Posted by david927 11/9/2025
Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
It looks inside each file to see what it’s about, then moves it to the right folder with a single click. Everything happens on your Mac, so nothing leaves your computer. No clouds, no servers.
It already works with images, Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) PDFs, ePubs, text, Markdown, and many other file types (30+) in English. Next I’m adding multi-language support.
If you have messy folders anywhere on your Mac, Floxtop can help.
Try it for free - requires macOS 14+ with Apple Silicon: https://github.com/taranntell/fallinorg/releases/download/1....
Just for clarity, it looks like image content itself isn't addressed, but rather just any text that might be in an image, correct?
Also: "Your sensitive data never leaves your Mac." Does anything leave the mac? Any metrics? I don't want this to have network capabilities at all.
Regarding privacy: everything runs locally on your Mac. No files or metadata are uploaded anywhere. The only network request is from Sparkle to check for updates. If you prefer, you can disable update checks and Floxtop will have zero network activity.
If you have questions or want to share feedback, you can reach me anytime at floxtop@proton.me.
This is already useful. If you do wind up adding image classification, first, I'd like it distinguish photos, screenshots, and graphics. Then, I'd like broad categories, like people, places, animals, memes, etc. Base case is I want sort out my downloads since I generally download something and then not bother putting it where it belongs or deleting it.
It would also be handy if, in addition to moving the items, it could tag them via Finder tags/xattrs.
If you want to stay updated when these features are ready, feel free to subscribe to the newsletter.
Maybe it's a story about named local fishermen from the early 1900s, with pictures, the history of a statue and videos of the process, or the state of a graffiti wall over time.
Currently in a phase of UI development and testing, and historical societies outreach for collaboration. It might stall and just fizzle into nothing, or it might be something cool.
Also still doing https://wheretodrink.beer, but haven't added anything of note since playing on this other project.
https://autio.com/ is similar - but obviously not open source, and more limited.
It seems like it could even tailor itself to what an individual user is interested in, and with AI - could turn more "dry" encyclopedia-type information into more compelling narratives. With some kind of route planning software, you could even pre-plan your trips ahead of time and select the things you're interested in.
Obviously not what you're building, but something related that's been clunking around in the back of my head for a while.
When you say open source is it so you could self host it, use your "own" models, and curate your own datasets? or some other reasons? I could see a future where a lot of the project could potentially be open sourced and work with any defined geojson API.
I meant community-sourced. Some kind of community where local "experts" or history enthusiasts could contribute info.
AKA - invite a local or regional historical society to contribute data for their region, with the benefit that they could then easily generate a regional tour map/route/recommendation.
[1] https://smartmap.ai [2] https://github.com/space0blaster/smartmap
* Disk images
* Liveboot isos
* Container images (docker/podman)
Many build products are supported, with more on the way:
https://chrivers.github.io/raptor/builders/index.html#compat...
It uses a syntax that is inspired by Docker, but significantly enhanced.
Take a look at:
* The project: https://github.com/chrivers/raptor/
* The book: https://chrivers.github.io/raptor/
The code is at https://github.com/matthiasgoergens/git-snap-fs
The original was in Python and actually had a decent excuse for existing for a very specific problem at work a few years ago. The new version is in Rust and exists just for fun.
This was also a small experiment in coding with OpenAI's codex. I wrote the Python original by hand---like a caveman. Codex was mostly ok at the actual code, especially once I told it to make `cargo clippy` happy, but it needed lots of help with the design. It kept insisting on extra complications and state.
But perhaps I'm a bit unfair here, because I only figured out the nice and simple design after reflecting on the connection between Linux's fuse and git's design for a while when writing the original. So it's only fair that the computer would also need some help to see how to match them up nicely.
Previously they just saved it in a (Windows) Shared Folder and it automatically showed up in the test cluster. No version control, no nothing.
The test cluster had actually grown to a few thousand machines or so. Running Shared Folders over that was crazy, and no version control was crazy, too.
In addition, they expected to be able to write output files next to the source files, and expected them to show up to be used by the other machines.
We were trying to help them migrate to something saner. We could convince them to not intermix source code and output files, but as part of that bargain otherwise they wanted everything to look as similar as possible to before, but still support some git-goodness we have promised.
To make matters worse, they had checked in some rather large files into their repository. Like Gigabytes, and lots of them.
As before, we wanted to support running multiple processes at the same time, but this time on different versions. As a joke I suggested to 'just mount' the git repository directly (that we constantly pull to every computer in the cluster), but my boss thought it was a grand idea, thus the tool.
An additional nicety: under the hood 'git stash' consists of two phases, the first phase make something like a commit from what you have lying around in your repo, the second phase cleans up what you have lying around. If you use libgit2 (or a similar library) you can use just the first phase to get something like a commit, and send that to the server to execute, while changing nothing on the quant's machine, and not forcing them to explicitly make a commit nor polluting their git history.
One saner alternative would have been to just make a checkout for each run. But naively that would have taken more storage space than we had, thanks to those big files. Alternatively, we could have done some sharing for running the same version. But that would have involved some reference counting etc and cleaning up.
So my suggestion was to 'just let the kernel caches handle it'.
In the end, the prototype was useful to get the quants to get along with what we did. And luckily for our sanity, we could soon convince the quants to store those large files somewhere else, and not in the repository along with the code. That restored our sanity, and we could move to a more conventional scheme.
The working life of the tool was blessedly short, but it played an important role in getting the quants to move along in their journey to using version control. Though even though on paper it might have looked like an abortive and wasted effort, in terms of business value it was very successful.
I love the quants. They are very technical and very smart and effectively write software all day every day, but they don't see themselves as software engineers, and they aren't.
I recreated it just for fun, because I like the connection between git and how filesystems work. You can really tell that Linus Torvalds, the original author and designer of git is an operating systems guy.
Speed is not an optional feature on the web. The site above is written in Firefly, uses hydration, and scores 100% on PageSpeed Insights.
The language is largely complete, and we're now working on DX: Got a language server, a devserver, and some essential libraries.
In general I prefer a better language over an involved javascript framework that does not look like js anymore.
In any case, if you take it for a spin, I'd love some feedback.
A simple iOS app for scanning (almost any) barcode and storing in the app, or adding it to your home via a widget. No tracking, no subscriptions, just a simple free app that is pretty simple to use and does the one thing I want it to do.
Building my own software has been super refreshing compared to working within a large organization. I really enjoy the path of just developing and it is fun to get into something different than React/TypeScript and Java. It was also really interesting to go through the process of publishing the app in the Apple App Store. Heard so many bad stories, but it was OK. Definitely not great, but not as bad as I was expecting.
Two learnings from this so far:
1. I do not think that I would want to do any Swift development in a large organization. Super fun to build indie style, but I can't imagine having to support 5+ years of old iOS versions. 2. I ditched most social media a long time ago and if you do not have any personal promotion channel, you are super limited into reaching any potential users for your software. I still do not know how to deal with this; I do not have any ambition to go back into building a social following. I just like building the "thing", but just building it is definitely not enough to get any traction.
For the current project I am building another iOS app, a bit more complex, also something I want to use myself. I was considering building with React Native, but ditched that plan because when I am building for myself, there would (I think) be a lot of overhead in testing Android.
For now I really like what I am doing, but financially I think I should consider going back to Java/Scala or React dev for a corporate client :-|.
My friend had a cute baby boy and mentioned difficulty in finding children's storybooks in Spanish.
Challenge accepted:
I built an AI generated multilingual storybook, just to see if it would work.
Tap or click the little monster to have it read to you.
Local LLM generated the story, stable-diffusion generated the images, AI converted text to speech in two languages: English and Spanish ( could easily do many more languages ).
I "filled the app out" by adding a simple landing page placeholder, login page and "library" page.
Not very phone friendly, was made for her iPad.
Only the second book currently has a story, the others are placeholder templates.
Bedtime Bulb v2[0]: A massive improvement over our original Bedtime Bulb, a light bulb meant for use in the evening to reduce blue light. The headline feature is the re-introduction of infrared, which was removed from lighting to make it more efficient, but emerging research suggest it's beneficial for health. After a long wait, this is shipping in 2 weeks!
Atmos Bedside Lamp[1]: A fully automated circadian lamp that automatically shifts in color and brightness throughout the day, helping you prepare for sleep and wake up more naturally. Working on some machine learning features that mimic the functionality of the Nest Learning Thermostat, but for lighting. The first units are shipping by Christmas.
Circadian Mode for Philips Hue[2]: A web app that gives your Philips Hue lights circadian powers, so that they gradually shift from bright light during the day to dim, low-blue light at night. It's way more powerful and easier to use than first- and third-party options from Hue, Apple, and Home Assistant. Just launched this week; looking for beta testers to give feedback!
[0] https://restfullighting.com/products/bedtime-bulb-v2-preorde...
[1] https://restfullighting.com/products/restful-atmos-preorder
[2] https://restfullighting.com/pages/circadian-mode-for-philips...
Hope to document 100 ideas. Wish me luck.