Solo project, built during nights and weekends: CLSTR reads 100k+ news articles a day from 40k+ sources, figures out which ones are covering the same event, and squashes them into one item. Related events get chained into "situations" - storylines with timelines, so you can see how a story developed over weeks instead of re-reading the same headline 20 times.

After 145 days, I asked Claude to analyze all the data I had ingested and published the stats. The news looks weird from above:

• 12:1 - articles written per thing that actually happened. The news is mostly echo.
• 82% of stories are still developing after day 3 - which is exactly when news sites stop showing them to you.
• One world leader appeared in 2,672 distinct events in 1 month (guess who) - more than the next five most-covered people combined.
• Only 0.07% of events rate as "exceptional". Almost everything is the mundane middle.

All the charts: clstr.news/observatory

About CLSTR: There's a free API, and if you use Claude or agent stuff there's an MCP server you can try without even signing up: clstr.news/developers

you stare out the window, watch the in-flight map, and buckle up when there’s turbulence: https://inflightsimulator.com

My only request is that if you insult this project (which you probably should), you also cast a vote. Had a lot of fun making this, and I've surprisingly received a little under 1,000 votes in about a week and have respected the results of 7 rounds of voting so far 🫡

There is also about 7 years of OG visit data among other things, like a cataloged collection of my nearly 60 vintage Olive Garden shirts. Probably getting frighteningly close to "r/MainProject" territory at this point 🤔

Wanted a way to force myself to stop scrolling through Instagram reels and actually get moving in order to use more screen time, so I built Amber Lock! From using it this past week, I've actually dropped my Instagram usage down by 6.5 hours from the previous week (the screen time usage stats I show in the video is a test device)

Please let me know what you guys think of it!

Appstore: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amber-lock-screen-time-limit/id6800528861

Playstore: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gnomesteadcollective.amberlock

I made a plug n play MIDI visualizer with diff maps & instruments! If you have a keyboard - feel free to try it out

I got inspired by slap my mac viral story but figured it should be more useful than producing noises.

So I spent one day training a simple ML model to reliably detect double taps on various surfaces.

It works decently well but it's too early for a production release.

when you work at a company, you have teammates to celebrate small wins with, complain about weird bugs with, and get instant sanity checks from. when you are building a solo product in your bedroom, every single doubt, every server crash, and every churned user sits squarely on your own shoulders with no one to talk to. how do you guys find genuine founder peers to keep your mental health intact?

My indie Mac app was featured on the There's An AI For That newsletter today.

I expected about a few hundred clicks first day and got... about 120 clicks after 12h.

Biggest learning? The landing page converts poorly, only a handful of downloads so far.

The app itself is essentially a UX for a particular Claude Code skill, and it uses browser automation to gather bank statements, PDFs, receipt photos, emails etc that your accountant wants you to send every month. Probably too small of a problem for most people I guess.

I had a pretty random idea a few days ago and decided instead of overthinking it, I’d just build it and see what happened.

The idea is to get 300 complete strangers to write a book together.

Each person gets one page. You can put basically whatever you want on it — a story, drawing, poem, photo, QR code, your Venmo, literally one word. Nobody knows what anyone else is making.

Then I take all 300 pages, put them together, and actually publish the book.

Before spending a bunch of time and money making it happen, I built a simple website to test whether anyone would actually be interested.

Signups are completely free right now. If enough people sign up, I’ll open the 300 pages for purchase at $20 each and actually make the book.

Somehow, in the first few days, almost 50 strangers have already signed up despite my videos getting very little reach.

I genuinely didn’t expect that.

Would love feedback from other people building weird side projects. Does this sound like something you’d participate in? And is there anything obvious I’m overlooking before I take it further?

The site is thesecretentrance.com if you want to see what I built.

How did you overcome the reality of "the best product doesn't win, the best-known product does"? I launched an app and I'll be honest; marketing isn't my forte... I've been trying some different means, TikTok, X, SEO, AEO, etc., and have gotten some subscribers, but not getting the traction I need. Any tips?

The app is called Nivelo if you're curious, for learning English and Spanish. I'm a language nerd so it's the app that I wish I had to learn the fastest. Any help is much appreciated!

I built a form builder and realized most form builders become useless after Submit

I realized something while building Formline:

Forms are already pretty good at collecting information.

The real problem starts after someone clicks Submit.

Imagine you run a campaign and generate 200 leads.

One has a $10K budget and wants to buy this week.

One has no budget.

One is a perfect fit for what you sell.

One is asking for something you don't even offer.

And 196 others are somewhere in between.

Most form builders collect all of that information and then basically say:

“Here are your responses. Good luck.”

Someone still has to read everything, figure out who matters, qualify them and decide what happens next.

That's the problem I started trying to solve with Formline.

Instead of only collecting answers, a Formline form can evaluate responses with AI, score things like budget, urgency and fit separately, qualify the lead, trigger conditional logic and route the submission to the next step.

So instead of:

Form → spreadsheet → manual review

I'm trying to make it:

Form → understand → score → qualify → act

And the more I build it, the more I question whether “form builder” is even the right category.

Maybe the form isn't the product.

Maybe the decision after the form is.

I'd love to hear how other founders are handling this.

If 200 leads came in tomorrow, could your current setup tell you which 10 deserve attention first?

And if anyone here wants to actually put Formline through its paces, I created a signup link that gives Reddit users 30 days of Pro access for free:

https://formline.io/signup/reddit

Try to break it.

Tell me what sucks, what's confusing, and what you'd need before you'd actually replace your current form stack.

Sports predictions currently disappear into group chats, screenshots and temporary posts. There’s no lasting record, reputation or community around them.
I built ParlayGround to solve that—a social sports platform where predictions become trackable content. Fans can follow results, discuss picks and build a permanent record.
ParlayGround is not a sportsbook and does not accept wagers. The MVP is now entering early testing.
I’m open to conversations with strategic investors and technical partners who understand sports technology or consumer social.
Would you use it? 🟢

I built MapToCraft to make real-world Minecraft map generation easier to try. You choose any location, draw a rectangular area, and download the result as a Java Edition ZIP or an experimental Bedrock .mcworld.

It runs entirely through the browser, with no account or installation required. The generator is built on top of the open-source Arnis project (Apache-2.0), using OpenStreetMap and elevation data to produce the world.

Try it: https://maptocraft.com/ Arnis source: https://github.com/louis-e/arnis

I would appreciate feedback on the map-selection experience, generation speed, and which locations produce the most useful worlds.

I’ve been rebuilding a personal side project called American Roots Radio Hub.

It started as a Country radio project and grew into a larger hub with:

🤠 124 Country stations
🎸 52 Blues stations
⛪ 52 Gospel stations
✅ 228 verified live streams

I also built in favorites, search and genre filters, a random station selector, multiple visual themes, sound ambience options, a 10-band equalizer, a sleep timer, a persistent player, and an installable web app for mobile and desktop.

The whole thing is free and ad-free.

I’m mostly curious what other builders think of the project as a web app — what feels useful, what feels unnecessary, and whether the overall experience makes sense.

https://american-roots-radio.github.io/

When the app I had given up on and left behind, suddenly gets subscribers it feels like free money!
It's so easy to forget the hours, days, weeks, months poured into an app.

My first ever published app was published on the Google Play store back in May.

And then nothing happened.

I managed to give away around 50 promo codes to get someone to install it, but had no marketing budget. I tried to "SEO" it, but couldn't even get it to show when searching in the play store itself. So I gave up and kinda just forgot about it.

Mid August, I got a notice from the Play Console to "fix my payment settings" and immediately proceeded to ignore it for a week. 😄

But when I checked, and found that it had multiple subscribers, monthly, yearly and even a lifetime purchase from users around the world. Even though it's small potatoes, something happened.

And right now, even though I know I spent 3 months making the app, it still feels like free money. Gonna enjoy this feeling for as long as possible, blessed by lack of memory of all the hours it actually took.

Any advice for how to proceed? I hear churn is real, so how to avoid without bloating the app with more features?

I’ve been spending some time hacking away at an Android client for the public VPNGate directory, mostly as a challenge to see how lightweight and optimized I could get the codebase.

I ended up with OpenGate. It’s sitting right around 6.7 MB because I stripped out all the unnecessary background bloat and focused purely on making it fast and efficient.

What it does:

Smart Server Filtering: Automatically filters nodes by country and residential IP likelihood, while sorting them by the best live ping, speed, and load.

Lightweight & Optimized: Built from the ground up to be incredibly light on system resources and data usage, avoiding heavy background loops that drain your device.

Pure Privacy: Zero accounts, zero analytics trackers, and zero background ads. (Just a quick reminder: it relies on VPNGate public relays, so always review their logging policy).

It was just a fun side project to practice clean app architecture, but it works surprisingly well. If you use public relays or just want to check out the repo for more details, the codebase is completely transparent under GPLv3.

Repo and APK are here: https://github.com/IyedAmiri/OpenGateVPN

Would love to hear any feedback

About five weeks ago I shipped a free Etsy listing checker. In those five weeks, not one stranger has ever run a check on it. People land on the page and leave.

So I built something different, and I want to write up the bug that nearly shipped with it, because it is the kind that passes every test you own.

What it does. Etsy lets a seller export their whole catalog as a CSV from their own shop settings. Upload that file and you get a verdict on every listing, including the thing a single-listing checker structurally cannot see: which of your listings are competing with each other. Same tag on too many listings, near-duplicate titles, near-duplicate descriptions. That problem only exists between listings, so a tool that looks at one listing at a time has no way to detect it.

The bug. Near-duplicate detection is pairwise, so it is O(n²). On a 500-row shop, exact Jaccard similarity over full documents pinned the event loop for about 1.7 seconds. Code review flagged it, correctly. (I am solo, so "code review" here is an adversarial LLM pass I run over every change before it merges. It is relevant to the rest of this, because it is the thing that caught what follows.)

The obvious fix is to stop comparing whole documents and compare a prefix instead. Cap each title and description at its first 20 normalized tokens, compare those. Per-pair cost collapses. The timing test goes green.

That fix inverted the feature, and every test still passed.

Etsy descriptions very commonly open with boilerplate. A thank-you line, a shipping paragraph, care instructions. Cap a description at its first 20 tokens and two listings that share that intro have identical token sets, so their similarity is 1.0 regardless of what the products actually are. A shop with a standard opening paragraph got its entire catalog labeled as competing with itself. Reproduced side by side: five genuinely different products, five false positives, at every description length.

Both of the things I had built to catch problems reported green.

The unit tests passed, because I had written the fixtures as five obviously-different listings. That is precisely the case the bug spares. The wall-clock budget test passed, because the bug made it faster.

The review pass caught it by doing the one thing neither test did: running the old implementation and the new one over the same realistic input and diffing the two outputs against each other. Not asserting against expected values. Diffing old against new.

That is the rule I took out of it, and it is not specific to duplicate detection. When you swap an algorithm for a faster one, the test that matters compares the new output to the old implementation's output on realistic data. A fixture is a hypothesis about what breaks. A diff is a measurement. My fixtures encoded the assumption that different products have different text, which is exactly the assumption the optimization broke.

The actual fix was a bottom-k min-hash sketch. Hash every distinct token in the whole document, keep the 64 smallest hash values, compare those sets. The sample is drawn from the entire text, so a shared 20-token intro sitting inside a 200-token description contributes only about a tenth of the vocabulary a hash could be drawn from, and the two sketches mostly disagree, the way they should. A real near-duplicate still shares nearly all of its vocabulary and still trips the threshold. Worst case came down to roughly 140-270ms depending on how adversarial the input is, and the false positives went away.

The honest scoreboard, since this sub asks for the ugly parts. 153 unique visitors all time. One paying customer. $19 MRR. Last week unique visitors actually halved. The new thing went live on Monday and has had zero external runs so far. The free checker from the first paragraph still has zero, five weeks in. I do not yet know whether "your listings are competing with each other" is a problem sellers feel or a problem I find interesting, and one customer is not enough to tell me.

Disclosure: it is mine. ListingLoom. The free half needs no account at all — listingloom.app/audit takes one pasted listing and runs the per-listing checks — and the whole-shop CSV version is on the paid tier. Saying that here rather than letting someone find out after clicking.

One limitation before anyone tests it and catches me on it: Etsy's listings export carries no views or sales data. The verdicts are content-based only. They are Strong, Refresh and Conflicting, never "Renew" or "Retire", because I can tell you two listings are fighting over a tag and I cannot tell you which one is winning.

Everyone here is shipping real products and useful projects. And I made a calendar you can put your name on. That's it!

It's called Claim a Day. You pick a day of the year, your birthday, your anniversary, 6/9 (nice), and your name goes on it. Free. 366 days, most of them still open.

That's the whole thing. I didn't solve a problem, I'm not disrupting anything, it's just a calendar you can put your name on.

You can also steal someone's day for a dollar, and they can steal it back. Optional, and a little unhinged. Just to make me rich! Papa needs a new pair of brains!

Absolutely ludicrous and useless app, makes me sad-proud that I wasted my time on something like this, but you live only once!

Ok, go claim your day: claima.day

Which day did you grab?

Operating subagents across long, consequential work will be risky. Parents need to poll the subagent to get the progress, which wastes token, and one interruption like laptop power-off will make the subagent's run state unrecoverable.

So I built a runtime. You can define reusable subagent workflows and orchestrate agent according to the workflow. The runtime will supervise the agent run and store durable workflow states in database, it can handle retry-able errors automatically, you can pause and resume the workflow anytime you want and make your daily workflow easier to operate.

It's open-sourced and self-hosted, also it's launching today, for more information: Oh My Subagents: AI teams you don't have to babysit | Product Hunt

I’m building a terminal multiplexer for Windows with persistent sessions similar to tmux, plus animations inspired by Hyprland and Niri.

You can customize the theme, fonts, appearance, workspaces, and more, while keeping sessions persistent across your workflow.

It’s written in C and currently uses less than half the memory of Windows Terminal.

Memory arenas, Ghostty’s parser, ~2 MB native footprint.

Trying to bring the speed, workflow, and polish of modern Linux terminal setups to Windows.

Windows devs deserve some love too. ❤️

Before the newest IOS update, I really wanted to get good voice notes with transcription, so I can go out for a walk and get my thoughts together instead of sitting in front of the screen all day.

I’m also a huge fan of vintage tech, that’s why “Cassette - Speech to text” came into existence!

Even though the newest voice notes are much better than in previous version of IOS, maybe someone will enjoy this retro vibe. And the easy and visual organization of the voice notes.

It’s 100% free and local. Optimized for IOS with Swift. If there will be interest, I might port it to Android. DM me if you’d be interested!

Every adult in my life has negative aura when it comes to slang. my uncle heard me say “skibidi” one time and asked if it was a cryptocurrency. unc is cooked. we are all cooked.

so instead of explaining “gyat” to a 43 year old man for the fourth time, I built genalphadictionary.com — an actual Gen Alpha dictionary with 800+ slang words. each one has:

a definition in boomer-readable english

an example sentence so you don’t use it wrong and embarrass your entire bloodline

tone notes (is it a compliment? an insult? are we being ironic?)

related terms, because you can’t understand “aura” without “aura points” and that’s just science

you can even see what words are trending today to ensure proper speechmaxxing and maximum aura points

it’s free. no signup. built different.

anyway drop the words I’m missing in the comments and I’ll add them

https://www.genalphadictionary.com/