Top
Best
New

Posted by david927 6/29/2025

Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

What are you working on? Any new ideas which you're thinking about?
439 points | 1401 commentspage 15
efromvt 6/30/2025|
Continuing to plug away at Trilogy, a better SQL for data consumption and analytics. Getting closer to core feature completeness, at which point can pivot to focus on integrated visualizations + pre-processing/ETL.

Most recently have been focused on better geographic visualizations in the public studio for people to experiment - getting decent automatic lat/long, want to have easy path visualizations (start/end, etc). More AI-accelerated options as well, especially around model authoring.

Repo: https://github.com/trilogy-data/pytrilogy Studio: https://trilogydata.dev/studio-core/

DamnInteresting 6/30/2025||
I'm putting the finishing touches on my free daily word game, Omiword[1][2]. I had it basically finished, with the option for players to make a one-time $5 payment to unlock access to the archives, but then Stripe shut down my account, claiming it was a "restricted business".[3] I'm now reworking it to try to fund it through Patreon, we'll see how that goes.

[1] https://www.omiword.com

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43654350

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44075038

jibolash 6/30/2025||
Open source quiz creator to create quizzes by pasting in text or selecting from a large range of historical categories.

Started as a very simple app for me to play around with OpenAI’s API last year then morphed into a portfolio project during my job search earlier this year. Now happily employed but still hacking on it.

Right now, a user can create a quiz, take a quiz, save it and share the quiz with other people using a URL.

Demo: You can try out the full working application at https://quizknit.com

Github Links: Frontend: https://github.com/jibolash/quizknit-react , Backend: https://github.com/jibolash/quizknit-api

whitefang 6/30/2025||
I'm building an AI for Customer Support.

Here's the summary: - read all your sources - public websites, docs, video - answer questions with confidence score and no hallucinations with citations - cut support time and even integrates directly into your customer facing chatbots like Intercom

Still deliberating on the business model. If anyone would be interested in taking a look, I would love to show you.

noisy_boy 6/30/2025||
I think if you allow a set of YouTube videos as input, it'll be quite powerful coupled with transcription ability of LLMs. Lots of people consume content that way. As an added bonus, you can show the performance summary about the sections the user did well or not so well on with video links to those timestamps for them to go back and review.
tombert 6/30/2025||
I've been hacking on an Icecast-compatible server with Erlang. You can feed it an FFmpeg icecast feed into the server, and listen to it with any Icecast-compatible player. I think it's kind of neat; I do some extra things that the official Icecast server doesn't give you.

I store the chunks in a custom-built database (on top of riak_core and Bitcask), and I have it automatically also make an HLS stream as well. This involved remuxing the AAC chunks into MPEG-TS and dynamically create the playlist.

It's also horizontally scalable, almost completely linearly. Everything is done with Erlang's internal messaging and riak_core, and I've done a few (I think) clever things to make sure everything stays fast no matter how many nodes you have and no matter how many concurrent streams are running.

cmdrk 6/30/2025|
This sounds super cool! Any public code you can share?
tombert 7/1/2025||
I’m afraid not; I have become a tiny bit disillusioned with open source and I’m keeping some of my projects to myself now.

I’ll probably release the code I wrote for the input radio station but that’s just a glorified script written in Rust and calling FFmpeg. The only fun part of that is I call OpenAI to get AI commercials and DJ chatter.

alienbaby 7/1/2025||
Along with what feels like billions of others right now, I'm building a pet project as a learning exercise involving rag agents, MCP and locally hosted llm's to work with a 15 year old pile of proprietary wiki data and a large 20yr old codebase.
atentaten 7/1/2025||
What kind of hardware are you using to run the LLMs locally?
alienbaby 7/14/2025||
5090 GPU, and on a system with 64GB ram. I'm comfortably running 8b param models
enthdegree 7/1/2025||
Any pointers?
omneity 6/30/2025||
I've been quite obsessed about ramping up (technically complex, not basic crud/wrappers) SaaS development with Gen AI tools, speeding things from months to weeks to days. But then I hit a snag: operations are the new bottleneck. How can I support all of these products, let alone promote them or find customers? My focus shifted to agents, and I realized that access for these AI bots was a major hurdle, despite all the MCPs available.

The thing is, we’ve been retrofitting software made for humans for machines, which creates unnecessary complications. It’s not about model capability, which is already there for most processes I have tested, it’s because systems designed for people are confusing to AI, do not fit their mental model, and making the proposition of relying on agents operating them a pipe dream from a reliability or success-rate perspective.

This led me to a realization: as agentic AI improves, companies need to be fully AI-native or lose to their more innovative competitors. Their edge will be granting AI agents access to their systems, or rather, leveraging systems that make life easy for their agents. So, focusing on greenfield SaaS projects/companies, I've been spending the last few weeks crafting building blocks for small to medium-sized businesses who want to be AI-native from the get-go. What began as an API-friendly ERP evolved into something much bigger, for example, cursor-like capabilities over multiple types of data (think semantic search on your codebase, but for any business data), or custom deep-search into the documentation of a product to answer a user question.

Now, an early version is powering my products, slashing implementation time by over 90%. I can launch a new product in hours supported by several internal agents, and my next focus is to possibly ship the first user-facing batch of agents this month to support these SaaS operations. A bit early to share something more concrete, but I hope by the next HN thread I will!

Happy to jam about these topics and the future of the agentic-driven economy, so feel free to hit me up!

busymom0 6/30/2025||
I had been working on a macOS app last couple weeks. Got it approved by Apple today YAY!

It's called Heap. It's a macOS app for creating full-page local offline archives of webpages in various formats with a single click.

Creates image screenshot, pdf, markdown, html, and webarchive.

It can also be configured to archive videos, zip files etc using AppleScript. It can do things like run JavaScript on the website before archiving, signing in with user accounts before archiving, and running an Apple Shortcut post archiving.

I feel like people who are into data hoarding and self host would find this very helpful. If anyone wants to try it out:

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/heap-website-full-page-image/i...

Kholin 6/30/2025||
I've built a Reddit-like community platform in Go. Users can create their own sub-communities, and within them, set up different categories and boards. Posts can be voted on, and board types can include regular posts, Q&A, or live chat. It's like a hybrid of Reddit and Discord but leans more towards a traditional web community. It also supports server-side rendering, making it SEO-friendly. This project is an extension of my previous Hacker News clone, dizkaz (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43885998). I'm currently working on implementing submission rate limiting and content moderation, which is a bit challenging, but it should be ready for launch soon.
daxfohl 6/29/2025||
I was hoping to make a piano practice assistant for my kids, that would take sheet music in MusicXML format, listen to the microphone stream, and check for things they frequently miss like rests, dynamics, consistent tempos.

Surprisingly the blocker has been identifying notes from the microphone input. I assumed that'd have been a long-solved problem; just do an FFT and find the peaks of the spectrogram? But apparently that doesn't work well when there's harmonics and reverb and such, and you have to use AI models (google and spotify have some) to do it. And so far it still seems to fail if there are more than three notes played simultaneously.

Now I'm baffled how song identification can work, if even identifying notes is so unreliable! Maybe I'm doing something wrong.

Tade0 6/30/2025||
Here's an algorithm I cooked up for my (never completed) master's thesis:

It's based on the assumption that the most common frequency difference in all pairs of spectrum peaks is the base frequency of the sound.

-For the FFT use the Gaussian window because then your peaks look like Gaussians - the logarithm of a Gaussian is a parabola, so you only need three samples around the peak to calculate the exact frequency.

-Gather all the peaks along with their amplitudes. Pair all combinations.

-Create a histogram of frequency differences in those pairs, weighted by the product of the amplitudes of the peaks.

When you recognise a frequency you can attenuate it via comb filter and run the algorithm again to find another one.

fxtentacle 6/29/2025|||
Note detection works ok if you ignore the octave. Otherwise, you need to know the relative strength of overtones, which is instrument dependent. Some years ago I built a piano training app with FFT+Kalman filter.
daxfohl 6/29/2025||
Cool, I'll give it a shot. So far I've just been blindly feeding into the AI and crossing my fingers. I'll try displaying the spectrogram graphically, and I imagine that'll help figure out what the next step needs to be.

I was thinking this would be a good project to learn AI stuff, but it seems like most of the work is better off being fully deterministic. Which, is maybe the best AI lesson there is. (Though I do still think there's opportunity to use AI in the translation of teacher's notes (e.g. "pay attention to the rest in measure 19") to a deterministic ruleset to monitor when practicing).

david927 6/29/2025||
I always wanted to do a keyboard/tablet combo (maybe they make these, I don't know).

The idea is a fully weighted hammer action keyboard with nothing else, such as the Arturia KeyLab 88 MkII, and add to that tiny LED lights above each key. And have a tablet computer which has a tutor, and it shows the notes but also a guitar hero like display of the coming notes, where the LED lights shine for where to press, and correction for timing and heaviness of press, etc.

mmarian 6/29/2025|
Just writing posts for my blog on personal experiences with startups https://developerwithacat.com . Am taking a break from any serious building, bit tired of failing. Using the blog as a form of self therapy.
More comments...