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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lexera, a kanban board with full multimedia and document include support that saves to markdown, exports to marp to manage teaching materials. it also started out to be my editor of choice for agentic programming as each task is a card. hopefully i will manage to create a page and visible materials soon!
finding simple bipartite expander graphs for better LDPC (expander) codes
I am learning math logic and two languages to use it: TLA+ and Lean.
I am working on these open source projects:
https://github.com/office-42/word42
https://github.com/office-42/math42
I'm making a language. Its name is Pergyra Lang, and there's nothing particularly special about it.
ssh sshfighter.com
Been optimising an ssh ansi rendering engine for six months, starting to look great. Homepage is slop please forgive
I'm working on an arcade joystick with full analog capability using a Hall effect sensor. It's along the lines of the Ultimarc Ultrastik, which I'm currently using, but it has so many shortcomings that I decided to build my own. I decided to go with a rp2350 microcontroller, and it will have inputs for 16 buttons, and outputs for RGB leds for every button. It should be a direct swap for any enclosure designed for a modern Sanwa stick, which it's based on.
I was curious if AI agents could go beyond just making SVGs and create entire skits with them.
So I built a platform to do that. Results were meh until Astra, so I finally open sourced it last weekend.
I want to try again using AI to build an app, and also learn some Rails. I consult at a company that uses ServiceNow for change control and it's absolutely horrible, and they have busted processes atop it. I dream of a change control app that has templates, has better visual indicators of an RFC's stage in the workflow and exactly what needs done to push it along, and just something that doesn't suck as much as SNOW.
I'm working through: https://modernaicourse.org/.
I appreciate that it makes me revisit some math which i've forgotten like directional derivative and why gradient points to highest ascent.
Interesting but hard as well.
i don't know what to do in my 27 age
i don't know what to do in my 28
https://github.com/amir734jj/symmetric-crypto-chat-room
Share an encryption key with someone offline, then chat with them (text + voice + video + file) encrypted with that key. Your JavaScript browser only knows that key. Nothing is shared. True end-to-end encryption in your browser.
I've been doing a bunch of stuff with using a PUT[1] to simulate an IF (Integrate and Fire) neuron[2]. Right now I'm experimenting with variations of pulse-width and frequency of the input spike train, seeing how that affects when the "neuron" fires. In a future step I'll add a resistor to bleed off some of the charge from the timing capacitor, to make it more of a "Leaky Integrate and Fire" neuron.
And then ... well, we'll see. I'm also reading a lot of books and stuff on neuroscience, neuromorphic computing[3], analog computing, etc. I don't have some "grand unified theory" or anything, just playing around in this space.
There's a lot more I could say about this, but I'll save that for a blog post or something. That said, if anybody wants to see some pictures and read some write-ups of some of this stuff, add me on LinkedIn[4] and you'll see some of that stuff in my activity there.
EDIT:
What the heck, here's a picture for anybody who's interested.
https://fogbeam.com/images/scope_20260913_202613.png
The magenta trace is the "spike train" which is output from a Rigol DG4162 Function Generator. The yellow trace is the voltage at the anode of the PUT, which simulates the "action potential" of the neuron membrane. And the cyan trace is the cathode of the PUT, which simulates the output of the neuron. What we see here are several input pulses hitting, with each bumping the action potential up a little, until it finally hits a threshold and then "fires" and resets. Lather rinse repeat.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_unijunction_trans...
[2]: https://neuronaldynamics.epfl.ch/online/Ch1.S3.html
LumifyHub.io
a marketplace for people to safely collect their own AI sessions in their own S3 compat buckets so they can sell them later to dataset buyers.
Recently got genomic DNA purification automated for yeast (plus have automated library prep for nanopore+ a promethion)! As part of the DNA purification task, I had to journey up to Healdsburg to buy some lysis enzyme (thank god for winemakers, 100x cheaper than the biotech grade stuff), and noticed catalogs of different yeast strains with all their flavor profiles and stuff characterized.
I'm thinking about buying all the strains and pushing them through my automated sequencing pipeline, and building a yeast genotype -> flavor converter. Then, I think it'd be neat if you could have someone try a bunch of wines to get their favorite, and then genetically engineer a yeast strain specifically for their favorite flavors. Think that could be neat.
I’ve been building an offline first animation webapp. CRDT-driven to support eventual team features. Just got tweening working this weekend, exporting to video is next.
An integrated softphone, email client, CRM and task manager https://www.benko.app/
1) I've been running a bunch of little daily puzzle games for my friends for a while, finally got around to polishing one for public release
Not like I'm gonna anything much with it, just was fun to get something nice-looking and presentable up for once. Working on polishing more of them and, of course, designing new ones.
2) A font generation system, inspired by Iosevka, albeit much much simpler. Learning tons of interesting technical things about TTF and WOFF2.
Software to promote live music and drink specials so I don't have to check dozens of Instagram accounts to find out what's happening tonight.
I wrote my own site parsing toolkit which removed the friction I have with the current ones. It's now easy to add new locations quickly to scale.
I've continued working on my game project, Vestiges, which is a 2D narrative strategy rogue-like in Godot. In brief: I once had a career in game development, in game design or project direction roles. Life circumstances derailed my career some years ago, but earlier this year a colleague encouraged me to experiment with genAI. I began Vestiges to see if I could create something again, to enjoy the creative process. It progressed well enough that I'm planning to complete and release it.
For various reasons unrelated to the project, progress since last month has been slow (and I expect the next month will be as well). Most of the work I've done has been for peripheral features, not anything on the critical path. After my brother bounced off of the narrative elements (not unexpected :) ), I added an "aliterate" lens that distills the game into its strategy gameplay, burying the narrative content for those who aren't interested in it.
In preparation for releasing a demo version, I added opt-in collection of a session's gameplay data, which I intend to analyze to find ways to improve the UI, UX, gameplay, balance. By default, no identifying information whatsoever is collected. A separate opt-in adds minimal technical information (things like OS, CPU, GPU, display settings).
I added global text size option as an accessibility feature and used an MCP server to have Claude do the initial layout testing. This was an interesting experiment, but requires enough tokens that it's not very practical as a frequent part of development. These features went hand-in-hand -- via the MCP server, Claude takes a screenshot every five seconds to decide what to hover over or click on next. These screenshots consume tokens rapidly, so they are reduced in size. With a larger font size, the screenshots can be reduced further with the text remaining legible to Claude.
Other housekeeping: numerous iterative improvements to my general development process and use of Claude. I wrote my first simple skill: used in conjunction with the brainstorming skill from the superpowers plugin, Claude creates an "origin" document that preserves my initial prompt and some aspects of the brainstorming discussion.
I expect to launch a demo version once my current life situation settles a bit. I'm still not in any particular hurry, but it would be good to start getting player feedback. Also, to the whatever extent I do want Vestiges to have any commercial success, the largest obstacle I'll face is discoverability and marketing.
A meta-comment: When I first mentioned this project, in the July "What are you working on?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886151), I explained some back story of this project. It got a fair amount of attention, rising to the top of the post and encouraging some discussion. Last month (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49234405), I didn't repeat my story and received no upvotes or comments. This presents me with a quandary because it feels uncomfortable/self-indulgent to repeat my story each time, yet without that context, my project isn't particularly notable or interesting. (Or maybe luck/timing was a factor?)
- danterm (https://github.com/danneu/danterm): a better terminal than iterm, ghostty, kitty, etc.
- braid (https://github.com/danneu/braid): a luks+btrfs tool for managing an encrypted disk pool on my NixOS NAS.
- tes3-es (https://github.com/danneu/tes3-es): a comprehensive latam translation of Morrowind.
I really like Morrowind's data file format -- how it's just a sequence of records -- except how bad it is for localization.
Basically, you provide a key for quest/info dialogue like "the ruins", and any time "the ruins" appears in dialogue, the text is hyperlinked such that if you click it, it activates the target dialogue.
But this implicit behavior means that even the production game has a lot of accidental hyperlinks and some bugs like orphaned dialogue branches because someone changed the text to "those ruins" not realizing "the ruins" was critical.
So I used a bunch of LLMs to build a glossary system and lint tools to check consistency. Ideally OpenMW would implement some QoLs here like a l10n dictionary system + markup like "I heard about {the ruins|1823432}."
As usual, my sideproject throughput is entirely limited by tokens.
All those things I use once in a while, I put them on one place without ads or bs. Optimized for usability, not impressions or whatever.
If there's a tool you'd like to see there, let me know and I'll add it.
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A social media platform trying to solve misinformation, astroturfing and inauthentic posting. I also thought there was a real space for some non-US-based social media, so this is based in Australia. This is owing to all the political instability going on in the US right now and especially stuff like users' identities being subpoenaed for criticising the government. It was a pet peeve of mine seeing threads of comments that are obviously artificially created to push some kind of narrative, and the ability to buy likes and upvotes to shape opinion. Nothing ever seems to get done about it on big platforms, so I wanted to make some small contribution towards fixing it. And there's an element of self-interest here, because I want to be able to read a platform where every comment is authentic.
I've been working on it since 2023 and launched in March this year. Recently, native mobile apps have been launched. It was also an experiment in seeing whether Swift Vapor can be used to build a complex backend and the answer appears to be yes. It's a lot of fun to see how bad actors are joining the site, then building automated mechanisms to counter them, using AI to improve detection, without impacting legitimate users. It's also been a great technical challenge to try to support features that the big players support, like video upload and encoding, image upload, CSAM detection, NSFW detection, LLM-generated text detection and auto-translation using DeepL.
There are also lots of legal compliance challenges now with age verification laws coming in around the world, and ensuring you employ all the correct Apple and Google-specific verification (Declared Age Range, Play Age Signals) in the correct global regions. It's also fascinating to see behind the scenes how tight or not so tight current age verification actually is.
Recently, I've been polishing the iOS version to try to hit the 120 Hz target frame rate while scrolling feeds and finding SwiftUI is much less capable at this than the old UIKit approach. I'm also trying to teach myself marketing and how to keep users engaged. I'm primarily code-oriented and historically haven't had to do any marketing myself, and this is a vertical learning curve. I have gained a great deal of respect for those who have 'figured out' marketing, seeing how difficult it is starting from nothing.
It's also satisfying to take a feature from a user suggestion in the morning to an app release including that feature in the evening. This is a speed of delivery that would be unthinkable in the corporate world, where I previously worked, and it's very gratifying to put a complete feature in a user's hands within 24 hours.
Anyway, it's a very long and tough road and may amount to nothing in the end. But if nothing else, it's been immensely educational and enjoyable. Thanks for reading and feel free to check it out:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.topicle.ap...
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