Posted by david927 11/9/2025
Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
(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.
I also wrote a longer technical post on the maths behind it: https://medium.com/p/292c755a6ceb.
I think there's a lot of potential for AI to improve the way we organize and manage our inboxes, while still letting us keep control over it.
What I've learned is that there are a lot of little features that make up a good email client that you may not even think about when using one, like threading, quote blocks, even what email address(es) to autofill when you reply to an email. For an app you use potentially for hours a day, the polish and "last 20%" makes a huge difference - and takes a while to build!
If you have any feedback, especially on what features are most important to you in an email app, I'd love to hear it :)
I don't like the idea of a centralized system to flow all of my email accounts through. I think this would work better as a localized agent that runs against my account (more like an email reviewing system vs a centralized email monitor). That would be less of a privacy concern, in my opinion.
Works only on chromium based browser as it directly writes into files on disk to not loose data. Sry
I’d like to add importing from a Pinterest account and continue adding support for all the creative implementations of the schema.org recipe format that different sites use.
[0] My partner has a bunch of handwritten family recipes, so I’m trying out an optional extract from a photo of a hand written or magazine recipe that uses AI. Not required and I may pull it out into its own service that spits out schema.org recipes. We’ll see.
Music player that can organize album collections from different services like Spotify, Apple Music and Bandcamp, Discogs, and show detailed and high quality information that can be searched and filtered.
Current features include:
- Live material price list updated monthly (based on prices at local shops)
- Conceptual 2D/3D floor plan generation following Ghana Building Standards (development in several phases using procedural floor plan generation)
- Construction management dashboard to track project stages and conversations between project manager, mason, carpenter, etc.
- Printable material cost breakdown
TODO: A contact listing for local construction services
I would love to have feedback, thanks.
I was tired of repeat, sponsored, and "safe" music suggestions from Spotify, so I built a discovery engine that puts the control back in the user's hands.
The core idea is simple: You define a "Discovery Model" with explicit constraints (specific genres, release years, track popularity, etc.). The app then uses this blueprint to source tracks.
The results are fresh for two reasons:
- "Known" Track filtering: Excludes all songs saved in your library and recent listening history.
- Active Curation: Uses your custom model, not a vague, opaque algorithm.
It’s built with a local-first mentality and a focus on privacy. No black-box AI "vibe" mixes, just pure, objective discovery based on your criteria.
Hope ya'll find some new gems!
A "discovery algorithm" that I used (works great for jazz) consisted on looking up which musicians played on an album that I liked on discogs and searching for more albums from them.
I am also a huge Discogs fan and unheard.fm actually leverages their APIs to aid with discovery ;)