alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?
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I'm doing a massive AI code review on my lone lisp project. I finished a complete Fable code review, and the experience pissed me off enough I switched from Anthropic to OpenAI. Decided to run an equivalent code review with Sol and compare it with Fable. I'll publish the results on my website when it's done. Some pretty interesting results already. I think I stressed Anthropic's safety classifiers to the max.
Meanwhile, I decided to revive my Rust liblinux project. Rust has come a long way since 2019, notably the inline assembly macro has been stabilized. I will learn Rust this time!
I lead development on Pindigo (https://pindigo.app), a social score-tracking and ranking app for pinball players.
Most of my time lately has gone into Flippd, its successor, which we recently soft-launched. We’ve also released a tech demo that uses custom computer-vision models to identify a pinball machine from a photo and extract the player’s score.
You can try it here: https://flippd.gg/scan
I'm building a program that should help golf courses and golf course architects design better courses. I've been writing about it on my blog. My goal is to start a golf architecture consulting company, and help design/redesign courses that are better.
The general thesis on identifying architecturally interesting areas on the golf course: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/i-spent-the-last-month...
Identifying dynamic golf design so you get more interesting play on the same course: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/friday-pins-vs-sunday-...
Measuring the addition and removal of hazards and how it dynamically affects different skill levels, and how to measure that: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/measure-2000-times-cut...
How I created a golf dispersion pattern generator -- which I made open source -- so that it can be improved, because the golf analytic companies already have the data and almost certainly won't share it: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/how-to-bake-a-dispersi...
I've been working on the Jane Street reverse engineering puzzle that was posted here a few days ago[0]. As usual I've not made much progress on the actual challenge because I've fallen down a bunch of rabbit holes.
So far I've built a digital circuit simulator, a parser for my circuit design language, and now a parser for my simulator language (so I can run the sim on known inputs and have the machine enforce asserts for me). All to avoid the painful memories I have of verilog/vhdl.
If I don't come to my senses, the next thing is probably going to be a wave form viewer because I've wanted to use Raylib for a real project for a while now.
[0] edit: forgot link - https://blog.janestreet.com/can-you-reverse-engineer-an-asic...
I am building my "dream tool" too, a cross-device roaming profile-experience context-focused UI. Many, many iterations that go back maybe 15y, even built a custom linux distro (iolinux) back in the day(ro root, containerized user-spac with composer-like app handling). Always worked on side-projects, consulting gigs or one-off implementations, often times across multiple customer-devices. Switching context is damn expensive, hence tried to build a tool to help with that. Always failed on the UI parts - native linux tooling was just awful. What do you specifically mean by "context" you ask? Well, you get a call, switch to work on `work://customer-foo/project-bar/task-baz`, every bound device / tool / application loads data related to that task (your filesystem mount shows relevant files, browser loads relevant tabs, obsidian relevant notes etc). Building my own small db engine to accommodate that use-case, getting more fun working on it every day
I’ve been hacking on an outdoor sound monitor for 24x7 logging of birds and bats around my house the last couple of weeks with a live indoor monitor: https://github.com/simonjgreen/OpenObservatory
And today I knocked out an improved trmnl plugin for Japanese flash cards at my wife’s request as she liked the native one from trmnl but it lacked furigana https://github.com/simonjgreen/trmnl-japanese-vocab
Note: I let AI do the vast bulk of the work on both counts, and I ideated, architected, and bug fixed. I do love AI coding hobby projects though, when you have an idea for a thing and know exactly how to put it together but don’t have the time to raw dog the whole thing.
I'm building a way to build internal tools inside the Django admin and make them accessible to both humans and agents.
An analog telephone line simulator built (almost) entirely in CMOS and through-hole parts. It will be the second of its kind designed entirely in the 21st century, and the first of its kind designed in the 21st century with any hope of other people reproducing it. Think of it like a rudimentary PBX you can build at home, or like a little telephone company that sits on your desk. Either is accurate.
Realized today why my filter circuits weren't working as they should: I screwed up the placement of one capacitor when I moved the design from simulation to schematic. Next post in the series coming soon.
I've been resuming work on a Zig library for developing N64 homebrew¹. Previous milestone was getting a framebuffer onto the screen, and after achieving that I took an overly-long break.
Current goal, which I've been working on for a bit more than a week now, is to add support for controlling the RDP (the part of the N64's GPU that actually does all the rasterization), such that programs can actually draw triangles. I'd already implemented the control registers, so the current work is defining all the RDP commands, along with documenting what they do and how to use them — which means that I need to fully understand what they do and how to use them, and that's been a fun rabbit hole to explore.
I'm currently about halfway to two-thirds of the way through defining packed structs for all the RDP commands, then the plan is to build a CommandList struct with methods to build RDP command lists and validate that they make sense (make sure all the triangle/rectangle rendering commands have all their subcommands in the right order, make sure you ain't calling them without there being a framebuffer defined as the rendering target, make sure the needed synchronization commands are in place where needed, etc.). Then that should hopefully be enough for Zig64 to draw its first triangle :)
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Been going a while, working to shift into a verification layer on existing static scanners rather than a standalone product: https://rsolv.dev takes a highly opinionated TDD approach to _proving_ (or disproving!) scanner-indicated codebase vulnerabilities and writing red tests against the desired secure behavior, so that customers can trust that they're not just making code mutations without cause, and that the shipped fixes actually work, and that there's regression protection in their suite.
Aside from that, I've been getting into building hyper-local services around public data; it feels really rewarding and relatable to invest more locally!
Already up and running: https://hailpass.com/?ref=HAILHN9 (ref code there knocks $10 off the season price) as a "season pass" for latlong/street address level-targeted hail notifications, built specifically for damaging-size hail (not just _any_ hail) on the Colorado front range. Email is free, texts are on the season pass model.
On its way, likely first ship today: https://denverbroomsday.com, same season pass model with same free email/paid-per-season text split on reminders to move your car before street sweeping days in Denver.
Currently building Tensou in my free time
https://github.com/kofta999/tensou
I always get frustrated when using local file transfer tools like:
Dukto: was my personal favorite, but is tiring to run cross platform, and most importantly does not support transfer resumes (so if copy got cancelled/disconnected at 99% you either have to copy again or search for the diff and copy it manually)
LocalSend: pretty good cross platform support, but does not work when connecting 2 devices using a LAN cable, and resume support is poorish
So I'm building Tensou to be an alternative that doesn't compromise all these features. Supporting resumes, folder syncing similar to rsync, cross platform (well I don't have a Mac to test on but it should work, and mobile support is planned)
Performance wise it's on par with Dukto and even slightly better with large files (and I'm still working on optimizations for small files too)
Would like to hear HN's feedback or what other features should I add? My goal with Tensou is to be the best, most performant and feature rich local file transfer tool ever.
I have been building a PDF reader with dark mode that supports image properly with vimimum navigations. Been using it for the past few months and really happy with the result. Finally got around to publishing it here: https://github.com/moomou/xeil
More work on https://cardcast.gg. It's a way for my friends and I to play Magic: The Gathering online using a webcam. For those unfamiliar, you take the webcam sitting on the top of your monitor and point it down at your desk, then play with your friends using paper cards over a video call, but specifically tailored towards Magic + Commander.
Recently I've been focused on marketing and small bug fixes. I think the core feature set is compelling enough, now I want to draw more players and start building a community. Been doing some social media stuff, designing an icon (this is HARD for me, I'm not very creative), and looking to print out a bunch of Cardcast-branded Magic cards that I can hand out at my local TCGs.
If you play MTG, I'm looking for more people to come give me feedback and contribute. Feels like something others can benefit from!
Photo upscaling and inpainting apps, both running in the browser https://crisp.photos https://wipe.photos
I'm working on Infrastry, a completely hands-off approach to deploying all kinds of (web) apps. You paste in a repo and Infrastry takes it from there, determining what type of software it is, how it should run, what should be configured, and then provisions to the internet and monitors it over time. It works very well for being so early, which is quite exciting!
The control plane is entirely in Elixir, using Jido & Oban to help power tools it gives an agent to get your app deployed. Uses k8s currently for the infra, but I've made the app => spec => build => deploy layers completely agnostic so we could switch out providers & methodologies in the future.
Looking for people who want to throw apps at, it's still early so no guarantees yet. You can find the website at https://infrastry.ai/ (still a brain wreck of ideas, working on it!) and I made a Discord for feedback at https://discord.gg/sBkS5ZMM3t
Releasing 3.3.0 version of my Video Hub App - https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/ & https://videohubapp.com - 8+ years of development!
Working on 1.0.0 of Simple Image Browser - https://github.com/whyboris/Simple-Image-Browser
Releasing 2.0.0 of my Simplest File Renamer - https://github.com/whyboris/Simplest-File-Renamer - Electron to Tauri 130mb to 3mb
Releasing 1.0.0 of My Off Remote - https://github.com/whyboris/my-off-remote - turn off your PC from phone / tablet over WiFi
GrandpaCAD - AI 3D modeling software focused on simplicity. Made it so even my grandpa could model. He’s been asking me for years when will I teach him how to 3D model. I tried, we failed and then I seen him use ChatGPT so I knew there was a better way than traditional CAD tools.
Recently we also got European funding and the project got some traction. Very exciting times ahead.
https://nommer.ai turns recipes into 2-player mode so you can cook together
People seem to love the concept so far and are starting to sign up, now just need to figure out how to get them to actually use it
building kubehub.io , build a private cloud with your own hardware, manage through kubernetes, most important easy to use.
kubernetes on prem setup take a lot of works, even if you setup the cluster there are tons of work wating for you to setup ingress/gateway/DNS/TLS/monitoring.
kubehub.io solves all those problems.
Helping a friend build a midi controller replica of a legendary vintage synthesizer (Yamaha CS80)
I have been working on a static site generator. I've used Hugo and Jekyll before but everytime there is something you have to learn or get used to and they never map 1 to 1 to the flat structure of a simple blog for example.
It's a few classes of C# right now that parses a folder and auto generates the navigation, links, titles and summary off of the folder/file structure for the 1st level and then subsequent depth is mapped to individual items in the list view not on the nav bar (although I did that too, it looked weird with higher depth). So if you have a folder with 3 files and 2 additional folder you get 5 links in the nav bar, 3 content pages and 2 list pages. No other setup is needed. No llm written code, but I used deepseek v4 flash to ask various questions and get samples of some things.
I forgot just how much depth there is to exploring a simple problem. Loving it!
I'm working on a platform that aggregates a business's operational and financial data and builds a causal model on top, deriving target metrics like FCF or EBITDA. With that model we can forecast different scenarios — what happens if we open a new shop, raise prices, take a loan. We also generate reports: weekly overviews, anomaly detection, deviations from targets. All of this is essentially a harness for an AI agent that customizes the platform for a specific business and integrates its data sources. Large companies have dedicated teams and sophisticated tooling for this; my bet is that small and medium businesses would benefit just as much, and with recent progress in AI it's finally possible to deliver it tailored to each case at very low cost.
My primary target right now is e-commerce due to rich data streams, however if you think your business would benefit from this tool, I would be happy to connect and discuss it.
Zero-subscriptions google + social media search mcp/api/dashboard/sdk.
Every $10 gets you 15K google searches + 3K Twitter search/lookups + 2K Reddit + 15K Url fetches as markdown for feeding to your llm's.
Your credits never expire, use them whenever you want to, and you can stack them as many as you want.
Already got 40+ paying customers within a month of launch.
Now trying to add more social media.
I was only working on this occasionally, but I built an extension to block sites in a more creative way.
Basically I'm finding myself in a bind where:
- I spend too much time doomscrolling (X, reddit, HN etc) - AI is making me lose touch with a lot of basic skills like coding, and I was already losing touch with doing real math
So I built an extension that blocks sites and forces you to actually solve a problem before you can get to a distracting site. The idea is to 1) block the reflex of visiting a site and getting a dopamine hit, and 2) at least get some mild cognitive benefit from it. I use it myself.
Just a little personal tool: Shipment tracking I call Lighthouse:
- All our shipments in one UI (instead of searching trough our mail boxes or going to several merchant apps/sites)
- LLM processes update emails, but everything can be manually adjusted (or created from scratch)
- We have a bunch of destinations we order to (work, home, different pick-up spots), this lets me see where I have to pick up and with which pick-up code
- Real-time sync in case we update something, the other person sees it immediately
- PWA, with animations, feels as good as native on mobile
- $0 running cost (I only paid for AI sub when vibing this)
Desktop: https://imgur.com/a/HD9mCIr Mobile: https://imgur.com/a/EAuJiqH
A programming language that makes your game multiplayer automatically! It integrates rollback netcode into the programming language itself, guaranteeing that whatever you code is deterministic and can be snapshotted and rolled back. Then it integrates the networking and server automatically so you can just code your game like a singleplayer game and it'll be multiplayer automatically! I've been working on this for four years now.
For the last 6 months I've been working on a local-first replacement for accounting and business management software. I just finished building a modular system that I'm pretty proud of, which lets users develop their own modules and import them into a running instance without having to fork the repo.
Not sure if this qualifies, but here goes: I wrote a hard science-fiction novella. It's intended to be scientifically accurate to special and general relativity, with just one tweak that permeates throughout.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19e3HfnK1lNHHBef-5c-KvNdD...
I built a macOS terminal (libghostty wrapper) that runs iOS simulators (and mirrored physical devices) in a Metal-rendered pane inside the terminal.
It works with standard tooling: for example, if anything in one of its tabs runs `xcrun simctl boot`, the simulator just shows up as a pane in that tab. There's a CLI for the things simctl/devicectl don't cover: taps, gestures, rotation, accessibility tree, etc.
Check it out: https://deviceterm.com
I'm working on Spacecap: https://github.com/mgerb/spacecap
It's a screen recording tool for Linux. The goal is to make it as fast and efficient as possible, while also being simple to use and install. It's just a hobby project that I am having fun working on. Here are some notable things about it:
- Written in Zig
- Uses Vulkan Video for encoding
- UI built with SDL3 and imgui
- Features recording, replay buffer, and screenshots
I am building Bloomberry, an alternative to tools like Builtwith for finding companies that use a specific enterprise tech, as soon as we detect them
Most tools just focus on frontend tech like Shopify or Wordpress. Bloomberry shows you who uses backend tools like Hubspot, or Workday, or Gitlab for example.
Example: https://bloomberry.com/data/github-enterprise - companies that use Github
Building the GoodReads of fanfiction and web fiction. Currently growing really quickly so dealing with scaling pains :/
A iTunes inspired music app (uses an extension of DAAP) for classic Macintosh (Mac II and system 6 and newer currently only m68k, ppc coming soon) https://github.com/nburns/iRunes
And a extended DAAP compatible server than can convert other local music libraries (files/dlna/etc) for iRunes https://github.com/nburns/sharon-jones-and-the-daap-king
A daily estimation game: https://estimatle.com
Every day, players answer 5 questions that require estimating some quantity, such as distance, year, cost etc. Then you can compare against answers of other players and the real answer.
Working on finding the right balance of questions that are both fun and also help understand facts about the world.
5 Q L https://fiveql.com
I've been working on this for a while now. It creates a sort of AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md table for your database which holds all the joins, definitions, formats, and relationships, as well as what are popular criteria sets and combinations.
And it populates it into a bi-directional visual (round-trip) SQL editor. Make changes in the UI or SQL text, it goes both ways.
It's a single HTML file.
I've been working on shard balancing for Playwright Test. The idea is to use the new API released in Playwright v1.62 together with historical test durations to balance tests across shards.
I ended up designing a specialized variant of LPT that works well for Playwright test suites. It's now used in WordPress's Gutenberg project, where it cut test runtime from 35 minutes to 23.
The algorithm is called SALT. Here's the detailed write-up if you're interested in job scheduling:
https://dipstickalerts.com - I've been working on this during my kid's naps.
The web app allows car owners in the U.S. to see a list of all the service bulletins the manufacturer has sent out about your car over the years (called Technical Service Bulletins or TSBs). You can subscribe for new bulletins to be sent to your email as well.
These service bulletins are not only recalls but also fixes for known issues with the car.
I found reading these bulletins super helpful for my own car. There were some symptoms I would have never noticed without reading through these bulletins. For example: the tailgate did not lift up all the way in cold weather. Turns out this was fixed and covered under the extended warranty.
The infrastructure is all built on top of Cloudflare workers. I use Gemini Flash Lite to summarize and filter the bulletins.
This is my first web app (thank you AI) so any feedback is welcome!
More things than I meant to, but one's live and three are landing soon. I quit someone else's work a little while back, spent some time building a game that I'll get back too to the extent I can support myself, and then started a things-I-want-and-others-might-want-too studio.
https://sponder.app (Live) - an RSS and podcast mutator. Filter feeds for what you want, merge, time-delay, and drip articles on a cadence (I like to start from feeds' beginnings). For podcasts, detect similar metadata to previous releases so you can skip reruns.
https://tellmeapenguin.com (Close! Come help test it) - Endless mad libs about whatever you want, and if it's a good story, you can keep writing more chapters. The kiddos love it, and you can share back and forth with grandparents and whatnot to keep sillily in touch.
https://nounogram.com/ (Web is live, apps soon) - Hybrid nonogram and crossword puzzles. Shade the grid to find the layout, then add the words where they fit. I built it to make the kiddo practice handwriting, and then it was more fun than I expected.
https://getyarnt.com (Free until I ship the Stripe integration) - A task tracker that's actively hostile towards you having tasks. Started as a joke, but I'm using it to track my own stuff and really enjoying it. If you have a manager who likes assigning you work, tell them to get Yarnt!
All of it's on https://hahamoment.dev/ in the likely event you don't need any of this but do want to turn on a light.
Had a moment of nostalgia and started building an IRC client for macOS. It’s totally free/open source. And has been fun to customize / add the features I like to see while avoiding the ones I don’t.
I'm still tinkering with my iOS/Android app.
It allows you to get a wake up call, like you would at a hotel, but from a real, friendly person somewhere around the world. If nobody is available to make your call, you'll get an automated call with a friendly recording.
All calls happen through the app so no phone numbers exchanged.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wake-up-call-service/id6741027... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.socurious....
A prolog to c compiler
I got depressed from my grievance with my abusive mother and started reading the compiler dragon book along with artificial intelligence by steve.
Building a modern typing application.
I believe typing is probably one of the most important skills in 21st century for knowledge workers and yet one of the most neglected. Hoping to change that.
Anyone can learn to type fast, without having to think about or look down at the keyboard. We are building the best tool to help people get there quickly
I've been working on https://smalldocs.org for some time. It as if "Claude Code & Microsoft Office had a baby". It's actually very useful if you develop with a terminal based coding agent and sometimes want to get out of the terminal view to dig deep into a topic.
I have had quite a bit of usage: https://smalldocs.org/analytics, which I'm very proud of, with many developers using it week after week.
It's free to use by the way.
Code is open source at: https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs
If you’re in the Minneapolis / Saint Paul metro area and care about trees, you might like my recent project: https://msptrees.com
On a walk and wonder what species is shading you? Curious if the city thinks your boulevard tree is as sickly as you think it is? Find your spot on MSP Trees.
It's been fun working with some public city data and thinking about how to normalize information across different municipalities. Community doesn't end at city boundaries, but municipal GIS data systems sure do. I'm hoping to build tools like this for some more areas if I can track the data down.
Enjoying retirement. Amazed how fast I was able to just stop thinking about software. It's very liberating.
I've been working on a general repository linter. The idea is to declaratively define a set of rules/conventions for your repo, (for things that language-specific linters don't cover), covering things from directory structure, required files, file staleness/freshness, file size, rules for binary files, rules around use of invisible Unicode, etc. - which can be checked deterministically. Many/most large repos have a set of hand-authored scripts for doing these kinds of checks, the tool I'm building basically packages these in a fast, reusable and extensible tool, with some niceties added.
I'm working on a family organizer app Mana - The AI-Connected Home App for Households & Trusted Circles https://share.google/dCKfODeN7c1QhHhft
I spent few months to buil the alternative to Wireshark. Native macOS app, built with Cocoa (Sorry SwiftUI), on top of libwireshark, so you can see the packet details like Wireshark. Support TCP, UDP, DNS, HTTP2, ...
I’m working on ProofLeague, an app for keeping workout promises with friends:
https://proofleague.com (iOS, web app and android)
You create a private league, set a weekly goal (workout 3x a week), and tap Start when you begin a workout. Friends get notified and then have 30 minutes to ask for a selfie. If nobody asks, the workout counts automatically. There’s no public feed or strangers involved, just a small group keeping each other honest.
My friends and I had been doing a version of this via text message for years, but this app has been great. I am in 4 "leagues", all of them get notified at once and then I only share my selfie once and it automatically goes to any group that asks. It's motivating and hilarious to see people working out.
It's free and would love for you guys to try it and set up a league with friends or family. Please send me any feedback at [email protected]
LineLedger - open source (AGPL) accounting. I run a few small companies in BC and got sick of paying for 7 QuickBooks subscriptions, so I built my own.
First thing I've ever open sourced, feedback welcome: https://github.com/lineledger/lineledger