Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)

Posted by david927 3/30/2025

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?

390 points | 996 commentspage 24

chabad360 3/30/2025|

I'm making an NES emulator in Go. Not because other ones don't exist, but because I've been wanting to get more familiar with low level system principles, and there ain't a better way than building one.

I suppose I'll post the link someday. I literally just started today.

starzmustdie 3/30/2025||

Reasoning Gym (https://github.com/open-thought/reasoning-gym)

A library that procedurally generates datasets for training reasoning models (like o1/r1) with verifiable rewards.

dvcrn 3/31/2025||

A buddy and me have been working on https://microfn.dev for a while: A platform for creating, managing and composing tiny (micro) javascript functions and using them from different places like webhooks, cron, MCP or AI agents.

It's still very heavy in development but the gist is: Say you have a cool idea for something small you want to automate or run - instead of thinking about hosting, workers, lambdas and what not, you just open microfn, open the editor (or the function generator), write your function, hit save - done! All the complexity is tucked away on microfn, and your place of use just has to authenticate with microfn and nothing else. We run it for you and keep you productive.

Now you can use that function from anywhere: From the terminal, periodically with a cron, add it to an AI agent as skill, use it through an MCP (not released yet), through Siri shortcuts, share it with your friends and so on.

Say you want to have an agent or function that gets the weather and sends it through Telegram: You can either quickly generate 2 functions through the AI function generator that get the weather ("I want a function that gets the weather for Tokyo") and another one for sending a message on telegram, or you can use what's already available (such as https://microfn.dev/david/getweathertokyo). Equipping them to an agent works like in a video game - each function is a new "skill" or "tool" the agent can use, and if someone else already has some cool skills, you can fork them without needint to re-implement everything from scratch.

So like a toolbox full of small composable hammers and tools that can be used across different scenarios and places, to be plugged into existing workflows, automation or to even be used in autonomous agents and through MCP.

Again, super heavy in development and not really a 1.0 yet, more like an early alpha, but wanted to share here anyway. Feedback greatly appreciated!

bbkane 4/1/2025|

Sounds neat, but please make testing first class - it should be easy to run functions locally, or to have the same code "infrastructure" run in dev/test/prod environments, etc

kavith 3/31/2025||

Highlights.Email [1] - a service to email yourself book highlights from your Kobo E-Reader!

Exporting book highlights from a Kobo was slow and inconvenient; you’d need to connect the device to your computer via USB and run a script, or upload the onboard sqlite database to a website to extract book highlights. With Highlights.Email, you tap a button on-device and in a few seconds have a nicely formatted email with all your book highlights!

So, I’m just scratching my own itch mainly while learning how to build and launch something to the world. There’s two parts to this service: Rust program that runs on-device and a SveltKit app (w/ a Supabase backend) for auth and sending emails.

[1]: https://highlights.email

maz1b 3/31/2025||

Continuing to grow MedAngle, the world's first Super App for future and current doctors. Everything that students and graduates could need for premed/medical and dental school, in one place. 90k+ users, 100m+ questions solved, billions of seconds spent on the apps.

mpduda 3/30/2025||

Still working on my software project for live music production [1]. At the moment, it only creates, forwards, and records MIDI note events, so it can't produce audio on its own. It has to be connected to external or virtual MIDI devices that can create sound. Turns out this is too much of a hassle and kind of a deal-breaker for most people (and to be fair, it is a hassle), so now I'm working on adding VST hosting support directly inside the app. If you're not familiar, VST (Steinberg Virtual Studio Technology) is pretty much the industry standard plugin system that most DAWs support. Different VSTs can create and filter audio data, and in a hosted context audio data can be sent between VST instances before going out to the speakers.

It's been tricky but interesting. VST plugins are basically packaged as DLL files of Windows COM(-ish) objects. Despite primarily being a Windows dev myself, I never worked directly with COM libraries or objects before. My app is written in C#, and .NET does have built-in "COM Interop" support, so it is possible. A few years ago, .NET added a new COM Interop Source Generator system [2, 3], and I'm trying to get it working with that. So far I've been making some progress, but it's still a lot of tedious work to setup.

(There are libraries/packages out there that implement VST in .NET already, but they mostly focus on plugin creation while I only need hosting. They're a lot heavier and more capable than I need. They also didn't use the newer Source Generator approach, so I figured I'd give it a shot myself.)

1. https://www.pulselyre.com/

2. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/native-int...

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZd1SGd7dSU

bushido 3/31/2025||

I'm building an ERP to encapsulate the whole "customer" journey. I'm building it to be a business operating system of sorts with a goal of creating clear line-of-sight visibility for all activities along journey's like lead-gen to churn (but in a variety of settings).

The goal is make it easier for organizations to work with external parties that affect finances (customers, investors, vendors, etc.).

The idea was born out of personal frustration that I've faced in a variety of leadership roles in organizations, that lead to wasted effort, slower decision making, bad decisions made with equally unhygienic data.

I've solved this successfully in the past form of internal tools and a data governance layer (data warehouse with much more authority).

kimi 3/31/2025||

Rewriting the Elixir parser for QueueMetrics live for Teams, my company's service to keep track of call and queue statistics for Microsoft Teams telephony, in a way that's better than the PowerBI examples that come in the box. It's at https://www.queuemetrics.com/teams.jsp?lid=H990

It's quite a mess as we have to aggregate multiple data sources that come with their own timing and sequence issues - plus we are seeing massive adoption so resource usage will be interesting for v2.

The plus side is that building massively parallel and redundant services in Elixir is, if not actually fun, at least more feasible than in other environments.

linkdd 3/31/2025||

https://link-society.github.io/flowg/

It's a log management/processing software, with visual scripting.

Started out of frustration towards OpenObserve and its inability (at the time) to properly/easily refine/categorize logs: we had many VMs, with many Docker containers, with some containers running multiple processes. Parsing the logs and routing them to different storages was crucial to ease debugging/monitoring.

It was initially built in Go + HTMX + React Flow encapsulated in a WebComponent, I then migrated to React (no SSR). It integrates VRL using Rust+CGO.

It is by far easier to use than Logstash and similar tools, and in fact it aims to replace it.

Contributors are welcome :)

ryanckulp 3/30/2025|

working on TRMNL[1], a hardware startup with a web app companion (Ruby / Rails 8).

this weekend specifically, setting up an in-house assembly area. decided to renovate my barn and be our own fulfillment center.

[1]: https://trmnl.ink

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