alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
Comments
I'm working on https://react.tv
It lets you create TV channels from digital media such as YouTube, The Internet Archive, TikTok, Twitch, and Dailymotion. It does that by letting you schedule videos against a custom calendar system.
Since filling out even a month of content can be a lot of work, I built some things to make the process easier.
* Advanced scheduler to know when and how long content can be played at any given datetime
* Real time team collaboration
* Channel libraries to organize media
* "Blocks" - Create a dynamic schedule which generate hours of content that mimics real television scheduling. It even carries over your playback history between generations so that playlists continue from where they left off.
* A catalog to find media from official sources on YouTube
* Embeddable as an OBS browser source to restream your owned content
* Repeat content infinitely or temporarily to create 24/7 channels.
If all goes well I am hoping to re-release sometime this month.
I'm building a native music player in C++ for playing music I bought. I know there's Doppler for macOS but I want different ways of curating and interacting with my library (annotating tracks, custom tags instead of a simple enum for describing genres, advanced tag editing, bulk and transactional/undoable library operations...)
Also, now that code is cheap(ish), I'm implementing UI with a thin-layer of 2D draw commands that can be easily ported (CoreGraphics, Direct2D, Pango, whatever), which is by large the most painful part of it all.
Focus is reliability, UI responsiveness and resource usage, which is why I ditched electron even though it seems to be the only sensible option today for non-ugly, cross-platform GUI.
Working on a UI test automation tool that leverages vision-based UI-perception and semantics, runs purely locally on CPU. It's called VizQA: https://github.com/TinyReasonLabs/vizQA
This solves both the laziness of creating UI test automation setups, without it breaking everytime a slight change is made. with VizQA, the test is just a yaml file describing sequences of simple steps, to navigate, interact, and make assertions.
I just made an initial release, looking for feedback and opinions for such a powerful tool, also open for contribution!
I’m working on https://github.com/true-async/php-async and planning to bring it to a production-ready state. It would be great to build a fast HTTP server.
I made a thing to watch YouTube like it's 2000s cable tv.
I'm working to make it better right now.
I built a desktop X.509 certificate decoder, and a user recently asked for a CLI version that outputs JSON — so I ended up building x509dump.
It’s a command-line tool for decoding certificates and CSRs into structured JSON rather than OpenSSL-style text output.
It decodes the underlying ASN.1/DER structure so fields and extensions are fully expanded, making the output easier to work with programmatically.
I’m planning to expand it to support more PKI artefacts (e.g. CRLs, Keys) over time.
I’m also planning to handle less well-formed inputs (e.g. missing PEM headers/footers, whitespace, or extra surrounding text), which tends to come up in real-world data.
It’s free to download — would be great to get feedback if anyone tries it.
Still working on my LPFM radio station https://www.kpbj.fm/
We have over 60 shows now, rented a studio, and are in talks to security a site for our tower. I'm building out an online store but really need to focus on fundraising.
This started as a joke idea I had but I've had a lot of fun making this and I got some of my friends to sign-up, adds another reason for me to ride my bike.
I am working on gamifying strava activities with a game called Hog Crankers. They are little hogs that turn a crank and right now it syncs to your strava and generates a certain amount of hogs per 5 miles of activity.
I got it approved by Strava so i can have up to 1000 athletes login, been making some small UI changes and next need to tweak the economics. I plan on making it kind of like a base building type of game.
I evolved an rsync based backup script I've been using for almost a decade into https://github.com/nickjj/bmsu. I use this for backing up my life's work to an external drive but also syncing files to my laptop and phone too. It supports easy restoring as well.
No traffic ever leaves your local network and since it uses rsync under the hood the devices being sync'd to don't need to run anything other than SSH.
It's a single file shell script that has no dependencies except rsync. It's literally 1,000+ lines of defensive checks and validations to make sure you're not shooting yourself in the foot with rsync, and at the end the last line of code directly calls rsync. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel by replacing rsync (it's an amazing tool).
After 20 years of running small agencies, I've been between things. So I built an actually useful time tracking bot. No logins or interfaces, it just lets you add projects and roles and budgets, and uses Claude to parse plain language into stored records. Then you can calculate your LER (Labor Efficiency Ratio; the big metric agencies should care about) instantly, and see realized cash (accrual basis) instantly. There's a lot more under the hood but the two benefits are: 1. People hate tracking time (slightly less) 2. Operators understand their instruments (much better)
I put all my best ideas and hard-earned lessons into a single product.
Micro - apps without the ads, algorithms or tracking. https://micro.mu
The business model is likely going to revolve around mcp and x402 https://micro.mu/developers/
I'm building aliaskit.com. If you ever tried to use openclaw/hermes/Claude Code or any agent for that matter, you'd know setting up the phone and email and card and everything in between is a headache. Our SDK packages it all into one so you can deploy digital identities with a click. Currently, we have our typescript SDK and a few plugins published with many more ready to launch. I'd love to talk about this with any of you to see what you need when you build agents.
PS. We also do DID and VC documentation and are looking further into how agents will verify themselves. The world is becoming Agent to Agent real quick :)
I am building a platform for helping stray dogs/cats pro actively. The idea is whenever you see an animal in need in an unfamiliar area, you can use it to help the animal get into the right hands. Meaning that you share your GPS and it automatically sends you the nearest clinics, relevant government institution, phone numbers of people that are monitoring for such things and local facebook groups that you can post on. I am also exploring a ways to post automatically in a facebook group whenever a signal is received. There are a lot of challenges however with the platform as it needs to be mobile-first and easy to use for the people to actually start using it.
I’m making Bezier, a mac-native vector design app as an alternative to Figma and Sketch.
Unlike those apps it has full support for design tokens and (so far) flexbox layouts. It can also export directly to HTML, rather than a fake preview mode. I’m also working on full code-backed components, so you can go between code and design very easily.
As a designer, I’ve been frustrated for years by the gap between design and code, and despite all the new AI features, Figma still hasn’t got any further in years - design tokens need a 3rd party plugin and responsive designs are a pain in the bum. So I decided to build something that has the ease of Figma while being much closer to live code.
I’ve got to the point where I’m designing the app in itself, tokens are working, html export is working and nearly ready for first betas.
I keep on refining https://hnarcade.com
I’ve got a decent amount of people on the newsletter so trying to figure out how to best deliver indie games via that channel and in the end get more people playing these awesome games people develop :)
Looking for an alternative to HN, I decided to spend 6 months writing some code and got my first result, which is how https://comuniq.xyz was born. It's nothing compared to the power of Hacker News, but it could become an alternative. To make it stand out, I added notifications, Markdown text styling, and a layout that the community there says is pretty nice.
VCamper: use LLMs to spot security fixes before CVE publication
Once a patch for a security vulnerability is public, the patch itself can reveal the vulnerability before the CVE is published. VCamper uses a staged LLM pipeline to analyze a Git commit range and flag likely vulnerability patches, even when they look like routine changes.
It’s still a proof of concept, but on known cases like curl CVE-2025-0725 it got close to the published root cause from the patch alone.
This matters because LLMs could make it much harder to keep security fixes quiet: once the patch is public, the bug may be recoverable almost immediately. Quietly shipping a fix and hoping it stays under the radar may stop being a reliable strategy.
Have been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix:
https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations.
https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic.
https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".
I helped co-host a popup village in rural South Korea last week. Mix of co-working, co-living and local activities like trail running and bird watching.
Post-event feedback showed everyone loved it. But personally I think we could have done better organizing on the co-working side so people has a more predictable schedule to lock-in.
So I’m planning what the next iteration of this event could look like if the co-working aspect was stronger. Especially in the area of everyone sharing their personal and/or professional intentions with each other. So they're more likely to accomplish those intentions with the help of other participants.
I built an open dataset mapping the structural connections between Israel's tech/startup ecosystem and its military-intelligence apparatus.
The Israeli tech industry isn't a neutral commercial sector, it's a deliberate pipeline from intelligence units to billion-dollar companies. Wiz ($32B Google acquisition) was founded by four Unit 8200 veterans. SoftBank's Israel ops are run by a former Mossad director. CyberStarts, a $1.5B VC fund, openly recruits Unit 8200 graduates.
A Minecraft competitor.
I'm leaning heavily on simulation, economics, towns with real economies, and interweaving progression systems. It's a custom engine. I finally have the foundation built, it's multiplayer ready, and it currently loads in under 200MB. The idea is to be hyper efficient to simulate multiple towns that grow by themselves and you can trade and interact with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeZ3O6F5FXU
It's a free-time project, but I will happily take investment and make it my full-time project. :) I have a game design-doc that I have built out, and I personally like it a lot. I believe in it's potential.
Working on Asfaload, a multisig sign-off solution applied to release artifacts authentication.
It is:
- open source
- accountless(keys are identity)
- using a public git backend making it easily auditable
- easy to self host, meaning you can easily deploy it internally
- multisig, meaning event if GitHub account is breached, malevolent artifacts can be detected
- validating a download transparantly to the user, which only requires the download url, contrary to sigstore
Nearing Alpha release stage.
Code at https://github.com/asfaload/asfaload Info at https://asfaload.com/
It's web service that allows you to channel your google docs through a more human-friendly name. So, you link
opendocs.to/your-name/resume (an example link)
to your public resume at docs.google.com/dlkjbalksdfd
It's a simple redirect service, but it just looks nicer, and I think the opendocs.to sounds natural. Got to learn a lot with this one, using Vite/React, Node, Postgres all in Docker, with a local profile that builds nginx inside with the containers, or a prod profile on the server where nginx proxies into the containers.
Anyways, check it out!
Right now, only free tier available as I some last tweaking and checking.
Crossed 100K MRR as a solo founder for Zigpoll[1] - honestly I never thought I would get this far with the product so now it's all about trying to market and keep growth strong. Doubling YoY gets harder each year so you always have to find new growth channels (or ways to improve existing channels). This is an interesting task especially given the current environment.
I used to think "if you build it they will come" but, as it turns out, it's much more nuanced than that and requires a lot of iterating and stumbling along the way. I hope to break into another vertical this year!
I am building https://peeekly.com it's an analytics tool on steroids. It shows you everything in very simple terms/ui and also generate suggestions on how to improve the conversations.
Conversions can be anything from going from one page to another or getting a user to submit the form. I am using it on my other website which generates >100k page views per month and it generated 70% valid suggestions which i used to improve the things.
In a world of AI coding it seems like we can create or copy almost anything. So after some denial I’m thinking let’s embrace that and bring back “view source”.
qip lets you write tiny WebAssembly modules in Zig or C and compose them together. The modules have a simple input -> output interface and cannot access anything else, no file system, no network, no env vars, not even the time. You chain modules together so the output of one becomes the input of another e.g. there’s a CommonMark module that converts to markdown-to-html. There’s a file-based router that lets you serve a website with these same modules.
I want these modules to be open and shared, so you can decide to have a `/view-source` page that lists all the wasm modules and all the source content (markdown, images, etc) and source code (zig, c). So you can choose to fork the ingredients of the qip website if you like: https://qip.dev/view-source
I chose wasm because it’s fast, runs anywhere (browser/server/native), and has a strong yet lightweight sandbox. I’m working on collaborative web hosting that I hope will bring back web 1.0 vibes.
I'm working on a new 1v1 scrabble/wordle style game - iOS and Android versions are cooking as well, thanks to Expo.dev. A friend described it as "scrabble that doesn't drag", and I've had a few friends and family members playing hundreds of games (and especially the daily game) over the last few weeks, which has been really encouraging. Play here:
If you're enjoying it, please leave me some feedback: https://discord.gg/pFjEcbQsv
I am working on a TUI framework for tokamak https://github.com/cztomsik/tokamak so I can then use it for my local agent harness. The currently separate PoC now lives in codeberg https://codeberg.org/cztomsik/hello-tui
Published 3 articles so far, but working on AI architecture and management. While most people are focused on prompt engineering and making stuff with AI; I'm more interested in how it actually works, how to size workloads, how to maximize performance, the security and safety aspects. Here is my most recent article where I played with benchmarking tools to get a baseline and understand how configurations impact token generation
https://ewams.net/?date=2026/03/29&view=Qwen35_Performance_w...
Since blacksmith labs and phoenix ai - the ai assisted automotive r&d, security and compliance engineering tool has been on the backburner for a while, I've been helping a couple of blockchain projects and built some tools, besides tinkering with my real-time EVM contract and transaction heuristics and classification engine.
- ETH Watchtower: a real-time EVM monitoring tool with heuristics and classification of contracts and transactions: https://ethwatchtower.xyz
- P2P SSL VPN provider/consumer tools using a blockchain as announcement and settlement layer: https://github.com/rnts08/blockchain-vpn
- OrdexNetwork: https://ordexnetwork.org, I've built https://ordexswap.online and https://ordexswap.online/wallet/ as well as an Umbrel variant of a self-hosted wallet.
- Waya Wolf Coin v3: Helped the team to compile binaries for linux, and modernizing the libraries: https://github.com/rnts08/WWC3-Linux-binaries / https://github.com/Waya-Wolf/WWC3
- Low Cap Exchange algorithmic trading bots with machine learning and automatic ghost trading, because I wanted to see what the most common shapes are on smaller exchanges: https://github.com/rnts08/low-cap-exchange-trading-bot
However, I am really looking for Sr. DevOps/Platform Eng/SRE/System/Network Admin/Infra Engineering or similar, full-time or contract work, see https://timhbergstrom.pro for contact details.
I'm trying to get back to verifying some of my old fun ideas. I want to finally build my 3D QR cube (https://deriese.net/qrcubes.html?s=hn) by sending a design to a laser shop, and I also want to find someone with a few termocouples to verify my results to the coffee cup cooling problem (https://deriese.net/coffee.html?s=hn). If anyone wants to help, feel free to send me a message.
Tusk — an open-source Postgres desktop app for macOS and GNOME — https://shapemachine.xyz/tusk
I'm building my take on a static site generator.
https://get-taxus-org.pages.dev
It's inspired by Zola, but has better documentation and will hopefully be more approachable when all is said and done. I'm trying to incorporate WebAssembly, with Yew, to give "islands" for high performance stuff you might want where WebAssembly makes sense. For example, I wrote search from the ground up, and built a search widget using Yew.
You can also just write JavaScript if you want.
It's a total work in progress, but I'm enjoying what I've built so far.
Not a big thing, but I’m happy to work again on a side project I started last year and abandoned because of some limitations from the stack I chose.
It’s https://napodico.it, a very simple online Neapolitan dictionary. Nothing extraordinary here but it’s something that will tremendously help me organize my notes on Neapolitan words and expressions that are currently scattered across Google docs. I’ve built https://www.schedarionapoletano.it in the past but it’s from a dictionary made my someone else and I didn’t want to mix my own definitions in.
This is not a 'product', it’s a normal free website as we used to do before the commercial Web became the norm. The front is very simple, but the entries can be edited in the back a bit like a CMS but with Wikipedia-like inter-links and redirects.
The stack I started with was SvelteKit and Drizzle for the ORM, but I quickly hit several limitations of Drizzle and I abandonned the project. Last week I asked Claude to split it into the more familiar stack that I used to use before trying to fit everything into a single TS project that is: one Python app (FastAPI/SQLAlchemy) for the backend that exposes a REST API consumed by the front app (SvelteKit). This is a lot more flexible, and it has allowed me to work again on the project.
Just started this weekend on https://gitlab.com/get-otter/otter-sdk
Its dbt inspired stream ETL tool (or maybe just the TL?), it currently just has a dev mode that does RabbitMQ to local Parque files while I'm getting the core of it to a place I'm happy with.
It runs SQL models against the incoming messages and outputs the results to one or more output tables. Has a local WAL so you can tune it to have sensible sized output files (or not, if you need regular updates but at the expense of query perf.)
Planning on adding Protobuf messages, Kafka as a source and S3 and Iceberg tables as sinks this week.
Lightly inspired by a some projects at work where a lot of time and effort was spent doing this and resulted in something not very reusable without a lot of refactor work. Feel like the stream -> data lake pattern should be something that is just SQL + Config, same way dbt is for transformations within a data warehouse.
No plans on adding any cross message joins or aggregations as that would require cross worker communications and I explicitly want to keep the workers stateless (minus the WAL of course)
Would really appreciate any feedback on the core concept, esp. if this is something you'd actually use in prod (if it were finished!) Not sure if there is something that does this already that I don't know about, or if this genuinely fills some sort of hole in the exisitng tooling
Working on working out and less IT.
I wish I could use auto completion for building muscle. Maybe a Large Muscle Model? (Joke).
An open course on building high performance LLM inference engine! Hope to finish by the end of April
I’m working on shifu (https://github.com/Ultramann/shifu), a pure POSIX shell framework to create powerful CLIs.
Shifu provides: argument parsing, subcommand dispatch, help string formatting, tab completion for interactive shells, compatibility with POSIX-based shells (tested with ash, bash, dash, ksh, zsh); all in a single POSIX shell file with no dependencies.
Edit: formatting
I'm implementing different parsing algorithms (for programming language text to syntax tree purposes). There are so many papers published on different algorithms... I'm just slowly reading it all, and implementing the algorithms and improvement ideas, sometimes combining ones from different papers. At the moment I'm constraining myself to LR-based algorithms to not drown even more in the sea of publications.
I have a recursive ascent code generator with a bunch of optimisations that I wrote about [1,2]; it's a linear-time parser for LR(1) with reduced overhead. I have an RNGLR implementation (a polynomial-time parser for any context-free grammar), that's still a table-based interpreter like more LR-based parsers out there. I've extended that implementation with special code to handle cycles more efficiently. Some day, I'll take some time to write a paper on that and publish it. Currently, I'm trying to combine the two ideas and create a generalised recursive ascent code generator. If I succeed I'll write another blog post again, it's been a year since the last one...
[1]: https://blog.jeffsmits.net/optimising-recursive-ascent/ [2]: https://blog.jeffsmits.net/optimising-recursive-ascent-part-...
I'm building Peerscope (https://peerscope-waitlist.pages.dev) — competitive intelligence for SaaS teams who can't justify Crayon or Klue at $15K-$20K/year.
The gap I kept seeing: small SaaS teams (5-50 people) are actively competing but either have no CI process, or one person manually checking competitor websites. They want structured tracking but the enterprise tools are priced for enterprise budgets.
Current pivot: also building a white-label agency portal — agencies that deliver competitive intelligence to clients are currently doing it via Google Docs or Notion exports. Building a branded client portal so they can deliver CI professionally.
Stack: Cloudflare Workers + D1 + R2, Vite/React 19. Waitlist open at peerscope-waitlist.pages.dev — trying to validate demand before building too much.
Biggest challenge: getting in front of agency owners who actually do CI work for clients. If that's you, happy to chat.
I was bothered by heavy polarization of Americans, individually and even in churches, that appears to ve driven mostly by media outlets who cherry pick and lie. The Left and Right report specific events so differently that their readers might as well live in different worlds. People need to ditch those sources where possible. If not, they need to have a mix of them while understanding their biases.
Originally for churches, my draft article below describes how this problem affects all individuals and institutions. I recommend solutions which include AllSides.com (amazing!) and search engines for retrieving news from multiple outlets. I have a prototype. Progress is slow on my tool because I work two jobs with my free time mostly going to ministry serving Christ and others.
https://heswithjesus.com/mediabias.html
I haven't finished reviewing and adding Drooid yet. I'll still link it because it's a good idea:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/drooid-news-from-all-sides/id6...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=social.drooid&...
(Note: I'm not affiliated with or paid by any of these companies. I am a paying supported of AllSides because I believe they'll do a lot of good.)
I’m working on docmancer (https://github.com/docmancer/docmancer), an MIT-licensed, local-first tool that fetches and indexes technical docs on your machine so coding agents can query it directly.
The goal is to become a local, version-aware alternative to tools like Context7. Pull the docs once, query locally, and use audited packs that match your project stack.
Docmancer also reduces context bloat by returning only the relevant sections instead of dumping full docs into the prompt, which can cut token usage by up to 80%.
No MCP server required. Your coding agents can access docs directly through the CLI.
I'm developing a tracker-like sequencer/DAW for the browser: https://psikat.com/
I'm a musician first and worked as a music producer for several years. After shifting into programming and becoming comfortable with a keyboard, using a typical clip-based DAW started to feel clunky and uncomfortable. I began gravitating toward trackers, but most feel too far away from what I'm used to, or have way more features than I need. So, I started building something in between for myself.
Now it's consuming all of my free-time and I'm starting to understand Why You Shouldn't Write A DAW (David Rowland), but I'm having the time of my life!
I'm building a gamified macro tracking app called https://macros.gg, that's targeted at gamers who want to eat healthier, but don't connect with traditional fitness culture.
Macros.gg applies game mechanics to good nutrition to encourage consistency and progression -- including XP, levels, daily quests, streaks, achievements, leaderboards, and a discord community.
It has an AI logger that allows you to describe what you ate and it'll estimate the macros for you, and after inputting over 10,000 foods, I've found it to be very accurate (and much easier than manual logging).
Other popular tracking apps I tried had major problems: - Most are heavily ad-supported or have no free tier for macro tracking - Most hide insights and AI tools behind a paid subscription - I lost interest within 2 weeks because none of them were engaging
Macros.gg is ad-free, privacy-focused, and gamer-centric. All of its features are free to use, including AI logging and advanced insights, so gamers can improve their health with a system that makes sense to them.
I'm looking for feedback, so if you decide to try it out, lmk and I'll hook you up with a Pro subscription.
I'm working on TravelTracker, a travel journal that doesn't track you back.
I kept running into the same thing with every travel app I tried: they either wanted background GPS running 24/7, or they quietly turned my trip history into ad-targeting data. I wanted to remember where I'd been without handing that memory to an ad broker. So I built the thing I wanted.
No analytics, no pixels, no third-party tracking. You log trips manually (countries, national parks, UNESCO sites, cities, photos, journal entries), the data lives in one account that syncs across web, iOS, and Android, and the business model is a subscription, not your travel history.
Just shipped iOS today. Android went live last week, and the Web App has been live for a little while now.
Website: https://traveltracker.me
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/traveltracker-me/id6761914931
Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.traveltrac...
Still improving copper-rs! https://github.com/copper-project/copper-rs a rust first robotics runtime and operating system. It allows you to target your algorithms for both a traditional OS and embedded targets with a perfectly deterministic replay. Our users are from all over the autonomous systems spectrum: AMRs, humanoids, drones, self driving... If you are a rust enthusiast wanting to test the robotics waters or a robotics rust curious. Come and join us!
https://prepbook.app - modern recipe manager As simple to use as notes, with clever culinary capabilities :)
I have been working on a few iOS apps for my own use case (stock/options trading)
Price & Volume: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stock-price-volume/id676015355... It is often helpful to see volume supports price action. I have the price/volume change color-coded with gradients so it is easy to see if they are following or breaking trends
Options Premium: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/options-at-the-money-premiums/... See all options premium on one screen
Stock Portfolio & Watchlist: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stock-portfolio-watchlist/id67... The idea is I'd like to group stocks by sectors and see if there is sector rotation going on. I will have an UI update soon
I get the data from my brokerage account. All apps is free but user may choose to support/donate if willing
For occasions like birthdays or Christmas where people want to give you gifts, I have always wanted to ask them to make donations to charities of my choosing instead. So I built an app to enable this: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/donate-your-gift/id6760786102 It is very simple but I didn't find anything quite singly-focused like it, so I built it just to scratch my own itch.
Learning robotics with AI and a Raspberry Pi (and a 3D printer) in my basement. https://youtube.com/shorts/PyLmN8CIZGQ?si=S8XhbNeiOLlyAWLh