about your expenses, but my experience with those is that you see the graphs, think 2 minutes about them and forget instantly.
I wanted to make something totally different, with the hopes that it can make you a bit more conscious about your spending and habits.
It’s a good point. Going over each item is what works for us. But I still extract from the bank and into a spreadsheet so we have full control. The only thing spreadsheets lack is double entry.
Fair points, that does make sense. Might be something to cover in a FAQ?
definitely, thanks for the idea!
> I'm having a lot of trouble with distribution
Maybe add a link to playstore/appstore under the generated promo code
small things like this have outsized effect
so true, I totally missed that. I will add it as soon as I can, thank you!
I tried to get a promo code for android (twice - on WiFi and data) both times I got that "this code has expired".
I re-generated the codes now, but I think they’ll only be available in 43 minutes, couldn’t set an earlier time.
I have some that are still valid, so hopefully you can redeem one of them:
oh no, I'm so sorry about this. I generated the codes some time ago when I posted a "Show HN" post, and forgot that they expired at the end of May. I'll generate new ones and let you know when available. thanks a lot for the heads up!
https://motionparty.net/ - motion controlled web games, by analyzing the Webcam feed locally. In the vein of eye toys for ps2. Works quite well I think, but some elements need improvement. Want to add more games as well.
I think this could have great success. I would easily pay for something like this to play with my kid without Nintendo Whatever.
Would love to see this as a Raspberry Pi image download!
Personally, a voxel space renderer for the PlayStation (Comanche terrain style rendering).
In theory, it's really not suited for this because (at least back then) this was designed for computers with:
- relatively large amounts of RAM (uncompressed color+heightmap data takes a lot of space),
- fast CPUs with data caches (it's a 2D trapezoidal walk of a top-down projected fustrum with plenty of additions, multiplications and divisions),
- memory-mapped linear framebuffers (for software rendering).
The PlayStation has none of these things: only 2 MiB of main RAM; an in-order scalar 33 MHz MIPS III processor without a FPU or a data cache, where any CPU load from main RAM stalls the pipeline for 5 cycles, multiplications have a 6 to 13 cycles latency and divisions have a 36 cycles latency; and the only way to touch VRAM is to send commands to the 2D GPU.
What it does have is 4 KiB of I-cache (direct-mapped), 1 KiB of scratchpad with no wait states and a fixed-point GTE coprocessor which is mostly geared towards projecting 3D points onto a 2D screen and not general matrix/vector processing. Meaning that if I get my hot loop within 1024 instructions (and no function calls), fit my working set+stack within 1 KiB and can pipeline the GTE for transformations and the CPU for map scanning/GPU submissions, it might just work.
So far I'm getting decent framerates (like 10-15 FPS at 256x240) with just software projection and GPU line rendering. Right now I'm wrestling with the GTE and various ways to trick it into transforming more points than it's supposed to be able to do, by looking at the fixed-hardware math equations for the various instructions and trying to fit my equations into them (doing stuff like putting relative altitude into X/Y vector registers instead of coordinates and massaging the rest of the values to get screen Y coordinates out of it).
Kind of a hardcore topic to pick for my first homebrew ever, but I craved a simpler, low-level optimization challenge as a pipe cleaner, after working on ghidra-delinker-extension for so long.
YtreeNova an XTreeGold-inspired, FOSS, keyboard-first Linux file manager built for fast, precise file work. Developed with AI assistance, but it does not run AI itself. https://github.com/robkam/ytreenova
I have made a batch of elderflower syrup from trees in my area, and now I'm trying it in different summer drinks.
Next I want to try making booze out of the berries.
I keep saving blogs and articles but almost never revisit them.
So I’m building an Android app designed to help me actually read what I save. You only get one saved article per day. Finish today’s read to unlock the next one. You can also save Twitter, Reddit, etc. posts separately and revisit them anytime.
Right now I’m mainly validating whether people would actually want something like this. If there’s enough interest, I’ll run a small closed beta for Android.
Join the waitlist for beta access: https://forms.gle/xgrXKoTkigYFcg6r7
https://github.com/mdesantis/ssr-deno Embed Deno JS runtime into Ruby to perform SSR / render JS views without spawning additional JS processes. It's even 100% working, and Deno just merged a PR which allows me to continue working on it: https://github.com/denoland/rusty_v8/pull/1970#issuecomment-...
https://smarterplaylists.playlistmachinery.com/
Build complex Spotify playlists by wiring together components in a visual editor. Mix, filter, and sort tracks from any source (with Last.fm and Musicbrainz support). Combine multiple playlists, saved tracks, and recommendations. Filter by genre, audio features, popularity, and more. Schedule programs to keep playlists updated automatically.
I've been working on a in-browser PDS (personal data server) for the ATProtocol.
It runs as a chrome extension and stores all the browser locally. A server is needed for some of the public connections. Early days but interesting:
https://localpds.at
https://tangled.org/niallbunting.com/localpds/
https://duckville.town
You play a duck in a small shared town. You pick a job, pay rent, post on a Twitter-style feed, vote in local elections. The simulation keeps running when you close the tab. No PvP, no loot boxes, no combat. Playtime is a few minutes a day by design.
I love it! I signed up to be the groundskeeper.
I really want a 2d world so I can see everything going on in the game. Even a static map would help visualize what the game is about.
Thank you :) There is a simple map currently but it can be improved. You can see it on this page after you sign in -> https://duckville.town/city
How can I make it better? I'd be happy to hear your feedback.
whenever i want to play a video game with someone, theres no way to just pick up a couple of controllers and jump into a game without waiting for something to start, or update, or sync, or...
im building a tiny handheld video game (think GBA) where simply turning it on starts the game and you can immediately start playing. no os to boot, bios checksum screen to wait through, or scripts between you and the game. if another person turns their handheld on, they join your game and it becomes multiplayer seamlessly
esp32-s3 based for dual cores (screen updates / game loop) and bluetooth for "local" wireless multiplayer matchmaking, currently making the game itself be like a cross between puyo pop and tetris (an actual mashup of the rules, not just two games in one cartridge)
A system for instrumenting GPS routes.
A user reports a location bug on their morning commute. You're 2,000 miles away. Instead of flying out to reproduce it, you replay their exact GPS trip on your simulator. Same route. Same speed. Same timing.
Record & replay real GPS routes for iOS.
Video here: https://x.com/LyleMakes/status/2064438713124270233
https://raizensoft.com - Game development tutorials and resources for code-centric frameworks (libGDX, LWJGL, MonoGame, etc). All articles are written by me and I've been running the site for 10 months to share my passion and technical knowledge. 200+ articles so far and I'm planning to add more.
You wrote 200+ articles in 10 months?
It's possible if you have wide or deep domain knowledge. Back in 2007 I made a Q&A website related to the open source FirebirdSQL database with around 350 articles in about one month. Although, those were very short and I had a huge archive from a mailing list with multiple years of questions and answers to source from.
10 months is a long time. You can write one article per day and do it easily.
https://cotect.dev
I was frustrated with not being able to properly review code changes that agents make, looking for a middle ground between VSC and Claude Code. So I built one. Still in early development but its working (mostly) and I hope dogfooding will get me all the way to something great :)
What issue do you have specific with reviewing ai code?
Terminal hunks speed by and I want to review the changes locally before they are on GitHub. Looking through VSC is very slow because it's aimed at writing, not reading, code. In cotect you can move through the repository quickly with WASD and you can approve/comment on hunks that you've viewed and any comments you leave you can copy all at once so you can pipe them down to your agent at once instead of interrupting its work every time you find an issue (or otherwise you forget about that issue - yes I have ADHD).
No links to share but:
- a self-hosted PaaS with CI-driven deployments, managed by terraform (and possibly other IaC in the future) - think Coolify but with IaC or Komodo but easier to run full-stack apps (databases, queues and OTEL support built in)
- a benchmark for AI agents where they have to iteratively build an application - it shows how bad design decisions compound over time
Gnoseed.com - https://gnoseed.com flashcards for learning. I like to learn the topics in a way the aws certification was done. I started with kubernetes topics and slowly adding more (docker atm). It's free to use, no registration. You can check and give me a feedback of you want.
This looks nice. Ran through a 5 question Go scenario and got 4/5 right. Which feels about right with my current depth of knowledge.
One of the very first pieces of code I wrote when I was figuring out if I liked development was a flashcard program to help me study in college. I really wish I still had that code.
A 3D optical simulator - https://opticsketch.github.io/opticsketch/.
I sometimes need to have a quick but realistic model of an optical system without paying a few thousand for some of the well known commercial offerings, so I've been building this.
Leash, a low-dopamine mobile browser replacement:
https://leash.ax
Super cool!
I developed an AI agent (https://github.com/chunqiuyiyu/sekrun) from scratch using DeepSeek V4 Flash to complete some simple tasks. I'll continue to improve it over the weekend.
https://prismstudio.dev. A GitHub and GitLab PR inbox and review UI. Built it to help me tame GitHub notification fatigue and see which PRs really need my attention.
Next I’m working on making reviewing large AI-generated PRs easier, but haven’t gotten there yet.
Making rent as an open source developer.
Desperately trying to attract new monthly sponsors and people willing to buy me the occasional pizza with my terrible HTML skills. Is it working?
https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html
I made an AI tool to help founder validate their startup ideas base on the user's complain on reddit and analyze their competitor to find the gap in the market - https://painbase.space/
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Tech Talks Weekly
It's a weekly email with all the recently published software engineering conference talks. I also pick a few ones that are featured and write short TLDRs. This month, I'll should hit 10,000 readers, fingers crossed!
https://www.useorganizer.com/ helps you organize stuff primarily but can also double as photo album and private log. Open source and local storage. Not so much working on. It is complete and does what I wanted it to.
I've been working on https://favs.blue/ -- lets you see the top posts from any Bluesky user.
I missed favstar.fm so I tried making something similar on an open social network!
Working on a personal project: langfuse on GreptimeDB, try to make S3 optional.
https://github.com/tma1-ai/openfuse
https://zenduxai.com - a tool that helps users generate and launch ad creatives across multiple angles, messages, formats, and aspect ratios in 10 minutes or less.
A hand written LAMP webapp to replace an MS Access application at work. Only needs to run locally.
Anyone working on non-AI things? Human making software for fellow humans?
Well mine is, see below. Rental managment. Making this for myself and plan to surprise my collegues once it is ready.
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https://grugnotes.com same thing for almost 4 years, a dead simple notes app and ai multitool
A wooden / e-ink version of enso.sonnet.io (working title "writer's log" or "writer's block")
Working on a better way to watch YouTube:
https://channelsurfer.tv
An Eisenhower Matrix plugin for my to-do app.
https://github.com/abstractspoon/ToDoList_Dev/tree/9.3---New...
I have been a long-term user of a todo tool called taskwarrior: https://github.com/GothenburgBitFactory/taskwarrior
One of the most interesting aspects of this software for me is that it autocalculates an urgency score based on various information about the task which is broadly similar to the Eisenhower matrix: whether a task is a dependent or blocking another task, due date, its priority, etc. You can set it to have urgency inheritance, meaning chains of tasks will inherit the urgency score of tasks they block. I use a personal script inspired by a script someone wrote to bump the urgency of tasks if they are due at a time when a lot of other tasks are due. The original one is here, but my own is a bit more involved: https://github.com/00sapo/TWDensity
I find this approach very helpful as someone with diagnosed ADHD. However, it's not a silver bullet. With my habit of putting a lot of things into the list, the urgency scores can sometimes become a bit of a black box, where some stuff that maybe isn't that urgent gets bumped because it blocks something that is. This is of course it working as intended, but it means you can spend more time fiddling with dependencies and modifying the task list than you do... doing things.
It has some rough edges, and lacks a lot of flexibility. For example, how recurrence currently works (though there are some ongoing PRs to address this). Or that your tasks are kind of isolated and hard to link up to notes, files, etc. The list based view in general is not ideal for many kinds of project.
I've tried many other todo tools from kanban boards to things like amazing marvin, and this is really the only one that stuck. Sometimes I neglect interacting with it for a long time and use paper instead.
A rental managment system for university workshops that rent out equipment. Since I have been doing this for 5 years I know all the realworld edge cases and what I have is already better than most competitors.
https://merrilin.ai, the best damned reading app for every platform with an AI chat that's spoiler safe by design. BYOB - bring your own books.
This is really cool. I'm working on a reading app too, but specifically for language learning. Upload an epub and get language annotations, that kinda thing.
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