Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)

347 points by david927 ↗ HN
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?

644 comments

[ 221 ms ] story [ 6981 ms ] thread
Hi everyone, these are going to now be posted on the second Sunday of the month.
I'm working on a tool for creating custom color palettes for web designs that pass WCAG contrast requirements:

https://www.inclusivecolors.com/

- You can precisely tweak every shade/tint so you can incorporate your own brand colors. No AI or auto generation!

- It helps you build palettes that have simple to follow color contrast guarantees by design e.g. all grade 600 colors have 4.5:1 WCAG contrast (for body text) against all grade 50 colors, such as red-600 vs gray-50, or green-600 vs gray-50.

- There's export options for plain CSS, Tailwind, Figma, and Adobe.

- It uses HSLuv for the color picker, which makes it easier to explore accessible color combinations because only the lightness slider impacts the WCAG contrast. A lot of design tools still use HSL, where the WCAG contrast goes everywhere when you change any slider which makes finding contrasting colors much harder.

- Check out the included example open source palettes and what their hue, saturation and lightness curves look like to get some hints on designing your own palettes.

It's probably more for advanced users right now but I'm hoping to simplify it and add more handholding later.

Really open to any feedback, feature requests, and discussing challenges people have with creating accessible designs. :)

My partner and I are working on Supabird.io (https://supabird.io), a tool to help people grow on X in a more consistent and structured way. It analyzes viral posts within specific communities so users can learn what works and apply those insights to their own content.

My partner shares our journey on X (@hustle_fred), while I’ve been focused on building the product (yep, the techie here :). We’re excited to have onboarded 43 users in our first month, and we're looking forward to getting feedback from the HN community!

I’m working on https://unrav.io

Building a new layer of hyper-personalization over the web. Instead of generating more content, it helps you reformat and interact with what already exists, turning any page, paper, or YouTube video into a summary, mind-map, podcast, infographic or chat.

The broader idea is to make the web adaptive to how each person thinks and learns.

Adding new transports and documentation to my Typescript logging library (MIT licensed), LogLayer (https://loglayer.dev). Just added documentation for Bun and Deno support added some new logging library transports (LogTape), and finishing up Logflare and Betterstack transports so you can send logs to their logging APIs.
Guessix is an LLM-powered word game like guess who!

We have a fun group working on it on Discord (find the discord invite in the How To)

https://guessix.com/

I’m working on a free and open-source invoice generator: https://easyinvoicepdf.com/?template=stripe

- No sign-up, works entirely in-browser

- Live PDF preview + instant download

- VAT EU support

- Shareable invoice links

- Multi-language (10+) & multi-currency

- Multiple templates (incl. Stripe-style)

- Mobile-friendly

GitHub: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf

Would love feedback, contributions, or ideas for other templates/features.

Something worth considering: the e-Rechnung directive enforcing b2b invoices with standardised metadata. They're becoming mandatory in Germany and I think they already are in some other EU countries.
I'm working on 1:6 size furniture. There's not much woodworking I can do outside of the shop, so I've been trying to shrink full joinery techniques down to dollhouse size.
I've spent the last few months working on a custom RL model for coding tasks. The biggest headache has been the lack of good tooling for tuning the autorater's prompt. (That's the judge that gives the training feedback.) The process is like any other quality-focused task—running batch rating jobs and doing SxS evaluations—but the tooling really falls short. I think I'll have to build my own tools once I wrap up the current project
Going solo on https://meldsecurity.com/

I'm putting a bunch of security tools / data feeds together as a service. The goal is to help teams and individuals run scans/analysis/security project management for "freemium" (certain number of scans/projects for free each month, haven't locked in on how it'll pan out fully $$ wise).

I want to help lower the technical hurdles to running and maintaining security tools for teams and individuals. There are a ton of great open source tools out there, most people either don't know or don't have the time to do a technical deep dive into each. So I'm adding utilities and tools by the day to the platform.

Likewise, there's a built in expert platform for you to get help on your security problems built into the system. (Currently an expert team consisting of [me]). Longer term, I'm working on some AI plugins to help alert on CVEs custom to you, generate automated scans, and some other fun stuff.

https://meldsecurity.com/ycombinator (if you're interested in free credits)

I user the ycombinator link, but it still says 0 credits, what gives?
A library to add strict types for PHP. Sort of a typescript for PHP.
I am working on Magnetron (https://magnetron.ai)

It is a tool that lets you create whiteboard explainers.

You can prompt it with an idea or upload a document and it will create a video with illustrations and voiceover. All the design and animations are done by using AI apis, you dont need any design skills.

Here is a video explainer of the popular "Attention is all you need" paper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x_jIK3kqfA

Would love to hear some feedback

An application that helps deaf and nonverbal individuals with daily interactions when they’re out and about.

My first career was in sales. And most of the time these interactions began with grabbing a sheet of paper and writing to one another. I think small LLMs can help here.

Currently making use of api’s but I think small models on phones will be good enough soon. Just completed my MVP.

Microlandia, the brutally honest city builder. Posting this for a second time, because i’ve been working super hard on a steam release.

last month’s “what are you working on” thread impulsed me to upload this game to itch and 1 month later, i’ve got a small community, lots of feedback and iterations. It brought a whole new life to a project that was on the verge of abandoning.

So, I’m really grateful for this thread. https://explodi.itch.io/microlandia

I am definitely giving it a try after reading this: "When citizens have no job for some time, they consider a career in the criminal underworld." LOL
Working (or better say playing) on LLM + Stocks Market analysis.

https://ftocks.com

Next in the plans is adding more models and compare which one gives better results.

Collecting public datasets for training visual AI models to track and target drones.

Drones are real bastards - there's a lot of startups working on anti drone systems and interceptors, but most of them are using synthetic data. The data I'm collecting is designed to augment the synthetic data, so anti drone systems are closer to field testing

I'm working on a series of "fun experiments" that use LLMs under the hood.

Some are small tech jokes, while others were born from curiosity to see how LLMs would behave in specific scenarios and interactions.

I also tried to use this collection of experiments as a way to land a new job, but I'm starting to realize it might not be serious enough :)

Happy to hear what you think!

https://llmparty.pixeletes.com

I'm working on Conductor

https://github.com/skanga/Conductor

Conductor is a LLM agnostic framework for building sophisticated AI applications using a subagent architecture. It provides a robust platform for orchestrating multiple specialized AI agents to accomplish complex tasks, with features like LLM-based planning, memory persistence, and dynamic tool use.

It provides a robust and flexible platform for orchestrating multiple specialized AI agents to accomplish complex tasks. This project is inspired by the concepts outlined in "The Rise of Subagents" by Phil Schmid at https://www.philschmid.de/the-rise-of-subagents and it aims to provide a practical implementation of this powerful architectural pattern.

I am working on Tailstream (https://tailstream.io/), turning logs into task time visual data streams. Built the web application, web site and a Go CLI agent (open source) and am now slightly pivoting into making it more log-focused.

Working on faceted search for logs and CLI client now and trying to share my progress on X.

Currently a one-man side project: https://laboratory.love

Last year, PlasticList found plastic chemicals in 86% of tested foods—including 100% of baby foods they tested. Around the same time, the EU lowered its “safe” BPA limit by 20,000×, while the FDA still allows levels roughly 100× higher than Europe’s new standard.

That seemed solvable.

Laboratory.love lets you crowdfund independent lab testing of the specific products you actually buy. Think Consumer Reports × Kickstarter, but focused on detecting endocrine disruptors in your yogurt, your kid’s snacks, or whatever you’re curious about.

Find a product (or suggest one), contribute to its testing fund, and get full lab results when testing completes. If a product doesn’t reach its goal within 365 days, you’re automatically refunded. All results are published publicly.

We use the same ISO 17025-accredited methodology as PlasticList.org, testing three separate production lots per product and detecting down to parts-per-billion. The entire protocol is open.

Since last month’s “What are you working on?” post:

- 4 more products have been fully funded (now 10 total!)

- That’s 30 individual samples (we do triplicate testing on different batches) and 60 total chemical panels (two separate tests for each sample, BPA/BPS/BPF and phthalates)

- 6 results published, 4 in progress

The goal is simple: make supply chains transparent enough that cleaner ones win. When consumers have real data, markets shift.

Browse funded tests, propose your own, or just follow along: https://laboratory.love

This is great, but I wouldn't consider a food to be "clean" just from this testing.

At a minimum it needs glyphosate testing. I suspect the avocado oil has no plastics but high glyphosate, it's one of the many reasons I only use high-quality olive oil and coconut oil in cooking.

This is really cool and I was hoping something similar existed earlier this year when looking into protein powders following the Clean Label Transparency Project report [1]. Basically they said about half of protein powders tested showed signs of heavy metals, but did not disclose which brands. I would be interested in funding testing for some specific brands as I am sure others would as well. I did a bit of digging on a few brands and found lawsuits against them for violating prop 65, sometimes multiple [2][3] from the same brand.

Some testing has been done on https://labdoor.com/ where they basically fund the testing with affiliate links, which I think could be another revenue source for your site. I did contact them in January and they said they would add the brands I requested to the list, it's just not crowdsourced the same way your site is. They received some form of backing from Mark Cuban [4].

(edit) To make this more clear - If you are looking for expansion or making it a little wider, allowing users to request other types of testing besides the plastics would be cool.

[1] - https://www.texashealth.org/areyouawellbeing/Eating-Right/Le... [2] - https://www.erc501c3.org/settlements/6f2zxji0o3m2k4jhcwgg7hd... [3] - https://www.erc501c3.org/settlements/k7p29rie5whpc5qek5kdha2... [4] - https://markcubancompanies.com/companies/labdoor/

FYI your website seems to trigger a filter/search every time I type a character. However, this causes the keyboard on iOS to collapse, which makes typing a tough task!
oh dear I'll look into this, I thought this bug was fixed. if you see this please lmk your mobile browser in case that matters.
I'm using the latest safari from an iPad
If I were a billionaire, one of my many pet projects would basically be a 100% privately-funded-by-me organization that does nothing but test consumer products - either directly or by third party

It would be so boring - no funding accepted, everything would be freely available, no political initiatives, no recommendations, nothing. Just a treasure trove of data

A man can dream - kudos to you for actually making it a reality - great inspiration

Question for you: in general, how much does this stuff cost? what if you wanted to expand to testing beyond plastic, e.g., verifying the potency of ingredients in supplements, verifying cleaning product ingredients, etc., is that possible?

For an individual acting on their own, single tests for phthalates and BPA/BPS/BPF normally cost ~$500. Laboratory.love tests three samples from different lots to ensure reliability (as PlasticList found variation of up to 59% between lots of identical products). Thanks to volume pricing and operational efficiency, we're able to target $425 per sample ($1,275 for triplicate testing). This covers not just the chemical analysis but also product acquisition, shipping, and operational costs. Right now there is only about 10% margin left as breathing room.

My partner lab specifically offers 300+ unique tests across the following categories: Contaminants, Elemental, Allergen, Preservatives and Additives, Microbial, and Phytochemical, Vitamin, and Actives"

So yes, expansion is definitely possible! If a billionaire wanted to fund a project like this it could certainly convert dollars into data, it's just a matter of choosing which products and contaminants to start chewing through first to ensure the data creates positive change in the real world.

www.appealseal.com

a tool to help California home owners to lower their property taxes. This works for people who bought in the past years low interest environment and are overpaying in taxes because of that.

Feel free to email me, if you have questions: phl.berner@gmail.com