Posted by david927 8 hours ago
Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
Hope to document 100 ideas. Wish me luck.
A few of my recent favorites: - swim lap counter in html/JS that uses the camera to watch you swim and count laps/timing - video recorder that records your window/desktop and uploads a file to S3 - video conferencing app that allows a 2 year to click on a family member face and initiates a video conference using webRTC, STUN, and browser audio/video capture with automatic bandwidth adjustments (works on all platforms with pure HTML/JS). - CUDA based ray tracer with HTML UI that can trace over 2m rays per second on my laptop for scientific study, allowing real-time display of optical parts. - chat front-end for image models like gemini-pro and openai that take other images and text as references and generate a big library of options to chose from in seconds, I've been using photoshop for decades but I tend to use this more now.
I'm curious if you mean they're running a raytracer on the back end, and you interact with an HTML UI, or if it runs browserside, maybe via WASM. AFAIK CUDA isn't directly compilable to WASM (yet?)
I was getting a little bored of retrocomputing discourse being so centered on gaming, so I'm exploring the productivity software of the 8/16-bit era. I put real effort into learning and using the programs, giving my light-hearted but heartfelt assessment of its form and function for both its time and today.
Using the software inevitably gets me thinking about other things, and I explore those threads as well. For example, "Superbase on the C64" also discusses the legacy and promise of "the paperless office." A couple of other posts got some nice traction here on HN, notably "Deluxe Paint on the Amiga" and "VisiCalc on the Apple 2".
I'm hoping to build a strong monthly readership, so I'm putting in the work. It's been up for two months and five posts now, with a new one coming at the end of this week.
> There is utility in those old tools and interesting ideas to be mined. Recently I stumbled across something that by all accounts should have set the world on fire, but whose ideas needed more time to germinate before blossoming much later. Discoveries like this are not just nostalgic “what ifs” to opine wistfully upon, they can be dormant seeds of the future.
> Computing moves at such an unrelenting pace, those seeds may lie dormant for any number of reasons: bad marketing, released on a dying platform, too expensive, or even too large a mental leap for the public to “get” at the time. I see this blog as a way to explore the history of the work tools we use every day. I don’t do this out of misty-eyed sentimentality, but rather pragmatic curiosity. The past isn’t sacred, but it is still useful.
What's your research process? Do you use lots of Internet Archive material? Do you reference any personal artifacts i.e. old hardware or documentation laying around? Any interviewing?
https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai
I recently ported the terrain generators to the GPU, and increased the visible volume to 1 billion voxels cubed. I did a short YouTube video about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLfgjWsM1PI
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.
At the intermediate level lots of learners struggle to find suitable content that matches their level and interests, more than a few learners turn to notebookLM podcasts to provide that, but that's a bit of a hassle to set up. So I built a platform that generates and manages infinite and shareable streams around your interests or specific vocabulary. It also provides live interactive transcripts (karaoke / teleprompter style) if you need it.
Core features work but still rough around the edges. Happy to help you out with any issues you encounter, languages to add, feature requests etc...
I wouldn't worry about it too much though - almost all of the people I know with finger injuries were trying to push into really being competitive climbers, not just doing it casually for fun/fitness.
Oh also to keep from tearing your skin don't climb tired. (That won't keep you from typing, it's just painful.)
There’s a free course for true beginners with no login/sign up required. https://listenreadinteract.com/start
It’s exactly the product I wish I had when I started my previous company. Running on PaaS is incredible for devex but the pricing is bonkers, and the vendor lock in makes it really hard to deal with annual price increases. We spent close to 400k / year for just 128GB combined fleet in our last startup on Heroku.
Canine tries to get the best of both worlds: developer friendly PaaS with no lockin or price gouging.
Just added build packs as a build option recently.
Also got a sponsorship from the portainer folks which lets me work on this close to full time
Hoping this saves someone the headache I had two years ago.