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 iterating on a constellation of git collab services that I’m calling “the disappearing code forge.” All self hostable with a focus on minimalism and Unix philosophy.
I just revamped the collaboration portion which is a patchbin service: https://pr.pico.sh
As part of that I work im also iterating on the ci/cd solution we are calling pici: https://ci.pico.sh
AMA
Enjoying an Upper Midwest summer and:
I started making a programming language that is designed to encompass frontend, backend, database, container, and cluster, so that there it is not necessary to stitch together other languages.
It uses functional programming and event sourcing to try and effectively "solve" modern distributed web application development, so that your app code in this language can be extremely simple but not have bad architecture and gaps.
I'm probably oversimplifying the complexity, so I don't even know if it's feasible, but it's pretty fun to give Claude my crazy ideas and see what happens.
Finishing up my GSoC project with MalariaGEN. We're writing a new tool to estimate kinship coefficients between mosquitoes genomes and the project got a lot bigger than I initially planned haha. I'm going to tie up a smaller part for the GSoC submission in August and then keep working on the rest for a paper we're writing up. Also a big shout out to AVX-512 and sleef, for numerical work it is just chef's kiss. For anyone curious you can see the tools used to analyze DNA for disease vector control here, it's pretty interesting :)
I'm adding MoE support to the GPT-2 code from Sebastian Raschka's "Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch)". Just the minimal changes. Planning to do (or at least start!) a from-scratch base model training run on my own hardware before the end of the month.
I'm reviving my multi-player Snake game Snaketron. It's written in Rust and probably the most technically interesting thing about it is that it's built for auto scalable Cloud hosting. The websocket isn't tied to the host actually running the game. And it can scale and rebalance in the middle of the a match without disrupting the game.
My family has gotten into camping the past couple years. I was navigating around the Texas State Parks' website and got annoyed trying to find the right combination of amenities, trails, etc.
I decided to make my own version of the state parks website which surfaces precisely what you need for all parks in one place and make it filterable. I've been adding states and features to it for the last month or so and I'm up to 20 states and 1252 parks.
I try to keep each parks' fire bans, alerts, and events updated on a cadence.
Hosting an XGBoost-model for MLB totals predictions. It runs every thirty minutes: incorporating weather at the hyperlocal level and joins with player attributes that are provably affected by that weather. It also provides advanced decision-making tools with a Kelly Criterion calculator built in. Model still needs some calibration for bet-sizing but is very close to production-ready.
Robust historical evaluations available at https://ballcast.app/validation
I have two personal projects at the moment.
First, https://agency.nu/ a personal agent platform for people who aren’t necessarily developers, but still want to connect multiple Gmail, Calendar, and other accounts and automate workflows across them. Spent a lot of time making the interaction easy and natural, so it supports chat, realtime voice and telegram.
Second, https://vinarium.one/ something I primarily built for myself to keep track of the wines in my wine fridge, when to drink them, and what pairs well with a particular dish.
Both are very much scratching my own itch, but I’m curious if either resonates with anyone else here.
I've always ran into an issue running arbitrary processes - whether it be for serious production work, or just toy scripts. So many choices with so many dependencies, featuring so many foot-guns. So I decided to take a stab at solving the problem. Would love any feedback or contributors :)
SystemG - An agent-friendly general process composer.
Waiting for the remaining broadcast equipment for my LPFM (www.kpbj.fm) to arrive! Then we finally get on the broadcast band. We have over 80 shows at this point. We still need fundraising support. If you are in Los Angeles and want to support freeform community please reach out.
I’ve been playing around with exploiting LLMs having ‘read’ every book ever written to make a chatbot to help people choose library books. You talk to it a bit about things you’ve read, and it uses the llm’s latent knowledge of books to suggest ones you might like.
It’s pretty fun! It might even work on your local library (I got carried away and spent a while making it work on a few thousand round the world - you can see the coverage here: https://leafle.nanosheep.net/coverage).
I’m working on “nah” [1] an agent hook guard that blocks catastrophic agent actions like filesystem destruction, secrets exfiltration, and git disasters.
All the agent hook guards I’ve seen can be easily removed by agents (and they often do so they can get going with the task). I made mine harder to remove, and I’m working on making it impossible.
I also made “nah” easily extensible. Just point your agent to the docs which ship with the CLI, and ask it to build a custom guard.
I’m working on strong Python and Typescript pseudo-interpreters so I can detect disasters in inline code with less false positives. Bash parser is already very strong.
This is a side-project that I want to be proud off. I spend a lot of time designing, not just coding.
[1] nahguard.ai
Petrichor, a music player for macOS: https://petrichor.page/
This has been my work outside of work, which I spend most of my weekends on. It has gotten enough downloads (23k+) and traction to motivate me to continue.
I'm updating Metabase's Podman documentation to reflect using Quadlet instead of "the old way." It's my first open source contribution in quite awhile and while it's tiny I'm excited for it. It's a chance to get to know pi.dev, not to write, but to behave as a copy editor and fact checker. Since it uses Mistral on the back-end it's a slightly insane copy editor and fact checker, but that's almost better. It's forcing me to check everything I say.
As per usual for the last two years I'm working on an open source spreadsheet engine called IronCalc. It is super exciting. We have a proof of concept at
In the last couple of months my partner and myself quit our jobs to work on that. I am pretty sure that in a year from now the world is going to have a fairly competent spreadsheet alternative.
My capacity is fairly limited but I am trying to build a community around it. Join us!
I've been following my curiosity to see if I can find "ten (or twenty) year projects", as part of my "second life"; the first was before turning 40-ish, the second is now.
I think I have found three, and they will keep me quite busy for a while.
Read/Think: Bioelectric networks as the software plane of morphology
cf. Allen Center / Levin labs / TAME
https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10346 and other work from that fecund lab is ever-fascinating. I have been following their work for five or six years. Much of that informed a giant essay I wrote prompted by an essay contest on Consciousness: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/consciousness-lives-in-a-ded...
Read/Think/Research/Write: How to write a Hard SciFi novel that does not have magic technology genius, and certainly not magic ET showing up to save the day?
A spec fic author friend is on my case about it, because he said "why the hell haven't you written your novel yet?" and I foolishly said "yeah why not? okay let me do it", and now I'm stuck in an honour pact. Write or die trying.
Side-quest of $DayJob: Um, how does the weather even work (metrology)?
Because that's what happens when you're helping an applied sciences team run weather forecasting models, like WRF (pronounced "Worf", which I absolutely love :D). My day-to-day is packer and FreeBSD and shell scripts, but I have to also understand enough about the domain to be somewhat dangerous.
And also... why isn't everybody using FreeBSD + ZFS for all their server workloads?
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x-posted from my earlier question [0] that David offered to fold into this regular Ask HN he runs... Thanks again; this is cool :)
I've been working on a simple multiplayer word game: http://alphabetsoup.club
It's a bit like NYT Spelling Bee, except it's multiplayer and only your best (longest) word counts toward your score. So, instead of trying to find as many words as possible, the game is more about finding one unusually good word.
Funny timing, I just made my first Show HN post for this a few minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49235347
I'm working on a painting of coneflowers and black-eyed susans from near where I live in New York City.
Oil on canvas, about 28 x 22 in.
I'm working on a multiplayer stock trading game that was inspired by all my favorite board games. https://www.spellfolio.com/
It's a web-based game for 1-8 players, features a tutorial and bots, plays like a board game, and operates with economy, bluffing, forward-planning, risk-taking, course-correcting mechanics.
Play as an amateur psychic navigating a fictional stock market. Receive premonitions, call in your wizard friend, navigate dividends & earnings releases, and chase the glamorous annual investor awards.
If you try it out, please leave me some feedback :)
https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator is still very useful for annotating html prototypes and markdown plans (as well as terminal agent messages). Was glad to see codex team pick up the feature requests in the Codex App.
About to release a fun paid version. All contributors get lifetime free access.
Better running agents run longer, they need better plans. (is my bet)
https://corvi.careers/reports/technology-stack-trends/
It tracks explicit mentions of ~ 181 languages, technologies, vendors, etc as seen in job postings. The motivation was that GitHub activity and developer surveys describe what people use or enjoy, but not necessarily what employers are requesting.
A free and open source chrome extension to help people review code - https://guidedreview.dev
It upgrades your GitHub pull request review experience with a guided walkthrough of the PR optimized for reading.
So I am working on building a low latency streaming dataflow framework - ala gnuradio but actually usable in production. The idea is to have deterministic latency as a first class objective and let all the other benefits fall out of that.
Additionally:
Live graph reconfiguration Timed events Easy simd support Support for non-mmu based architectures Imperitive configuration management and querying at the single runtime level. Can be compiled to wasm, and run in the browser (w/ coors headers). IO/user interface and any GUI is done via typescript.
I'm still working on Hackerman recorder. As a programmer, I really enjoy having live coding videos playing in the background while I work. But it's surprisingly difficult to find hour+ long videos of coding without commentary on Youtube.
What I really wanted was an infinite coding video, so I built one. Pick your IDE/monitor/ambience of choice, hit the Screensaver button, put it on a second monitor or TV, and enjoy infinite coding ASMR.
Recently added a Paper Mode which shows an animated quill that scrawls across a parchment for public domain novels.
Text message reminders and automation.
Send the service number a text message like "call Dave in 2 hours"
and then in 2 hours you get a text back that says "call Dave"
Open in private beta if you're interested email:
I'm working on a go (the game) server. still unpolished, but it's functional! currently hosted on a raspberry pi in my living room and proxied to the public Web via Tailscale. Rust backend, SQLite, preact frontend.
I've been slowly building [MiserablyUnemployed.com](https://miserablyunemployed.com/) for the last four or five months.
It pulls jobs from tens of thousands of company HR pages, and only keeps them for seven days (unless it sees that the job has been filled). No reposts. Only fresh jobs.
Besides that it has a resume builder, matching system, application assistance via an extension, job tracking software, and an interview preparation helper. It turned into some fairly complex software that I ended up learning a lot from!
If any of you try it, let me know what you think.
A low-cost vibecoding website for non-developers. Still in alpha.
I've continued to work on a modal text editor, which has a server-client architecture that supports multiple clients (terminal, native, web) with consistent UI/bindings. I'm not using an editor as I used to, so this is more oriented around viewing/navigating code. I've recently been working on adding a Markdown viewer. The process of being able to use the editor and then get Claude to quickly make changes has been very satisfying.
I've also revived a project to design/implement a programming language. I'm slowing converging on a (keyword-less) syntax and (Beam-like) architecture that's starting to feel good.
hi! i'm building https://easyinvoicepdf.com - a free and open-source invoice generator.
currently building a backend for recurring invoices, a public API, and an MCP server. recently hit 1k stars on GitHub =)
https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf
features:
- no sign-up required and no ads
- live PDF preview & instant download
- save seller & buyer profiles
- flexible tax support (VAT, GST, sales tax, etc.)
- fully customizable invoice templates
- 120+ currencies and 10 languages supported
- and much more
Just promoting a small utility for others that may need it.
For us MacOS users that use Spaces and want to CMD+Tab only inside that Space, the only alternative was AltTab (that I could find) but it has so many more features and goals, plus I had performance issues with it remotely over HPSS which I use heavily so I've generated the simplest utility that only shrinks the CMD+Tab list per Space and nothing else.
Finally, after at least 5 years of trying, I've figured out a photo storage engine for myself, backed by a SQLite database and Cloudflare R2.
https://metallian-photos.fly.dev
It's an Actix Web/Tera/Datastar concoction, hosted on `fly.io`. It provides the backing for galleries for my music site: https://crusty-metallian.net
Now, if only I could actually write something for the blog part...
A new transformers architecture based on relational data instead of text. Been exploring search reranking based on graph data and customer prediction.
https://github.com/relativedb/relational-transformers
https://relationaltransformers.com/
You can read more about the architecture here: https://relativedb.com/blog/relational-transformer
I’ve been gearing up for launching Todone, a CLI / GitHub Action that can scan comments with URLs to GitHub issues, Figma comments, or browser support pages, and more (plugin system available); and open an issue when the issue or comment is resolved, or your target browser has that feature, etc
It’s still in flux and a bit slow as I have to juggle it with my day job, but pretty excited to launch it once it’s good enough for a 1.0!
A workflow orchestration engine built for agent harnesses e.g. Hermes:
Had a problem this week helping a customer troubleshoot some SAML interactions. They couldn't install SAML Tracer in their environment and I got tired of digging through HAR files and manually decoding SAML assertions and the like so I made https://hartosaml.com/.
Just drop in your HAR file and get immediate insights into the SAML related events.
Since January I've been working on a storytelling system that fuses what I think is the best of interactive fiction / MUDs with the strengths of LLMs. The world model is entirely deterministic, but the LLM interprets the player and narrates the game and NPCs.
Also hacking on something similar to YC's QM but designed for small non-profits to ease as much back office work as possible.
I'm working my way through "Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding". Thank you so much, HN!
I recently got a Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad and have been using them on two different Macbooks (work and non-work).
I couldn't find a good way switch them between different Macs, so I made https://github.com/MegaManSec/magic-switch. It's a small application which allows you to basically share the peripherals between Macs, and send them back-and-forth either manually or automatically.
I'm building Prospex (https://prospex.ch), a lead-generation tool for B2B salespeople in Switzerland. This is just a side-project as I have a full-time job.
Basically, I'm collecting public data (official registries, job boards, company websites, linkedin etc) to surface sales opportunity signals, like leadership change, new branch/market entry, funding rounds, etc.
I had a lot of chats in OpenRouter, google AI Studio and lm studio and no good way to view/search/combine them together. ThreadShelf started as a local archive with semantic search/MCP, and later grew support for continuing conversations through llama.cpp or OpenRouter. https://github.com/ChrystianSchutz/ThreadShelf It is my first time creating oss so please be gentle.
I have had fun building a small test-framework in Gleam recently.
https://github.com/eliasson/garanti/
Just this friday I wrote an article that took a look under the hood.
https://markuseliasson.se/article/under-the-hood-of-a-gleam-...
I'm working on codecast. Something that started as a way to index / search and sync agent sessions from their jsonl files has turned into a high level desktop/mobile orchestration and product / steering layer above agent sessions. It's a huge productivity boon for me and for teams that have adopted it.
A music recommender website oriented towards albums.
Tell it your 5 favorite albums, get an immediate suggestions list. No sign up, free to use, integrated with Spotify to hear immediate samples (or the whole album).
neely (https://neely.app) - club & team management for amateur sports clubs in the DACH region, starting with youth handball. I coach youth handball myself. The incumbent here is SpielerPlus - practically every handball team in Germany uses it, and I've yet to meet a coach who's happy with it. That gap is the whole opportunity.
Most inventions are just better versions of things that already exist - I'm building the Google Workspace for clubs.
An interactive compound-interest explainer, based on The Compound Effect book https://github.com/alexadam/compound-effect
Added more widgets to Printable Mockups https://github.com/alexadam/printable-mockups & https://www.printablemockups.com/
Audion, interpreted scripting language that is fun to write and lets you make interactive music, a/v installations using supercollider or any daw and hardware. BPM synchronization between real OS threads and Ableton sync is built in as well. https://github.com/audion-lang/audion
hack music
I am in the final stages of preparing to ship a 2.0 version of a fairly successful app, that has been shipping for a couple of years.
This is a complete, bottom-to-top rewrite (front- and backend). It's a huge improvement. I used an LLM, quite a bit. It's been a big help.
We're in the last stages of the first-wave testers. This is the one that affects the app UI. After this, we expand the test, and do bug fixes only.
Also, we need to start taking screenshots and app previews for the App Store. That requires setting up a test server, with anonymized (fake) users, so we don't compromise actual user anonymity. It's a bit of a pain, but it has to be done.