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- My wife and I are working on a math/science/CS-inspired jewelry business.
We try to create pieces that stand on their own aesthetically but have a hidden meaning. We currently have two styles: lambda calculus based pieces (we depict the lambda/Tromp diagram) where we have Y-Combinator earrings (well, strictly speaking they are one beta reduction away from Y-combinator. Aesthetic oblige) and a pendant depicting a lambda expression computing Graham's number. The other style is quantum computing circuits, based on quantum computing research my brother (a physics professor) is doing: a pendant that is actually a non-local controlled-NOT gate.
I wrote a tiny DSL to describe the jewelry pieces, and an interpreter to produce CAD files. We then either 3D print them or have them produced by lost-wax.
We are 200% out of our comfort zone (and love it): I know nothing of front end dev, payments, or anything like that. The diamond district in New York is a neighborhood we normally actively avoid, but if you are forced to go there it is fascinating (people examining diamonds on the corner of the street, others in fur coats in summer straight out of a mafia movie...), and especial marketing. Jewelry is a completely saturated business (luckily we are not doing this to pay the rent); we think we have a unique angle, but we are still figuring out the target audience (if there is one).
Store: https://studio-galois.com/
- Still plugging away at Breaka Club, where kids take photos of their hand drawn art and build games using it. Starts out as no-code, photograph an AprilTag and it imbues the image with functionality.
https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids
We also teach kids visual scripting in Overcooked 2!, allowing kids to code their way through the levels of an existing much beloved game:
I'm running an in school pilot this week (Lunch time school club).
The tech stack for the main product is honestly pretty intense at this point with full multiplayer support, offline play, transitioning from client authoritative to joining a remote server. Built atop GodotJS, TypeScript bindings for Godot, which I maintain. Huge monorepo with over a million lines (yes, I'm aware that's NOT a good thing), and GodotJS itself is not included in that.
- I am making Cargo for C. I have 3/4 of a working demo; the tool can build itself, including some non-trivial dependencies which I've ported to build natively with the tool (instead of wrapping their Make or CMake or whatever).
The pitch: It's insane that we have to pull in Python or Lua to build C code. CMake is an abomination against god that has become usable in spite of itself. Zig cc is proof that this entire ecosystem is an embarrassment. My tool gives C projects a TOML manifest, and builds scripts written in C and JIT compiled by the tool. Now, you can write build scripts in the language itself, pull in dependencies you wanted to use anyway.
It also provides a stable ABI. There's an HTTP-backed index and a Git-backed index. And it generally does the same thing for C that, say, Bun did for JS/TS. You'll be able to run C files from source and have the entire ecosystem available. You'll be able to trivially generate single file static binaries, or dynamically link to an older glibc without arcane tricks. It will fix C.
I'm also still working on my "what if we wrote a real standard library for C"; I added some feedback I got from the release.
by dboon - Been learning electronic PCB design the last few weeks while retrofitting some IKEA window shades for Zigbee enabled motorization.
I've really enjoyed the journey of 3D printing and being able to create all kinds of mechanically useful things over the last few years, but I had always wanted to go even further and incorporate some non-trivial custom electronics.
For this project I had a space constraint for the motor controller board, so while I could have probably hacked together a working perfboard, it just wasn't going to be satisfying. So I finally took the plunge and spent 40 or so hours in KiCad learning how read IC reference documents, picking components, and of course, doing the PCB trace layout.
It's really just a 12v→5v buck circuit, all the plumbing and ancillary components for connecting a ESP32 module to a couple motor driver ICs, and some headers, but it is completely mine!
Just got 5 of my boards in the mail from JLCPCB the other day (insane turnaround, less than a week) and was very happy to find that the entire circuit worked perfectly! I did spend a fair amount of time going over the design with Claude though, so I think that paid off (the kicad files are plaintext, so it made easy work of understanding what I was doing).
Still putting together the repo here, but I'm hoping to make a little blog post out of the project too :) https://github.com/evanpurkhiser/HOPPVALS-MRF-01
- I'm working on Hiring Method (https://hiring-method.com).
After 1.5 years of development and two exhausting pivots, I’m incredibly happy to finally have our v1 live!
While most of the HR tech is rushing to use black-box AI, I built the exact opposite. It's a transparent, math-driven fitness engine. It extracts objective data from CVs and calculates how well applicants match requirements, letting you see the reasoning behind why someone scored an X%.
If anyone here builds in the HR space or regularly hires engineers, I would absolutely love your feedback or a roast of the landing page.
PS This is a project of immense importance for me, I've been working on for past ~2 years, I'd appreciate to know why this comment is flagged.
by genekrapivin - Opening a new maker space in Berkeley, July 3rd Noon-Midnight. Founded by 2 guys in a basement 9 years ago. Now opening it up to the community of local makers as a non-profit 501(c)(3). 3D print, laser cutters, CNC, full e-bench. https://eastbaymakersclub.comby tagami
- I’m continuing to work on my daily word game Tiled Words!
I checked my analytics recently and over 100 people have 100+ day streaks which kind of blows my mind!
I released custom player puzzles which has been a lot of fun! I’ve gotten dozens of submissions that I’m working through. People are submitting really clever and interesting puzzles. It’s fun to get to solve puzzles I didn’t make myself! There’s more I want to do here (featured puzzles, categories, etc.)
https://tiledwords.com/player-puzzles/page/1
I think I’ve also tracked down an issue that was causing the game to crash on older iPhones. I’m having playtesters run through it now and hope to deploy tomorrow. (Switching some positioning rules from CSS transforms to SVG coordinates)
I recently made some puzzle brainstorming tools using the Datamuse API which have been very helpful for brainstorming words related to a theme.
I’m starting to debate some monetized features. So far everything is free but it would be nice if my wife and I could dedicate more time to this. If I could get a few thousand dollars a month in subscriptions my wife could quit her job and focus more on puzzle creation and improving the game. If you play and have ideas for features you pay for I’d love to hear them!
by paulhebert - I continue to work on my city builder game Microlandia, launched here in HN ~6 months ago. I originally predicted a few dozen urbanism nerds would play it, but now almost 10,000 copies sold. I'm still a solo developer but now I collaborate with 2D, 3D and music artists. Which is good because the original art that I drew myself for the launch was horrible.
I'm currently working on modeling energy, climate and new policies like universal basic income
by phaser