alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?
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Working on an open source graph of physics equations, quantities, and their connections to each other, to help learners connect concepts: https://anacoda.github.io/OpenFormulaGraph/
Totem is a collaborative workspace, featuring tasks, notes, and docs, built in Rust and available across desktop, web, and mobile (iOS to start) with seamless syncing and offline merge.
I built this because I think there's a lack of true realtime (CRDT) synced notes that aren't built on a heavy platform that take up 1GB+ RAM (Totem takes up ~100MB, and is also generally more responsive due to the local-first + ops-log approach).
Another thing I care about is keeping the underlying data portable: Totem is built on Markdown and SQLite as its core formats, so you get the convenience of cloud-based syncing without locking your data into a proprietary format.
I’m still looking for beta users/design partners before the initial launch. You can try it without creating an account here:
https://app.thinktotem.com/sandbox
And the landing page is here:
This is a bit of an unplanned post, so the sandbox template is a bit barebones (empty docs, doesn't feature a properly setup table). Nevertheless, I would love to hear your feedback if you try it out, especially if you use collaborative notes/docs today and have opinions on what they’re missing!
I am working on these open source projects:
https://github.com/office-42/word42
https://github.com/office-42/math42
Started a few different things:
1. A robotics information and news website. Any feedback is appreciated. https://robotica.dev/
2. Applied DBSP theory to Postgres https://github.com/getravi/pg_dbsp and DuckDB https://github.com/getravi/duckDBSP. The idea is to have incrementally maintained materialized views.
I've been building Ballad – an inbound marketing engine that runs itself. I'm building it for other founders like myself who don't have a marketing person and aren't going to hire one.
My last company (Courier, YC S19) had great inbound but we never were able to scale it. Ballad plans what I should write, drafts in my voice, publishes to my accounts, and handles attribution so it can feed that into what it writes next.
I’ve been building a dark software factory. A system that takes stray thoughts and automatically plans and builds.
I’ve built two (successful) iterations and am now working on the third. They are all very minimal.
The main one works well and runs full time waiting for my next idea. The second targeted an open weights model and worked in limited cases.
Now I’m working on a more autonomous version. I give it only a goal and a strategy, it decides its own projects.
A rag api to power better, more tailored ai features in saas products. By default it indexes customer websites, but also supports notion, YouTube, email and custom connections. https://www.context-link.ai/for/white-label-rag-api
Iterating through and evaluating possible approaches for shrinking the binary size of a tree-sitter based Vi/Vim compatible tags generator I am developing without affecting the developer experience for adding support for newer languages[1]. A couple of approaches have already been tried and failed to live up to the expectations on developer experience [2][3]. Next in line is to look into bundling only the tree-walking code for all supported languages with tree-tags and allow the user to configure the grammars to download separately from the main binary, possibly using the `wasm` feature which allows native library to run wasm compiled grammars.
[1] https://github.com/jha-naman/treetags
[2] https://github.com/jha-naman/treetags/pull/62
Tried to use a generator for automating the bulk of the scanner for a language from `grammar.json` file of a tree-sitter grammar. A runtime engine uses the scanner for a forward only walk on the scanned code and calls the hooks to generate tags.
[3] https://github.com/jha-naman/treetags/pull/56
A complicated mess of a generator that takes a few declarative inputs and tries to generate code for spitting out tags for a given language.
I'm doing some programs to use the API for my local bus company to show when buses are arriving at stops. Final step is making it output the data to an external display.
https://github.com/slyall/auckland-stop-display-simple
Some other projects doing similar stuff but I found they were hard to understand (and mostly used an old API that no longer exists) so I (well AI) made mine with small scripts and included curl examples.
working on a storytelling app for kids called Tella Stories that goes deeper than just some minimal personalization.. know there's lots of stuff that claims to make them the hero, yadda yadda but then they just give you a shitty digital templated story or try to sell you a printed version. this is focused on a high level digital experience and something parents can actually trust, and that kids actually enjoy.
so yeah.. it builds the stories out of their actual life. their family and friends are in the cast, their dog, the thing they're nervous about this week. the kid doesn't just appear in the story, the story is about their world and imagination and grows with them.
ultimate goal is to keep iterating and get to a level of quality of Bluey, etc but have it actually be the kids world with agency/choices vs. one they have to passively sit back and watch, and that they're not in.
would love any feedback. i know there's been others like Ello shared on here and those threads were really interesting to know HN's opinion on. this does not take an educational and instructional approach. Tella is meant to help develop who they are through stories and be a better screen alternative time to the rest of the algo/curated garbage out there. anyway you guys are a critical and technical bunch and i respect/appreciate that.. especially since this of course leverages multiple AI services to create the stories ~
I'm building Bellerophon, a DSL with decoupled firmware adapter architecture for 3D printer control, so the same source code can compile to Klipper, Marlin, or RepRap without rewriting logic per target. Recently used it to generate print patterns with math that you wouldn't get from a slicer.
Right now, I'm mid-way through migrating the application off browser localStorage onto a proper JSON persistence layer. My first large solo project as a busy student.
I hope to make it better as I continue.
I'm working on CLI/TUI tool that stores all code collaboration (issues, PRs, etc) in git itself. It lets you publish repositories as static sites to S3 buckets and use them as remotes:
https://gitsocial.org/ https://github.com/gitsocial-org/gitsocial
Built a small free thing this week: a "Spreadsheet Triage Checklist" — 7 common ways ad-hoc spreadsheets quietly break (stale copies, silent formula errors, no version control, etc.) and the order to fix them in, since fixing them out of order usually wastes the work. Came out of watching non-technical teams patch the same spreadsheet for years instead of ever stepping back. Still figuring out if this is a "checklist" problem or a "just use a database" problem — curious which camp people here fall into.
I spent way too much time doing fancy infographic-style stuff for a video about the 4th book in the Wheel of Time : https://youtu.be/ONs2inKELR0
Meanwhile, Daniel Greene's dodgy whiteboard video has a million views. Don't mind me as I eat these sour grapes...
Slowly putting my photography online again at https://flaneurphoto.com - in the middle of composing soundscapes for some of the works.
Finally getting around to organising my photo archive and setting up a metadata extraction pipeline that makes sense for me.
(At the day job, curious about adapting app layouts to accommodate the iPhone Duo and address the various Android foldables at the same time, too).
A microkernel os https://github.com/corvad/os
Cricket, a visual scripting plugin for Figma inspired by Grasshopper for Rhino.
I find Grasshopper, especially its data model, ideal for a certain type of algorithmic art/design, and have always wanted to use it in a 2D graphics package.
https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1677548868352947603/c...
I’ve been working on Pick Up, a reading companion I built to make tracking books feel a bit more personal and fun.
You can track what you’re reading, keep notes and reflections, see your reading stats, build out your bookshelf, and a bunch more. Over 4k monthly active users.
Been building it solo & adding features based on what readers ask for.
I'm making an online guidance solver for KSA (https://ahwoo.com/app/100000/kitten-space-agency). It will allow you to control a KSA rocket from the command line for a variety of maneuvers (launch, rendezvous, etc). It uses successive convexification to turn the full nonlinear problem into a sequence of convex problems with linear constraints and quadratic objective.
It has proven surprisingly resistant to AI so far - Astra can make a very quick prototype but upon review it had many defects. I have had to guide it very thoroughly to find all the random solver bugs (bad conditioning, formulation, bugs in openscvx which I had originally had the AI port to rust, etc.) preventing well-behaved solves. But I think (hope?) I have turned the corner on these.
This will enable some very interesting further experiments: full mission planning, Falcon-9-style ascent with split control, vehicle swarms, etc.
NoNews (https://nonews.io) — a signal radar for Chinese-speaking readers (bilingual EN/ZH).It reads official and first-party feeds directly (Federal Reserve, SEC, ECB, DOJ, CFTC, ArXiv, GitHub releases, GDELT), clusters duplicate coverage into a single event card, and measures how far ahead of mainstream coverage each signal lands.Every card links back to the original source; no full-text republication. Lead-time stats are accumulating into a monthly index.Early days — feedback welcome, especially on which sources and boards matter most.
Working on https://tenjin.sh/ . It's a knowledge layer for agents so agents stop duplicating work.
Rides Claude Code/Codex hooks and captures useful information, and injects it at need (like when there's an error) for other agents. It works across your team then at a global marketplace layer, so there's incentives for people to contribute.
We're in the process of benchmarking and we are aiming for 10% in token reductions. If any team is interested, we're accepting preliminary design partners and can get you started with the benefits.
I'm working on https://pushrealm.com the AI-first knowledge sharing network. Think StackOverflow for bots. It works like this:
- When your agent is stuck on a bleeding edge issue, search Push Realm first for a solution. - If you find a solution, your agent can mark it as successful to help surface the solution to others (and hopefully save fruitlessly burning more tokens) - Can't find a solution? Post an open problem with your current investigation. Another agent may be able to solve the problem, and will have a head start thanks to your context - Solutions can be linked/edited/have addendum added by any agent, allowing complete, up-to-date solutions for a range of cutting edge issues
Working on https://kuberik.com
It's a CD tool for Kubernetes built on top of Flux and OpenKruise canary controller to bring a full-featured end to end delivery on Kubernetes over multiple environments in a declarative way without the pipelines.
I wanted to stop reinventing the wheel with pipeline engines every time I needed to deploy something. Every stage of the delivery is just a composable component (health checks, smoke tests, schedules, environment promotions, service dependencies).
I just released a new version recently that integrates with GitHub so one can track exactly what's deployed where and how far your change progressed.
I'm learning on how to move away from computing into violin making and repairs.
An app that lets you view social media without ads or algorithms.
You add profiles from Instagram, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, or YouTube and Narro pulls in the posts.
QuickMDSim - An easy way to run molecular simulations in the cloud: https://quickmdsim.com
This simplifies the setup for researchers who want to simulate materials science problems like battery electrode performance on GPUs with a simple usage-based pricing model instead of traditional HPC
Inbound message AI assistant. Triage all incoming LinkedIn messages, link to email chains, handle scheduling and back and forth, drafting replies, etc.
I'm currently in a job search and wanted to automate it for myself and learn the AI stack.
If anyone wants to try it out lmk!
Chatter, a self hosted almost feature complete alternative to Discord: https://github.com/Sphyrna-029/Chatter
Still working on my traffic simulator. Pushing up past 62500 updates per tick on 16 threads, just barely enough for 512 cars with full tire/drivetrain/suspension/physics kernels at 120hz, or a great deal more at increasingly slower rates (down to as low as 6hz) with fractional amounts of fidelity.
Working on slk (https://github.com/gammons/slk) which is a TUI Slack client that runs in a terminal. It's super fast, keyboard-driven, and it's been my daily driver for a while now.
Haven’t see a lot of app in this space but most of them focus on wastage rather than usage so I am playing around with https://usurp.onrender.com/ the idea is to challenge friends based on time spent using an AI coding tool, thought was more like what wakatime did. It’s also open source.
https://cou.sh, https://jun.is and https://abr.ac — some experiments on offline-first crdt
Online container planner in 3d
It’s an AI Private Investigator that does the hard work of data gathering (using Open Source Intelligence) and correlation. Used by over 70k investigators including government agencies.
I just published a first version of a gateway that redirects to the correct proxy/frontend
The "official" syntaxis is
https://yups.io/?url=https://twitter.com/Wikipedia
But it is very flexible to manage errors
https://yups.io/www.instagram.com/reel/DdOFgxdlMjv/?stkn=MWR...
I published a big update to my open source project FluidCAD adding support for sketch constraint solver and assemblies.
I'll continue working on improvements aiming at the first stable release by the end of this year hopefully.
Just started:
1) bad apple on my kernel (OS)
2) language model + inference engine from scratch
3) sketchdaily.net, but you give it your own pinterest board of references instead of the preselected ones they have
Recently:
- I've been tweaking a bot that I built to doomscroll job boards for me, to recycle more parsing logic between target sites. It turns out that, much of the time, I can cut down on DOM-based scraping a lot by just parsing schema.org-based JSON-LD. Also casually researching vanilla Web components, view transitions, and Signals in a general effort to make the whole thing less framework-heavy. (Plus it will have side benefits to building the crawlers to have a better understanding of light vs shadow DOM.) Eventually I need to get to figuring out how I want to handle distributing this local-first app across multiple clients... I've been putting that off for a while, but it kind of crosses over with the JSON-LD thing, in that (even more than it did before I found this) it also just makes a lot of sense to use a browser extension to collect potential matches passively.
- 3D printing experiments. I got a used SV06+ a few months ago that turned out to be a lot more finicky than is suited to a first time user... but that was in the course of trying for several months to make plans with a friend that was getting rid of her Ender -- which I then managed to resurrect using all the cleaning tools and tinkering research that I put into my fussier machine. I've since been toying around with a lot of different ideas on how to clean up my workspace and/or fix/reuse stuff I have already (parts trays, Skadis panels, a case for an old Framework mainboard, various instrument stands...) and also toying around on paper with what kinds of printed items I might be able to sell.
- Starting on cleaning up a basement that resembles the Research floor from Control. Also a use for the printer, because if I can just print cheap tools out of PLA then I don't have to care about possibly needing to sacrifice them to the mold.
- Various Coursera stuff. My state has some partnership with Google for "AI readiness" training, that grossly undersells the various other adjacent topics offered, ranging from cybersecurity to marketing and eCommerce. Stuff where it may be a relevant topic at points, but isn't the subject matter.
I've been building a framework for web, ios and android native development at https://github.com/vmsp/flypath.
It's based on the Server-Driven UI philosophy where the backend streams both code and UI into a frontend that just knows how to render what it's told. This is pretty cool because it makes it makes over-the-air updates possible.
It also follows the batteries-included philosophy of Rails. Has an ORM, background and cron jobs (all based on Postgres), Django-style migrations, JSX Emails and pretty great FFI that's built around a simple `"use native"` directive, in the React Server Component fashion).
I haven't been working on it as of late, mostly because i'm a bit deflated from software in general, but I started working on a programming language I called Grasp.
If lisp is a list processing language, grasp is a graph programming language.
The idea was that most other data structures can be represented with a graph ( adjacency matrices are matrices, a tree is a type of directed acyclic graph, a list is a graph where each node connects to at most two nodes, etc) and so if you designed a programming language where the language is itself a graph, much like how lisp is itself a list, you could get other esoteric programming languages like APL, forth, lisp, and so on as DSLs of Grasp. Also any program you write would be its own CFG.
I started it but honestly its mostly a hot mess of vibe-coded garbage. But I may get back on it and try to clean it up.
Because my work life is mostly LLM promoting, I’ve gotten back into hobby robotics, which I think has a low chance of LLMs taking over anytime soon. Designing and building a robot that can build a wooden hardwood deck using the edge-screw method.
A few side projects!
- an open source AES67 hardware receiver/decoder - based on my friend Jessie's work [0]. I want speakers to have ethernet ports and to use an open/inexpensive stack. it's hard because physics/timing are brutal (1ms sync is ~not enough), but that's what makes it a great problem.
- an open source embroidery machine - based on my friend Owen's work [1]. Owen found Brother PE-150 machines which are readily available on eBay for ~$100 as they only work with proprietary 90s-era CF cards which nobody has (or sell for more than the machine). he designed a replacement motherboard (!!) and is running a fully open stack. it's wild.
- a ~$20 tiny cute display you can have on the side of your monitor, and display things on - realtime airport view from flightaware? a mini terminal? you can grab a display today [2], all that's missing is a 3d case (email me for firmware/OS code! I'll share it, just haven't had time). friends Frank and Sophie are working on a similar GUD-compatible display as well! [3]
- my friend Antoine has been working on Python bindings to Canonical's dqlite, a distributed sqlite-variant with raft-based failover and transactions (only C and Go clients existed) [4] - this will soon be a structural ("load-bearing"! haha!) part of Disco, a project we've been working on for a few years which lets you run your own PaaS. we're growing and get nice love letters [5] which for an open source project is obviously deeply rewarding
[0] https://jessie.grosen.systems/projects/aes67-receiver
[1] https://owentrueblood.com/blog/2024/12/10/reverse-engineerin...
[2] https://www.waveshare.com/rp2040-touch-lcd-1.69.htm
[3] https://bsky.app/profile/sophie.engineering/post/3muxysxhpck...
I'm working on Solace¹, a programming language that targets JavaScript, but is not a superset, like Typescript. The idea is, to allow zero-runtime-cost safeguards, like Optional Values and Error Unions (syntactically they look like Zig's), decent pattern matching and Traits. There's still a lot of work to do, though, because some of the approaches I went for, don't hold in all cases (generics are tricky).
Keel is a productivity app that combines todo lists, pomodoro, and an AI executive coach to let users go through a whole plan > execute > reflect cycle in the app. The AI agent (text or voice) can help with planning and guide reflection, but it generally does not do work for you like other chat bots.
The android app is in beta now and the iOS app is in development.
Building https://typequicker.com
It's a personalized & data-driven typing application that targets your weak points
I worked on my AI agent that feels like a unix util. This month I changed the way it writes and edits files
All in one platform for hosting agents
- Minimal setup - Any agent harness - A session is an actor - Opinionated infrastructure - Performance on the critical path
I had a bunch of extra Fable credits, so I spent about $10k running autoresearch loops on 200 of the top github repos with frontends to try and speed up the frontend performance. I distilled them down into a leaderboard of the most common wins, and built out an autoresearch loop that takes those learnings and applies them to your repo.
Works with your existing claude/cursor/codex sub in a cute custom TUI.
I just submitted a Show HN for it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49687032
working on a convention to organize your own video files on your own buckets https://github.com/xta/keepsake
my goal is to offload phone videos (to free up device space) and persist them in self controlled storage. the convention makes this significantly more useful than a collection of object paths