Posted by david927 1 day ago
Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
I also wrote a metaprogramming language which generates a lot of the editor UI for the engine. It's a bespoke C parser that supports a small subset of C++, which is exposed to the user through a 'scripting-like' language you embed directly in your source files. I wrote it as a replacement for C++ templates and in my completely unbiased opinion it is WAY better.
In all seriousness, I think I have the same propensity to have a hundred unfinished projects and have a hard time finding motivation to complete them. The difference might be that I have this 'big' project called a 'game engine' that wraps them all up into some semblance of a cohesive whole. For example, projects that are incomplete, but mostly just good enough to be serviceable (sometimes barely):
1. Font rasterizer 2. Programming language 3. Imgui & layout engine 4. 3D renderer 5. Voxel editor
.. etc
Now, every one of those on their own is pretty boring and borderline useless .. there are (mostly) much better options out there for each in their specific domain. But, squash them all together and it's starting to become a useful thing.
It just happened that I enjoy working on engine tech and I picked a huge project I have no hope of ever finishing. Take from that what you will
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me. --Hunter S. Thompson
Toooootalllly. This project started out for me as a learning exercise, and for a long time an explicit non-goal of the project was to ship a game. It's just my own little land that I know every nook and cranny of for experimenting and, sharpening my tools, as it were. It's also the best way I've ever found.
Username checks out
I've always also had a side project or two in this domain but I've never managed to stick with one for more than 3-5 years.
Do you have any recommendation on voxel engine learning materials (e.g. books, courses, etc)
I'd recommend Handmade Hero for a more traditional resource on how to build a game engine. That's how I learned to program for real, and it worked great for me.
From a dev perspective this area has a ton of super interesting algorithmic / math / data structure applications, and computational geometry has always been special to me. It's a lot of fun to work on.
If anyone here is interested in this as a user, I'd love for any feedback or comments, here or you can email me directly: tyler@vexlio.com.
Some pages the HN crowd might be interested in:
* https://vexlio.com/blog/making-diagrams-with-syntax-highligh... * https://vexlio.com/solutions/state-diagram-maker/ * https://vexlio.com/blog/speed-up-your-overleaf-workflow-fast...
This is an example, https://terostechnology.github.io/terosHDLdoc/docs/guides/st...
But it only outputs an SVG, and there are no tools (AFAIK) that go from diagram to code, which should easy to setup.
So I'd consider extending this to both generate code and read in code and make these nice interactive diagrams.
Do you know if the FPGA and/or hardware communities use any type of formalism for design or documentation of state machines? One example of what I mean is is Harel statecharts - essentially a formalized type of nested state diagram.
Diagram-as-code option?
ie. a language syntax from which a diagram can be generated?
I find a lot of the time taken up in doing diagrams is laying them out properly and then having to rearrange them when it grows beyond a certain size.
This may,however, be an old-man Visio user problem that's been better solved by more recent options...
Re: desktop version. The short answer is yes, probably, but I don't have a concrete timeline. I made tech and architecture choices from the beginning to make sure a cross-platform desktop version always remains possible. Frankly, the biggest obstacle for desktop is not the app itself, but distribution and figuring out a pricing model. The current solution for enterprise, business, and other interested people, is to self-host Vexlio, with separate licensing.
Overall amazing though, will be using!
Enterprise licensing? Donation based? Hosting fees with value-add mark up?
The standard fiscal POS app was adapted to support a sort of low-trust swarm of waiters who used the app to collect orders. These orders were then transferred to a few high-trust cashiers by scanning QR codes generated on the waiters' apps.
After receiving payments, the cashiers' apps printed invoices and multiple "order tickets" categorized by "food," "drinks", "sweets"... This allowed waiters to retrieve items and deliver them to customers.
The system was used by around 40 users, with new waiters joining or leaving throughout the event. They used their own phones, and the app functioned without internet or Wi-Fi, gracefully downgraded (If a waiter didn't use the app due by choice or due to technical problems, they could manually relay orders to cashiers), Customers also had the option to approach cashiers directly, receive their order tickets, and pick up items themselves.
This is not that technically interesting, but I liked how the old manual system, the 70+ year village firefighting org. main cashier had, got digitalized in non-centralized way. (and I took this chance in trying to explain it, as I will have to, to maybe find more users for it)
Just curious: How did it work without internet or wifi? Did it do something over bluetooth, NFC, QR code...?
Then the waiter paid the cashier (in advance), got the bill to give to customer and order tickers (printed on a bluetooth POS printer with a cutter, so they were already separated) to recieve the goods (grouped by stations that gave out the goods, food, drinks ...). The stations took the order tickets and gave them goods. The waiters delivered them to customers and used the bill to get cash from the customer.
The waiters could use their own starting money and just stop selling at any point, or got it from the main cashier and had to return the same amount at the end.
To get there, I'm breaking it down into smaller projects. The first one: a basic WebSocket signaling server written in Rust (based on RFC 6455). I'm also learning Rust, so this was a good way to build something real while figuring things out.
On the frontend, I used Angular and just the RTCPeerConnection API — no external WebRTC libs. The focus for now is just signaling: how peers connect, exchange offers/answers, and so on. No media or security handling yet — that's the next step.
Here’s a short demo video on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_qdW2JchbU It’s not production-ready yet. Right now, each WebSocket connection spins up a new thread, but I plan to rework that using something like Tokio for better performance.
Curious to hear thoughts or suggestions.
* OSINT (r00m101 just beat me to it by launching...)
* Research into recommendation algorithms, advertising placement algorithms, etc
* Marketing (ad libraries, detailed analysis of content given data not even exposed to the mobile app due to some interesting side channels, things like trend analysis, etc)
* Market research for products
* Sales teams can use it to find exact mentions of other products. Eg: selling crash reporting software? Look up your target accounts' brands and find examples of complaints.
Plus a few more with more imagination.
So I'm working on a site that allows user access to some of the read-only functions available here. Coming soon :tm:. Been really fun building it all in Rust, though :) If you're interested in anything here, email in profile.
My main question: why, do you like the UI? I honestly really hate the reddit app, I haven't seriously used it for browsing since I fixed up Libreddit into Redlib :)
I'd also just like to play around with different styles of frontend just as a way to hack on things.
What makes you special in this aspect? Seems you are small fish now, but if your niche project picks up steam. Nothing to stop them from cutting you off or forcing you to court/injunction and waste your personal resources.
I cycle between learning about scheme macro hygiene and implementing more and more realtalk/dynamicland demos and trying to grok the programming model. Doing this in the browser is a weird but fun constraint that makes things shareable.
My latest project is a wikipedia explorer: https://deosjr.github.io/dynamicland/wiki.html
I am trying to see how far I can push AIs to do a research project in physics. I did a PhD in plasma physics a decade ago - I am using the literature survey I did while looking for a problem as my starting point.
The plan is: - Using a few research papers to ground the state of the world, see if I can nudge it towards coming up with a few research problems to tackle. The problem needs to be (1) unsolved and (2) something that is probably solvable in a timeboxed fashion. - Let the AI read more papers to refine the hypothesis, and come up with a plan. - Let another agent write code to run numerical simulations. - And finally do synthesis.
I am curious to see how far it's possible to push the models in this direction. At the very least it hopefully helps new grad students in a copilot capacity.
A Lucene-based search engine on top of S3 block storage.
Index schema is immutable (but supports migrations), so you cannot just screw up your index.
Separate indexer/searcher tiers, so heavy indexing load does not affect search latency.
And embedding/reranker local inference, so you can run the whole AI search within a single docker container.
I've gotten the process to fully catalog all of the advertisements in a magazine (about 150 on average) down from over a week to a few hours. I should be able to get through the material within my lifetime now :)
I feel the same about a lot graffiti; if it's recent, it's an eyesore, but old graffiti can be extremely interesting. I guess both domains expose some elements of the zeitgeist seldom explored in other mediums. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Nice site, by the way!
Think about a newspaper / magazine: The ads didn't suddenly block the article, move the page around, or phone home to the advertiser. Likewise, the ads wouldn't slow the magazine down, flash, or make noise.
I'm sure glad that the inline ads model never caught on in novels.
Yeah, there is a subtext to the advertising that changes over time that is very interesting. For example, early appliance ads are about saving household labor to spend time with the kids, later appliance become more about status and the allure of technology.
Ok, ok, I'm out.