alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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I am a passionate player of this traditional German card game called "Doppelkopf". It's a fantastic way to spend time away from screens. The game is quite complex which makes it super fun but also hard to pick up.
I'm building a small web app with an interactive tutorial and a browser-based singleplayer game that helps people learn and practice Doppelkopf. I've just released an English version:
Been working on canine.sh for about 2 years now.
It’s an open source project that basically turns your kubernetes into a developer friendly PaaS.
Just crossed 2k apps on the cloud version, no idea how many people run it locally, and thanks to a generous sponsorship from the Portainer folks, I’m able to work on it close to full time.
I'm getting ready to release a re-creation of an old mobile game that got delisted after the devs sold it to a company that subsequently ruined it.
The stack is Babylon + React + Capacitor, which was easy to step into as a full-stack dev with zero game building experience. Currently seeing what I can do to fix some performance issues, though it still works decently for a graphics heavy incremental/idle game.
Beta is still open for Test Flight. Can sign up via https://blossom-beta.blindsignals.io
I'm working on interactive explorations of algorithms and machine learning. Small, visual, hands-on demos that help build intuition by letting people tweak code/parameters and see how things behave in real time.
Recently have been focusing on a personal assistant type of thing.
I've been building it with the agent sdk and any time I want an additional skill, I create it
Examples: parse this pdf containing my credit card bill and add all transactions
Given it has a db, I've been using it to save notes, ideas etc.
Been fun
I'm adding drug-development features, and polish to my open-source molecule viewer and editor, Molchanica: https://www.athanorlab.com/molchanica.
Source code, in rust: https://github.com/David-OConnor/molchanica I've split out its building blocks into their own libraries on crates.io, for anyone building other bio or chem software. I don't think anyone uses them at this time.
During the holidays, I’ve experimented with some ideas. I wondered if it was possible to make money in 2025 using simple, nano banana wrappers, thr answer is yes!
for example, RecolorLife.com and Headshoti.com generate around $800 USD.
Now I will expand for real estate.
For work related items I’ve been building out agent tooling for building some models and PoC projects related to energy industry applications. Been doing the consulting thing for a bit now and gaining more broad knowledge on some of these data center builds. Hoping to spin this into a product soon.
Started playing with gas town which is really cool. I had a naive version built that was just not good enough. This feels like a step in the right direction.
Haven’t had much time to work on any of my physical hands on hobbies lately but maybe when the weather gets better I’ll head back out to the shop again.
Still working away on a free, completely offline transcription app that's available on all platforms with CUDA support as well.
https://blazingbanana.com/work/whistle
Currently tidying up some internal code (also removing the larger model on mobile platforms) and implementing proper diarization (who said what) so that it can be used for more than just personal dictation.
My iOS developer account is _finally_ approved so it will be available through the proper app store soon.
I am working on a query cost analyzer that looks at query performance and does maths against your infrastructure cost to understand what is your dollar cost per query. The idea is that teams (when tables are tagged appropriately) will be notified with their most costly queries and hopefully makes that actionable for teams to clean up some queries.
I am unsure if there is a need for a tool like this in the market but I am becoming more and more curious around databases so this felt like a lower barrier for my product-minded engineer skills to get into.
I'm working on a "simple" (started out that way at least) ETL app for the public library system that I work for; the target output is SQLite databases where Datasette will be the platform to interact with the data being generated/extracted. Primarily, the goal is to provide a simple report tool for staff and give me a source for nightly snapshot outputs to a datalake in parquet format.
building a GPS tracker for my cats who like to wander outside.
some features:
- no monthly subscriptions
- location via GPS/GNSS
- a screen that hangs on my fridge (akin to marauders map, to see where the cats are at all times)
- the location data stays local always.
The tech will be extended to more products - a watch for adults, kids tracker etc. Will release here once I have all the tests completed!
I was working on an Arazzo[0] generator as a plugin for the Serverless Framework. This has now become a fully fledged runner. So far I have it using multiple OpenAPI source descriptions, and just about got retry rules working. Next steps will be for it to be able to reference Workflows in external Arazzo documents.
I'm making a synthesizer drone generator (Webaudio API) with an audio visualizer (Three.js). It's a fibonacci sphere made of 100k particles. I send a sine wave down the spiral and it highlights the different spiral paths contained within the larger fibonacci spiral, which creates some really interesting patterns. I'm currently working on the audio component.
https://github.com/syamp/biscuit - Just a fun experimental tsdb completely written by codex.
A little desktop app that lets me upload transaction csvs from my bank and figure out how much I need to split with my partner. Mostly because I always forget to charge her for utilities or flight bookings and I hate going through the bank UI. Might also expand it with some simple subscription auditing logic.
Also, a dramatic anime intro (complete with cheesy AI generated theme song and video) starring our foster kittens. It's been interesting to learn about some of the techniques needed for consistency, how to storyboard, etc.
I’m building a simple CSS redesign for Hacker News on Safari iOS as an extension: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/y-redesign-for-hacker-news/id6...
I have a few other small side projects that generally improve my day-to-day life, including a better calendar widget for shift workers and a video speed controller that floats on websites where I frequently watch videos for easy access.
I hate all the portfolio tracking tools out there + don't understand why tools like FactSet or CapitalIQ cost so much.
... so I'm building an open source version.
Track all your trades in Excel, and get Sharpe ratios, Sortino ratios, or even pass it on to an LLM to have it recommend trades based on news feeds.
Planning to open source it in the next week or two, once I add the proper tests and docs! :)
My project is WithAudio and is gonna be WithAudio for a while. Its a text to speech reader. Initially I decided to generate pargraph by paragaph. But that was not a great call as users sometimes might have to wait for the whole paragraph to be ready before they can listen. Now I'm working on changing it to sentence by sentence. I think that + adding 2 new languages would take most of my January's budgeted time.
I'm enjoying building a website with solitaire and puzzle games.
I am currently rewriting the engine for the fourth time and plan to add 400 games to the platform in the coming months, as well as social features such as daily challenges, awards and leaderboards.
My main goal, however, is to make this project the largest collection of free modern solitaire games available for mobile devices and desktop computers.
So far, the project has been incredibly exciting, and I've learned so much!
I finally decided to promote my gitignore pattern Python library, pathspec, from v0.x to v1 after 12 years or so.
I'm thinking of reviving my Python SQL parser prototype I have half done. Or maybe resume my Mako template plugin for PyCharm.
Public dataset for exploring 50,000+ 401(k) plans holding $7.5T in assets.
You can look inside a company like Google and see what employees invest in (mostly 2035-2055 target date funds) or how much they contribute ($30K - likely using Mega Backdoor Roth)
DTAP protocol.
Double TAP is lightweight testing framework where users write black box tests as rules checking output from tested "boxes". Boxes could be anything from http client, web server to messages in syslog. This universal approach allows to test anything with just dropping text rules describing system behavior in black box manner.
Building some prototypes around the Recursive Language Model paper. I'm currently working on integrating it with Unity for scene and script automation. Thinking about standardized patterns for retrofitting this into other existing business systems. If I can make it drive Unity reasonably well, I think it could drive a lot of things.
Multiple things, but among many:
- A sports club management platform, and a way for end-users to sign up for sports events, lessons etc.: https://mojtim.ba/en/
- Given the raise of AI, I'm a hiking guide and would like to have that as an alternative, an outdoor activity agency - https://boa.ba (still very WIP)
Two weekend projects:
- https://github.com/rcarmo/gotel (an OpenTelemetry tracing collector/UI, under heavy refactoring)
- https://github.com/rcarmo/toadbox (a simple Docker-based agent sandbox to run Toad/OpenCode/Mistral inside, which I've been cleaning up for general use)
I’m working on a startup that aims to make decarbonisation profitable faster, based on the following idea:
Short and sufficient version here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17288906
Extended version here: https://go.expinent.com/VlChn65
I'm working on The Influencer AI(www.theinfluencer.ai), a platform that lets you create realistic and consistent AI personas('ai influencers') to use on social media or as your brand ambassador. You can use this unique AI person in photos and talking videos, for use cases like talking about your product, creating a high quality Instagram persona, photos for your e-commerce site, etc.
I'm still working on my Web Server Library .NET Core
I'm rewriting from scratch : https://simplew.net/v26/
Been hacking on https://rsolv.dev. It's a security scanner with a couple of unique twists; in addition to using AST validation to cut the false positive rate, it uses a heavily orchestrated LLM to write unit tests that fail if the detected vulnerability is present.
Happy for alpha users; it's really early days right now. Email in profile if you want to give it a try at no cost.
A domain-agnostic, open source scientific database.
“Protein Data Bank-in-a-box”
A domain-agnostic, open source scientific database.
“Protein Data Bank-in-a-Box”
Been working on a Google-sheet backed workout tracker, which basically makes it easy for me to see what I've done or not done recently and pick the next thing to do. I'm thinking of open sourcing this soon, but need to do some "de-monolithing" first.
Locque is a language designed to both be easy for LLMs to read and write, but also for humans to review, and it's designed along my philosophy that the more structure you can give coding agents, the better, so it's dependently typed and hosted on Haskell at the moment. Feedback eagerly solicited.
Still working on my new LPFM radio station https://www.kpbj.fm
We are a 501c(3) and are actively fundraising to build a tower here in Shadow Hills and are launching our live stream and regular schedule February 1st. So far we have about 60 shows in the schedule.
If you're in Los Angeles and have an interest in radio, please hit me up.
My Friend and I are working on Fostrom: https://fostrom.io
It's an IoT Cloud Platform built for developers. We're still in technical preview and are currently working on adding more telemetry to our small device agent written in Rust.
Check out our docs at: https://fostrom.io/docs/
A Substack for 80/20 life advice that gets repeated every year. We all know what to do, the idea of this is to remind us every week of one aspect of life and what best practices are for that area.
https://euzoia.substack.com The concept: https://euzoia.org
Tried to do this as low tech as possible, so website is just an off the shelf notion wrapper
https://interviewcop.com - interview cheating affects both businesses and legit candidates like myself.
I'm trying to solve this problem with AI agents that help interviewers to understand who actually can code and understand the code they're presenting.
"Hold for Me": uses LLM to detect when somebody picks up your call https://github.com/predkambrij/Hold-for-Me-using-ADB
I am working on version 6 of the Nutrisense. A device to keep track of what you eat (calories/protein, etc.) without the need to type it in, in some app.
https://marcelv-net.translate.goog/index.php?w=apparaat&id=3...
My Family recently (in the last couple of years) started to breed Ragdoll cats in the U.K.
In an attempt to support what's involved in this I built Ardent for them. It covers a bunch of the day-to-day concerns (weighing and health tracking), Lineage and Inbreeding prevention, and Owner Pack generation for handovers to new Owners.
Still working on PocketWise (https://pocketwise.app), a simple double-entry accounting app. Just finished adding end-to-end encryption with a zero-trust server model. All encryption and decryption happens in the browser (using PRF), and the server only sees encrypted data.
I am working on a camera module that has SLAM built-in: https://x.com/_asadmemon/status/1989417143398797424
Running on a single-core armv7. It includes a VIO and a nice loop closure. I am now optimizing it further to see if I can fit some basic mapping too.
Continuing to build GhanaHousePlanner https://ghanahouseplanner.com/, currently focused on enhancing the cost accuracy and constraint solver for the generated house floorplans.
https://fuzzygraph.com - aspires to be the most beautiful equation graphing app
TCKR - Scrolling Stock LED Ticker for Windows https://github.com/krypdoh/TCKR
I've been working on this for several weeks/months and I'm happy with the result!
Vibe coded it as my programming skills have eroded with time (or they never existed).
I would really appreciate some feedback.
Writing a WebAssembly module parser from scratch, focusing on good diagnostics/errors and DX.
Currently it's fully-conformant to v2.0 of the spec, while I'm working towards implementing the recently released 3.0 version.
I’m working on a context aware clipboard for Mac.
I found myself switching a lot between apps to get the same info, lots of copy/pasting.
Example, URLs in bookmark (which I forget about), project descriptions , images, folders.
So I built a Mac app that is similar to Raycast, but just for notes. If I want to save a webpage, I click control+option+C and then a window pops up to describe it.
If I press control+option+V, I get a spotlight like window where it does full-text search of all my notes and descriptions and filter so I can either:
- Open
- Insert the data into the current app (chrome, slack, ChatGPT).
I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, and not sure if others will find it useful.