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

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

I’m working on a open-source tool to create photo galleries from a folder of photos: https://simple.photo. It creates galleries as static sites that are easy to self-host.

I started this out of frustration that there is no good tool I could use to share photos from my travel and of my kids with friends and family. I wanted to have a beautiful web gallery that works on all devices, where I can add rich descriptions and that I could share with a simple link.

Turned out more people wanted this (got 200+ GitHub stars for the V1) so I recently released the V2 and I’m working on it with another dev. Down the road we plan a SaaS offer for people that don’t want to fiddle with the CLI and self-host the gallery.

I really like the idea! One issue though is that the content seems to “stream” much slower than what’s being spoken. The result is that I’m sitting there waiting to see whats going to come, even though its already been said which makes it hard to focus on whatever new information is coming.

The animations / drawings themselves are solid too. I think there’s more to play with wrt the dimensions and space of the background. It would be nice to see it zoom in and out for example.

this look super cool but is it hugged to death? i can’t upload the document 🙁

how does it work with long papers? will it ever work with small books?

will try it out tomorrow again

I’m currently working on building a local delivery service using electric cargo bikes in NYC: https://hudsonshipping.co. We are planning to launch our first pilot in early 2026 with our first customers in Brooklyn.
We’ve built all of the tech in-house to manage the fleet, deliveries and optimize our routes. If you know of anyone that would like to be a part of the pilot program, feel free to reach out to me!

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’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. 🙂

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’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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

Any chance you’ll take a look at power tools next?

There are some Amish people who rebuild Dewalt, Milwaukee etc battery packs. I’d like a repairable/sustainable platform where I can actually check the health of the battery packs and replace worn out cells as needed.

To give you an idea of the market, original batteries are about $149, and their knockoffs are around $100.