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

Posted by david927 6/29/2025

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

439 points | 1401 commentspage 6

Tsarp 6/30/2025|

Lets you create encrypted containers disguised as normal files. 1000s of images, pdfs, videos, secrets, keys all stuffed into an innocent look "Vacation_Summer_2024.mp4".

I've almost got true steganography working i.e to get the carrier file to actually open in any file system(currently with mp4, pdf, png and jpeg).

Things like this have existed in the past, but nothing with a simple UI,recent encryption standards.

czarofvan 6/30/2025|

Damn how is the docker image only 4Mb. Even with the docker slim images they typically are atleast double digit. Nice!

Tsarp 6/30/2025||

Im just stuffing the binary into a scratch container. I had to port over openssl certs, but works like a charm after!

tootyskooty 6/30/2025||

Still working on https://periplus.app, and recently started to see some traction.

It's an environment for open-ended learning with LLMs. Something like a personalized, generative Wikipedia. Has generated courses, documents, exams and flashcards.

Each document links to more documents, which are all stored in a graph you grow over time.

freakynit 6/30/2025||

This is great. I love this concept. Built something similar myself a few months back (just the course generation part): https://quickguide.site/

A few courses I generated using above:

- https://dev.to/freakynit/network-security-cdn-technologies-a...

- https://dev.to/freakynit/aws-networking-tutorial-38c1

- https://dev.to/freakynit/building-a-minimum-viable-product-m...

- https://dev.to/freakynit/startup-metrics-5ed7

encody 6/30/2025|||

Supremely impressive, and I lean a bit towards the more AI-hesitant side.

encody 6/30/2025||

I tried to get it to generate a foreign language reading comprehension course (and even included custom instructions to make the course generate reading comprehension passages to emulate a test), but it just generated a course about _how_ to effectively read different kinds of texts, without actually generating the foreign-language passages themselves.

tootyskooty 6/30/2025||

Yeah, doesn't work for generating language-learning content yet. Something more aligned to what you'd find on Wikipedia tends to work best.

I'm thinking you could have it in the same interface eventually, but right now all the machinery & prompts assume it's decomposable declarative knowledge.

robpruzan 6/30/2025||

wow I just tried this, absolutely fantastic. I really hope you take this all the way, I will be sharing with friends!

robpruzan 6/30/2025||

Edit: upgrading my review from fantastic to probably one the best first experiences I've had with an LLM app. You got my money!

Do you have any socials? Would love to keep up with updates about this project

tootyskooty 6/30/2025||

Thanks for the positive feedback (and the sub)!! Means a lot.

No socials so far as I've mostly been posting updates on the Anthropic discord. But I made an X account for it just now (@periplus_app) where I'll mirror the updates.

You can also reach me any time by email for bug reports, feature reqs etc.

dalemhurley 6/29/2025||

https://DocCheetah.com - aiming to help accountants chase clients for their documentation. Launched, not got any traction, spent a little bit on advertising through LinkedIn. Probably need to execute more targeted marketing and more problem validation.

https://Full.CX - still hums along in the background. Couple of customers. Just added MCP which has been amazing to use with AI coding agents. Updating the UI/UX to ShadCN to improve usability and make it easier for future changes replacing NextUI and Daisy.

https://Toolnames.com - no changes this month.

https://Risks.io - little bit of work on the new platform, yet to be released.

https://dalehurley.com - little facelift

jtokoph 6/29/2025|

FYI, Your personal site seems to have some styling issues: https://imgur.com/0pDKc4l

Same thing in firefox and chrome on mac.

dalemhurley 6/30/2025||

Thank you, I will have to look into it

postalcoder 6/29/2025||

I'm still working on hcker.news, which first started as a more configurable hacker news frontpage, but has turned into a thing that I've found to be quite helpful at content discovery.

I recently by request[0] added a cohesive timeline view for hn's /bestcomments. The comments are grouped by story and presented in the order that they were added to the /bestcomments page. It's a great way to see popular comments on active topics. I'm going to add other frills like sorting and filtering, but this seems to be as good a time as any to get some of your thoughts!

You can check it out here: https://hcker.news/?view=bestcomments

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44076987 (thx adrianwaj)

zeta0134 6/30/2025||

I'm working on a rhythm game for original NES: https://zeta0134.itch.io/tactus

This is written entirely in 6502 assembly, and uses a fun new mapper that helps a little bit with the music, so I can have extra channels you can actually hear on an unmodded system. It's been really fun to push the hardware in unusual ways.

Currently the first Zone of the game is rather polished, and I'm doing a big giant pixel art drawing push to produce new enemies, items, and level artwork to fill out the remainder of the game. It's coming along slowly, but steadily. I'm trying to have it in "trailer ready" / "demo" state by the end of this calendar year. Just this weekend I added new chest types and the classic Mimic enemy to spice things up.

namuol 6/30/2025|

Nice! What’s the new mapper you’re using? Is it available as an IC or does it use FPGA or something?

zeta0134 6/30/2025||

It's an FPGA mapper made by Broke Studio, detailed here if you're curious:

https://github.com/BrokeStudio/rainbow-net/blob/master/NES/m...

In terms of capabilities, graphically it's something like MMC5 (8x8 attributes and a bunch of tile memory) while sound wise it's almost exactly VRC6. The real nifty feature though is ipcm: it can make the audio available for reading at $4011

It turns out the APU inside the NES listens to writes to $4011 to set the DPCM level, which many games use to play samples. By having the cartridge drive it for reading, I can very efficiently stream one sample of audio with the following code:

    inc $4011

So I just make sure to run that regularly and hey presto, working expansion audio on the model that doesn't normally support it. It aliases a little bit, but if I'm clever about how I compose the music I can easily work around that.

supplied_demand 6/30/2025||

I am working on building a prototype for a simple 4-track recorder. It would be a cross between a Yak Back [0] voice recorder and a Tascam DP-004 [1] mixer.

My 7 year-old has gotten into music and is trying to record his own ideas. We have found the existing tools to be either too simple (Yak Back) or way too complex (Tascam). I want to make him something that has a simple interface, few buttons, and simple recording/mixing. The idea is to avoid the software programs like Garage Band and Logic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yak_Bak

[1] https://tascam.jp/int/product/dp-004/top

Alex-Programs 6/30/2025||

I'm working on LLM translation research for my tool that teaches you a language while you browse by translating sentences at your level into the language you're learning (https://nuenki.app)

I've had some breakthroughs with LLM translation, and I can now translate (slowly, unfortunately) at a far far higher quality than Opus, and well above DeepL. So I'm considering offering that as an API, though I don't know how much people actually care about translation quality.

DeepL's customers clearly don't care - their website is all about enterprise features, and they appear to get plenty of business despite their core product being mediocre.

Would people here be interested in that?

marcuskaz 6/29/2025||

I finally compiled and expanded on all my various blog posts, tutorials and other Python goodness into a book: Working with Python. It is available as a free pdf download at: https://mkaz.blog/working-with-python/

It's grown over a dozen or so years and when I finally decide to compile into a book, everyone now uses AI and no longer read and learn from books but instead through LLMs.

zahlman 6/29/2025||

Fantastic. I wish I'd started on writing something like this years ago (although I'd wanted to teach explicitly rather than having a collection of how-tos).

> when I finally decide to compile into a book, everyone now uses AI

This is part of what discourages me from starting now, sadly. That, and having more concepts for actual Python projects than I know what to do with.

htk 6/30/2025|||

Great book! I already use python for some simple projects and your book is in the perfect level of practicality that I need. Thank you! Suggestion: create an epub version as well. It would be awesome to read it on a kindle or other e-ink devices.

ok_dad 6/29/2025||

> everyone now uses AI and no longer read and learn from books

Not me, I read the shit out of documentation and also books like yours which distill knowledge from professionals down to a bunch of useful points. I have never not learned something (even if I knew and forgot it) from reading a good book about "Working with X".

Thanks for your hard work, and for giving it away to others gratis.

Edit: the string formatting cookbook has a ton of useful info that I always forget how to use, I'm going to bookmark your site by this page: https://mkaz.blog/working-with-python/string-formatting

marcuskaz 6/29/2025||

The string formatting article definitely has been my most popular post for years. I'm glad you found it useful, and thanks for the kind words

superdocs1 6/30/2025||

Building an app that extracts key information from PDFs + highlights citations. You provide a PDF and a JSON schema defining what to extract, and it returns the extracted values, the citations and their precise locations in the document.

This is especially valuable in workflows where verification of LLM extracted information is critical (e.g. legal and finance). It can handle complex layouts like multiple columns, tables and also scanned documents.

Planning to offer this both as an API and a self-hosted option for organizations with strict data privacy requirements.

Screenshot: https://superdocs.io/highlight.png

rrampage 6/30/2025|

I've been building small programs in Zig, C and ARM64 assembly without relying on libc and only using Linux syscalls directly.

Some examples:

- A minimal C shell with built-ins like cd, pwd, type: https://gist.github.com/rrampage/5046b60ca2d040bcffb49ee38e8...

- Terminal Snake game which fits in a QR code using Linux syscalls for drawing: https://gist.github.com/rrampage/2a781662645dc2fcba45784eb58...

- HTTP server with sendfile support in ARM64 assembly: https://gist.github.com/rrampage/d31e75647a77badb3586ebae1e4...

I learned to handcraft a static ELF binary using just GNU assembler (no linker): https://gist.github.com/rrampage/74586d0a0a451f43b546b169d46... . Trying to see if I can craft a small assembler in ARM64

kunley 6/30/2025|

Kudos! Especially for the asm.

http.S is something I wanted to do by myself, ended up with generating data in asm and reusing Go for a http server.

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