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- Hacker News
- projects per year in "Ask HN: What are you working on?"
Top five topics per year (% of that year's projects, keyword-classified):year projects avg/month ---- -------- --------- 2008 123 10.2 2009 104 8.7 2010 666 55.5 2011 86 7.2 2012 46 3.8 2013 389 32.4 2014 146 12.2 2015 104 8.7 2016 471 39.2 2017 456 38.0 2018 242 20.2 2019 246 20.5 2020 882 73.5 2021 837 69.8 2022 363 30.2 2023 425 35.4 2024 2122 176.8 2025 6220 518.3 2026 6093 677.0 (Jan-Sep)year #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 ---- ------------- ------------- ------------- ------------- ------------- 2008 Dev tools 9% Games 9% Video/gfx 7% Writing 7% Business 6% 2009 Dev tools 16% Science 11% Writing 8% Education 7% Business 7% 2010 Dev tools 8% Games 6% Video/gfx 6% Business 4% Writing 4% 2011 Dev tools 8% Games 8% Social 7% Business 7% Science 7% 2012 Business 13% Dev tools 7% Hardware 4% Video/gfx 4% Social 4% 2013 Dev tools 16% Video/gfx 10% Games 7% Writing 6% Education 6% 2014 Dev tools 12% Video/gfx 10% Writing 7% Hardware 6% Games 6% 2015 Games 11% Dev tools 10% Business 10% Hardware 8% Video/gfx 8% 2016 Dev tools 17% Video/gfx 11% Hardware 8% Business 6% Music 5% 2017 Dev tools 18% Video/gfx 10% Hardware 7% Games 6% Data 5% 2018 Dev tools 14% Video/gfx 8% Writing 6% Games 5% AI/LLM 4% 2019 Dev tools 17% Video/gfx 10% Games 9% Hardware 6% Business 5% 2020 Dev tools 14% Video/gfx 9% Games 8% Hardware 5% Writing 5% 2021 Dev tools 18% Video/gfx 10% Games 9% Hardware 7% Writing 6% 2022 Dev tools 21% Video/gfx 13% Music 9% Science 8% Games 7% 2023 Dev tools 14% Video/gfx 10% Games 9% Writing 8% AI/LLM 7% 2024 Dev tools 20% AI/LLM 17% Video/gfx 11% Games 9% Business 6% 2025 AI/LLM 27% Dev tools 21% Video/gfx 10% Games 9% Data 5% 2026 AI/LLM 33% Dev tools 22% Video/gfx 10% Games 10% Hardware 6%by stefap2 - https://curvefit.app
it's a weight-training app that helps you train along your "pareto frontier" of weight vs reps. The idea is to train at lower weight-higher rep, medium weight medium reps, and higher weight, lower reps for every movement. I tried to develop my own weight training program following bits and pieces of advice from bodybuilding forums and ended up injuring several tendons in my first year. So I did a bunch of research on tendon strengthening as well as what's most effective for hypertrophy (reps near failure) strength (reps near maximal load) and injury-prevention/frequency (not bringing yourself to failure too often) and designed an app to automatically prescribe and advance weights and reps based on your learned strength curve (Brzycki-like, with an added shape parameter)
The app is designed to make use of the free Cloudflare tier, so I can support thousands of athletes for just the cost of the domain name. I'm primarily interested in understanding the "Fatigue curve" - right now I have some basic per-set fatigue modeling (basically a log-linear strength dropoff) but I think it could be much better characterized with more data. I could go on and on about the modeling but my intention is to keep it free (maybe add some non-intrusive ads on content pages if it ever starts costing me a few pennies a month) but my primary interest is to be able to do statistical analysis on the data.
by jerkstate - https://shopspec.io/
ShopSpec is a deterministic parametric furniture generator (bookshelves, cabinets, shop carts, leg-and-rail frames, multi-carcass composites) that encodes real woodworking intelligence and outputs shop-ready artifacts.
Most recently, introduced the concept of value engineering by sweeping across dimensions to batch evaluate candidates that ranks based on sheet purchases. Also have in beta an MCP connector to let agents explore the deterministic engine.
I'm building a number of items for home and shop and ShopSpec has been instrumental to plan, visualize, and execute on these new ideas/projects.
by variodot - My wife and I continue to work on a private, paid, ad-free and personally customizable search engine: Uruky [1].
To signup you don't provide any information (a randomly-generated account number is assigned to you), and you can run a proof-of-work captcha to get 2h for free. You can choose among many different search providers (for defaults and per query), including Uruky Site Search, powering our own index.
Last month we reached 300 monthly active accounts and released an image search gallery mode, plus a simple calculator and conversion widget!
The main differences between Uruky and Kagi, DuckDuckGo, SearXNG, etc. are visible in the footer (right side), but one huge difference is that with Uruky, after being a paying customer for 12 months, you get copy of the source code (licensed as BUSL, into AGPLv3 in 2 years — a suggestion made here on HN)!
Our main challenge continues to be discoverability and outreach because we want to do it ethically (no Big Tech and no GenAI/LLMs). Ideas are welcome! We’ve been sponsoring open source projects, open source maintainers, and indie, small-web, and privacy-related websites and applications/groups/orgs. This month we're sponsoring NOYB [2]!
Feature-wise, for September the most visible things that shipped already were Tags and Scopes (top feature requests for a while). We’re also still (slowly and sustainably) increasing our own index, focused on indie/small web.
Thank you for reading this!
[NO-AI]: There is no generative AI product or service being offered, here.
[1]: https://uruky.com
[2]: https://noyb.eu
- I built a tool to see if people or ai agents were opening my links. I kept sharing links, pitch decks, demos, articles, or videos and wondering whether anyone actually opened them or if they used AI for it. There weren't really any good tools to do help with this for generic links, so I built LemonLink to get a shareable link for any url that shows whether a human or AI opened it and when. pls try to break this and lmk how I can improve itby lemonlinks
- I'm building https://uscodex.org. In a nutshell, the goal is to collect all US federal law in version control, and cross-link any references between different sections. Currently I have the US Code, CFR, ~30 years of public laws and congressional bills and 25 years of executive orders.
Actually using raw git repos as the main data store which has worked out great since the US Code changes very little between new releases and so it compresses very well. Also makes it easy to generate diffs of sections: https://uscodex.org/usc/d/119-100/119-102not101/16/2201
by SebRollen - I'm working on a real-life social app called Holler (https://justhollerapp.com).
I'm an introvert and socially anxious, but I do enjoy hanging out with my friends. I just HATE the invitation-and-coordination game. If someone invites me and I don't want to go, I hate having to come up with a socially acceptable excuse. Inviting someone and waiting for them to make a socially acceptable excuse is equally awful to me.
Then you get to coordination. I want to go to the brewery at 2pm, but your kid has soccer practice so you can't get there til 3:30, but then Joe has to leave at 4 to pick up his mother in law at the airport, and... ugh. It's the worst.
So I made Holler, which is basically you hollering to your friends, "I'm going to be at the farmer's market at 2pm," and then you just go. If they show up, fantastic. If not, whatever, you were going to go anyway.
No coordination, no invitations, no friction. Just holler and go.
It's iOS only for now, but I'm working on an Android app as you read this, so hopefully that's coming soon.
by Jemaclus - I've been working on a voxel game engine called Bonsai for ~10 years.
Probably the most interesting thing about it at the moment is the editor. The world, and most things in it, are represented as collections of SDFs. More accurately, they're density fields, but, potato-tomato.
Bonsai has undergone a large rewrite over the last couple years that's nearing completion. A world edit is defined as a bunch of SDF parameters which get projected/rasterized into the voxel grid by a shader on the GPU. One neat thing about SDFs is they've been thoroughly researched and documented by a guy named Inigo Quilez, and they have a lot of nice mathematical properties. For example, you can do a smooth union of arbitrary SDFs to get nice rounded contours where shapes join.
I've written every system from scratch, all the way from the memory allocators and font rasterizer to the collision detector and simulation loop. I even wrote a metaprogramming language as a replacement for C++ templates, which is a whole other story. IIRC the only external dependency is the C runtime library for starting the process and my very occasional use of variadic functions arguments.
For a long time, an explicit non-goal of the project was to ship a game. It sounded insane to me to write an entire 3D engine and then ship a game. As it turns out, I've gotten it to the point where I can actually make a game. I've got a start on the game systems in a closed-source repo, and hope to have a steam page for it by the end of the year.
I'll do some shameless self-promotion and leave some links here for anyone interested in looking at the engine, language code, or some pretty pictures.
by jesse__