Posted by david927 2 days ago
Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
I want to 3D print a shell that goes over my car fob: I keep leaning on it and setting off the alarm. The shell would make sure the buttons never get pushed.
I want to 3D print a sleeve that keeps the NCAS dongle in my car charger. I really wish there was a dongle that stayed attached with screws or similar.
FWIW: I was playing with an inexpensive (for me) Revo Inspire over the weekend. It feels somewhere between learning an instrument and taking a daguerreotype. There's a lot of room for improvement in the equipment for someone like me who just wants to casually scan something so I can make an attachment part. (I kind of wish there was a box that I could clamp something in, and then have it be about as easy as a flatbed scanner.)
I ended up covering my key fob with blue painter's tape, which kinda-sorta got it to scan. (I tried dry shampoo and drawing on it with marker, but I could never get a big enough area to scan.) When I imported the scanned fob into Tinkercad, it really distorted.
I ended up ordering a set of digital calipers and I'm going to try skipping the 3D scan part and go directly to CAD.
Finished: the 100%-vibe-coded "GPT-5 reviews all my PRs on max reasoning" GitHub app (which is shockingly effective, https://github.com/Smaug123/robocop - probably nothing new for people who already use some product like this, but I like owning my own infrastructure as far as possible, and GPT-5 and perhaps Gemini are the only models smart enough to do this so I can't take this any further).
Currently: back on "write an immediate-mode TUI framework that uses a vdom as its fundamental abstraction" (https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Zoomies), in the hope that this is the first UI framework that I don't absolutely loathe.
Next: using the TUI framework, write a debugger to inspect the internal state of my deterministic .NET runtime (https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.PawPrint) and to step forward and backward in time.
Next: get the deterministic .NET runtime to a point where a property-based testing framework can identify the deadlock in some very simple buggy multithreaded code. (The framework is not yet able to run Hello World - did you know that's an incredibly complicated program in .NET? - but it can solve a few Advent of Code problems right now, can perform some limited exception handling, limited virtual method dispatch, limited casting between types. Even getting to Hello World might take a year if I'm unlucky.)
It's off to a rocky start though, as I've initially populated it with YouTube-8M and AudioSet, neither of which are music-specific. The search results can be... Weird.
(1) For one product I am working, I have been working on a custom reporting language for producing high quality PDFs. I used hy.py as a basis to make it LISP-like.
(2) I need to make a Django postgres site that I am running more reliable. Earlier I was experimenting with making static HTML renderings of the pages. That is certainly nice, but it took several hours to reproduce the site. I am currently prototyping making read-only replica of the database in SQLite (the database is only 1 MB) and hosting it on CDN, and then pulling that for the read-only replicas. The database export takes only some seconds.
(3) I vibe coded a iOS app using that same SQLite database that fetches it from the same location. It was surprisingly simple. It seems much simpler than using Flutter or React native.
A place to find great blog articles by regular folks related to dev/tech world.
Wondering about the best way I can add a weekly newsletter built on top of the content currently being ingested and still looking for more sources to add to the database (let me know if you have any good recommendations).
I have added only about 35 essays for now. Might pick up some from your list too.
I would say it combines the best parts of Duolingo and Anki. Anki is great for memorizing words, but you don't see the words in the context of novel sentences. Duolingo is great for exposure to new sentences, but it's oriented around "lessons" and SRS is an afterthought. (Duolingo is also not designed for people serious about learning a language IMO, it's too easy and goes too slowly.)
Had to do quite a bit to get it to work well.
1. At first you would think that if you know all the words in a sentence, that should be enough to understand the sentence. But it doesn't work like that. For starters, words can have multiple meanings. The french word "bois" can mean "(you) drink" or "wood". You want to learn these separately. I trained an NLP model (a gemma3 finetune) that I use to understand the manner each word is used in each sentence: https://huggingface.co/collections/anchpop/lexide-nlp-models
2. Even then, what about a sentence like "you'd better not"? Even if you know the words "you" "had" "better" and "not", you still won't really get this. So I use the wiktionary "multiword terms" category for each language to get a huge list of terms like "'d better" , "you better believe it", etc, and teach these in addition to individual words. And then I only show sentences where you know all the individual words as well as all the terms.
By the way, I have a suggestion, the examples on the answers could be listenable to keep the brain on a learning mode all the time even on side words
And I'm not planning to get rich off of it haha. Right now there's no monetization at all. If lots of people use it to learn a language and avoid wasting their time on duolingo, I'll be happy
I am always looking for more people to test and play with it or even review the code. We've got a nice little user community going.
Usually this comments drowns in the crowd of the massive amount of awesome stuff people are building, but if you find sanctum useful, hit me up. Good things are happening.
Stay happy