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

Posted by david927 11/9/2025

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

464 points | 1369 commentspage 4

chrisischris 11/10/2025|

I was hitting Claude Code's rate limit pretty often while paying for their max subscription. Started thinking – I've got a decent GPU sitting at home doing nothing most of the day.

So I'm building a distributed AI inference platform where you can run models on your own hardware and access it from anywhere privately. Keep your data on infrastructure you control, but also leverage a credit system to tap into more powerful compute when you need it. Your idle GPU time can earn credits for accessing bigger models. The goal is making it dead simple to use your home hardware from wherever you're working.

It's for anyone who wants infrastructure optionality: developers who don't want vendor lock-in, businesses with compliance requirements, or just people who don't want their data sent to third parties.

Get notified when we launch: https://sporeintel.com

RationPhantoms 11/10/2025||

I don't want to get into blockchain-shenanigans but I did love the Folding@home model for democratized compute. Could spare cycles on GPUs at home be used for a P2P network of inferencing?

chrisischris 11/10/2025||

Yeah! not building a blockchain but we are building a system similar to folding at home (also a fan of that) where if you choose to have your node process others peoples requests you will get credits that you can then use to spend on other people nodes on the network. This is so you can still be able to use models that may be too big for your own hardware when you need them. Overall goal being to prevent people getting priced out of AI and providing and alternative way of accessing these larger models.

amysox 11/10/2025|||

Couldn't you do that with Ollama + Tailscale? Minus some of the fancy bells and whistles?

chrisischris 11/10/2025||

Yea that would be the best current solution out there and would work ok for one person with one computer but the average person isn't going to set that up and it isn't easy to use from any device just by logging into a website or app. And if you had multiple machines you'd have to manually load balance by switching between them. Spore will allow you to easily set up as many nodes running models as you want and manage what models they are serving from anywhere, this allows for simple servicing of an organization or your family for example.

geeksinthewoods 11/15/2025||

lol. I keep on hitting my usage limits but I haven't upgraded my Claude Code CLI... so I just continue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jmWnPfgtik

  [End] --- for the visuals, reflect on the lyrics... think about AI learning more about how its thinking interacts with manifolds...
  ⎿  Claude usage limit reached. Your limit will reset at 3pm.
     /upgrade to increase your usage limit.

> now let's continue

orblivion 11/10/2025||

Running OpenStreetMap off the grid (self-hosted to say the least) on a Raspberry Pi 500 (and to some extent a Pi Zero 2W) for Internet In a Box:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielkrol_openstreetmap-acti...

All of the street and satellite tiles are thanks to maps.black. The search uses Nominatim's sqlite3 mode. I was told that it's experimental only because it hasn't been tried in production yet, so I'm sort of testing it in the process. So far I'm only doing administrative boundaries and natural features, but so far so good! I'm going to slowly add a few more types of POIs, I just don't want the database file to get too big.

Note that Internet in a Box has an OSM offering already, but the data is five years old and the tech makes it harder to update. As of today, there are much easier options on the table, and we get cool stuff like 3d buildings. Also, the search was much more limited.

* https://internet-in-a-box.org/

* https://maps.black/

* https://nominatim.org/release-docs/latest/customize/SQLite/

ghostfoxgod 11/10/2025||

When someone dies, you don't get even one extra second to access the documents and information they meant to share it with you.

Trying to fix this problem with Eternal Vault.

Link: https://eternalvault.app

Another thing thats in early alpha right now is CapKit, AI professional captions for short form videos

https://capkit.app

lukebuehler 11/10/2025|

Eternal Vault is interesting. I would for sure use something like this. However, only if there is a strong story how the vault will survive 20+ years, even if your company is defunct. I do see the pieces scattered around the website (backup to Dropbox, etc), but this story needs to be front and center.

ghostfoxgod 11/10/2025||

Hi Luke, thanks for the feedback. Will be working on improving the marketing site to share the story in better way, any other feedbacks are also appreciated. Lastly, would love for you to give the platform a try at https://dash.eternalvault.app/register

azianmike 11/10/2025||

A few months ago, I saw a tweet from @awilkinson: “I just found out how much we pay for DocuSign and my jaw dropped. What's the best alternative?” Me being naive, I thought “how hard could would it actually be to build a free e-sign tool?”

Turns out not that hard.

In about a weekend, I built a UETA and ESIGN compliant tool. And it was free. And it cost me less than $50. Unlimited free e-sign. https://useinkless.com/

komali2 11/10/2025|

Just to play a bit of shark tank, why would I use your tool instead of Docuseal, which is FOSS and self host able?

hitensethiya 11/10/2025||

Building the world’s first “Travel Confidence Engine.”

I’ve been obsessed with how people actually make travel decisions — not how platforms think they do. From a consumer’s standpoint, travel isn’t just “search → compare → book.” It’s emotional, contextual, and full of FOMO.

You open 20 tabs across Booking, Google Maps, Reddit, and Instagram trying to answer simple questions like: Is this the right area? Is this hotel actually good? Am I missing a better deal somewhere else?

Most existing tools either oversimplify (like ChatGPT giving three confident but unverifiable answers) or hide information behind algorithms and commissions (like OTAs). Both remove choice — and ironically, make people less confident.

I’m building SearchSpot, a “Cursor for travel.” It automatically does what power travelers already do manually — cross-check reviews, verify real photos, compare prices across platforms — and then shows its reasoning transparently so you understand why something was recommended or excluded.

The goal isn’t to replace your decisions, but to help you close your tabs with confidence. From FOMO to flow. From chaos to clarity.

If you’ve ever spent hours researching a trip just to end up more confused, I’d love your thoughts: https://searchspot.ai/home

sharmarishi0103 11/10/2025|

Why does it need a login though? big friction to just see the result of search

hitensethiya 11/10/2025||

yeah, but there's no way to reach out for feedback or follow ups if not logged in. At this stage, we want loads of feedbacks and help genuine users plan their trips well, hence the login wall.

hju22_-3 11/11/2025||

Well, as a "genuine" user, you'll never get so far as to get feedback since I'm (and likely others too) not going to bother with a tool that I can't even test its authenticity, correctness or usefulness of over known good individual routes for information. So if you want feedback; lower the friction. If it's useful, people will make accounts. E.g. too save searches and whatnot.

dvcoolarun 11/10/2025||

I built this: https://github.com/dvcoolarun/web2pdf — a CLI tool for converting web pages to PDFs, recently open-sourced after adding several new features. (Might be useful!)

Not related to the thread, but if anyone is looking to hire a developer or knows of opportunities, I was recently let go and am actively searching. Any leads or feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Sample PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n7M1TKOptSsYiibrbvV_Yojx53T...

deepdarkforest 11/9/2025||

I'm working on Flavia, an ultra-low latency voice AI data analyst that can join your meetings. You can throw in data(csv's, postgres db's, bigquery, posthog analytics for now) and you just talk and ask questions. Using cerebras(2000 tokens per second) and very low latency sandboxes on the fly, you can get back charts/tables/analysis in under 1 second. (excluding time of the actual SQL query if you are doing bigquery).

She can also join your google meet or teams meetings, share her screen and then everyone in the meeting can ask questions and see live results. Currently being used by product managers and executives for mainly analytics and data science use cases.

We plan to open-source it soon if there is demand. Very fast voice+actions is the future imo

https://www.tryflavia.com/

vessenes 11/9/2025||

This sounds amazing. A demo video would help me finish sign up - I can’t try it without hooking it up to real data, and I don’t want to for a test.

deepdarkforest 11/10/2025||

Great feedback thanks! We have added a synthetic e-commerce dataset as an example when you sign up so you can test it without your data first. Will also add a demo video ASAP.

ilaksh 11/10/2025|||

What kind of plan do you have with Cerebras? It seems like something like that would need one of the $1500/month plans at least if there were more than a handful of customers.

deepdarkforest 11/10/2025||

They introduced pay as you go recently. The limits on that is similar to the plans, 1 million tokens per minute, so if you stack a few keys and do a simple load balancing with redis, can cover a decent amount of traffic with no upfront cost. Eventually we would have to go enterprise though yes!

ilaksh 11/11/2025||

ok.. when I tried to use pay-as-you-go it was unusable for me because there were a ton of 429s and 503s. one test it was just constant for a few seconds when I tried it, 429 or 503.

I am using it for a voice application though so retrying causes a delay for the user that they don't expect. especially if it stays unavailable for a few seconds.

danielwmayer 11/11/2025|||

Hey! I have a business inquiry for you but I don't see a contact anywhere on your website. Is there a place I can reach you? Thank you!

ElasticBottle 11/11/2025||

are you guys built on recall or did you guys build out the meeting joining functionality yourself?

abound 11/9/2025||

I'm building a small rural ISP and web hosting service, as a way to learn about low-level networking stuff. I've got an ASN + IP space, and am working out the details with a colo, local fiber provider, and some upstreams. Right now I'm configuring the hardware itself (server, router, switch, etc) and learning all the bits and bobs (Proxmox, BGP, OPNsense, IXPs, etc)

Loughla 11/9/2025||

All I can say is good luck. We spun up a co-op isp to take advantage of fiber grants for rural areas about a decade ago.

Maybe it was because of the grants, but it was a fucking nightmare getting off the ground even though we had nearly 90% of the population in three counties on board for the co-op. The red tape and regulations (in our state at least) made it clear that government runs for urban and suburban interests and actively undermines rural needs. I'm talking government in bed with large providers who had exclusive rights to run "high-speed" Internet to our towns and farms, even though they had never and were never planning on anything above dsl for most people and cable for the ones in town.

If I was more charismatic (and wasn't 1000% sure there were pictures of me doing drugs when I was in college), I would consider a run for state office, because it's a shit show for small towns here.

And that's the story of a) when we got sued by a large provider that I hope goes out of business and burns to the ground, and b) the last time I volunteered on a large project and why I will never take the lead on anything bigger than the Lion's Club pancake breakfast now.

abound 11/10/2025|||

Oof, thanks for sharing and the well wishes.

I'm funding this myself, and my current approach (hopefully!) avoids most of the red tape. I'm leasing fiber from a local ISP for the colo <-> my home connection, and once I have myself as a successful "customer" of my own ISP, I'll start doing the last mile build out, which is where I expect the red tape to begin.

But I haven't decided if I'll do fiber or wireless, and if I go wireless, I might be able to avoid pole agreements entirely by just working directly with my neighbors. The problem is that our area is pretty heavily wooded, so I'm not sure if I can place antennas high enough to cover a reasonable swatch of the area.

Loughla 11/10/2025||

Our best approach was to run fiber in the ground in the public right-of-way on county or local streets and avoided the state highways. It was much easier to get easements with property owners and local towns than the state (as far as I know, our request is still sitting unread with the state). That meant we had to build twice, essentially. Once for the north of the major highway that bisects the area, and once for the south. But that cut out all of the nonsense with existing agreements from the state. So that helped.

Most property owners we had to cut across were willing to forego payment of any kind for free fiber hardware, and access at reduced rates for 10 years. So that was nice.

We didn't evaluate wireless, just because of the terrain, but I do know a local chap who is providing that for folks using grain bins for line-of-site access points. That's seemed to work well for his use case.

jermaustin1 11/10/2025|||

> If I was more charismatic (and wasn't 1000% sure there were pictures of me doing drugs when I was in college), I would consider a run for state office, because it's a shit show for small towns here.

Loads of politicians have come back from worse! Don't let that hold you back.

vc5 11/10/2025||

Best of luck with this. If you get the web hosting part going and need to stick a load balancer in front of web servers/front end proxies, may I suggest that you give my project[1] a go? Speaks BGP directly to your routers to advertise healthy services and scales from small VMs (for services that are only a few gigabits/s) to physical servers if you need to serve tens of gigabits/s traffic.

Shameless plug, sorry (not sorry!) but I would have killed for it when I worked in web hosting :-)

[1] https://github.com/davidcoles/vc5

amysox 11/10/2025||

I'm reviving a project I last touched in 2006, in the hopes that it might be of use today in making social networking human again.

Back in the day, after the company I worked for bought the Electric Minds community and migrated it to its own CommunityWare system, and then the company that bought our company decided to shut the platform down, I reimplemented the community platform in Java and helped rescue the community. See: https://erbosoft.com/blog/2025/09/08/electric-minds/

EMinds eventually sputtered out because of the rise of platforms like Facebook. Well, now we see what came of that. So I think there's room for a platform like the one I used to have. See: https://erbosoft.com/blog/2025/11/03/what-we-once-had-and-co...

The new system is being written in Go. I'm porting the code over without using AI, though I have used Claude to translate the old crusty HTML pages into modern HTML with Tailwind CSS. Once it gets to the functionality I had back in 2006, I'll put it up...and then see about going beyond that, including how to make it distributed and provide more interoperability.

sakopov 11/10/2025|

Every time I talk acquaintances, friends and family members about finances I'm always shocked at how little people know about basic things like tax brackets, 401Ks, IRAs, ETFs, compounding interest, debt management and etc. So I decided to write a financial literacy/education book with a bit of humor and easily comprehensible language to distill some of these topics. I'm about 1 month into it and try to write a chapter a week.

teleforce 11/10/2025||

Really good idea, perhaps you can include some simple guidelines for long term investment as well.

Looking forward for the publication of the book and buying it.

wonger_ 11/10/2025||

Do you have a sample to share?

sakopov 11/10/2025||

Just some drafts in markdown but nothing I can share just yet. I'll be posting it here once I have the ebook done.

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