alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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Building Atlas, a recovery analytics platform for athletes.
The core frustration: Apple Watch collects HRV, sleep stages, respiratory rate, blood oxygen, resting HR. Apple does basically nothing useful with any of it. You get ring animations and step counts.
Atlas pulls all of that together and turns it into two scores: recovery and training readiness. The point is to actually use the signal your sensors are already collecting and ensure when you train, it matters. It’s like Whoop, but actually works.
iOS app is live (finally!). Happy to talk shop.
I am working on a Dungeons & Dragons combat tracker: "Top Of The Round".
For those DMs that use tools like these, my app sits between Shieldmaiden and Improved Initiative in terms of features/complexity. I tried to offer as many features as possible but "hide" them in a way that makes it easy to understand the most important information like initiative order, health and conditions, stat-blocks. But then I added many buttons with keyboard shortcuts and a quick-access command-palette (think MacOS Spotlight or Alfred on Linux) that lets you access even more commands and features just by typing.
It is in beta, free and and you can check it out at https://topoftheround.com
I'm back to searching for numbers that are palindromes both in decimal and in binary. [0]
I had an insight the other day, that as I fix the n least (and most, it's a palindrome!) significant decimal digits, I also fix the remainder from division in 5^n. Let's call it R. Since I also fix by that point a bunch of least (and most) significant bits, I can subtract how much they contribute mod 5^n from R, to get the remainder from division in 5^n of the still unknown bit. The thing is, maybe it's not possible to get this specific remainder with the unknown bits, because they're too few.
So, I can prepare in advance a table of size 5^n (for one or more ns) which tells me how many bits from the middle of the palindrome I need, to get a remainder of <index mod 5^n>.
Then when I get to the aforementioned situation, all I need to do is to compare the number in the table to number of unknown bits. If the number in the table is bigger, I can prune the entire subtree.
From a little bit of testing, this seems to work, and it seems to complement my current lookup tables and not prune the same branches. It won't make a huge difference, but every little bit helps.
The important thing, though, is that I'm just happy there are still algorithmic improvements! For a long while I've been only doing engineering improvements such as more efficient tables and porting to CUDA, but since the problem is exponential, real breakthroughs have to come from a better algorithm, and I almost gave up on finding one.
[0] https://ashdnazg.github.io/articles/22/Finding-Really-Big-Pa...
Trying to improve my fine tuned whisper through more custom dataset. I can still see it not understanding certain things currectly.
UI for image logic puzzles (nonograms), I’m working on making them prettier and more user friendly.
Some prototypes are already live in my app. Screenshots in the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/nonoverse-nonogram-puzzles/id6748... (the patterns in the puzzles in the dark mode screenshots, i.e. 4th and 7th).
I'm working on Ruly, a daily number/logic puzzle where you set rules on a grid.
My goal is to make a simple yet interesting procedural and replayable puzzle. It has a couple of weekly variations: on Saturdays you need to break a rule to score max points, and on Mondays there's an added memory aspect which brings variety to the game.
It's mostly vibe-coded which lets me focus on game design and testing. The next step is better onboarding/tutorial and more intuitive UI.
I'm working on https://concludia.org, a site that helps groups of people collaborate on arguments and conclusions. I don't really have any revenue plans for it currently as I suspect it will be rather niche -- I certainly wouldn't mind if it tops out as a small community of users -- but I've found it super useful in various contexts at work and at home.
You can read more about it over at the site, but it allows you to construct and validate arguments in a graphical form, and it has truth/proof propagation so you can see whether a conclusion is currently considered valid or contested. You can create counterpoints where you think the argument breaks down, and strengthen arguments from there. Some upcoming plans are to allow users to validate arguments for themselves, like mark which parts they understand and agree with so they can collapse that part of the graph, and to add more mcp capability so that LLM can help you construct and validate new arguments.
Mame Sama - A free Android/iOS app for finding vegan resources (primarily within, but not limited to, Japan). Essentially it's Instagram with a location requirement. While not-yet-open-source, that is the plan. I wanted to build something without any intention to monetize it, while relying on the community to contribute to its success and maintenance.
Backend is zig, frontend is in Flutter. First foray into zig and I'm really enjoying it.
- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mame-sama-%E3%81%BE%E3%82%81%E...
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mamesama&h...
I'm working on an open source SYZYGY carrier board powered by Zynq 7000 SOC. My goal is to create a simple yet usable platform for SDR experiments. The hardware design is done with KiCad, and everything including the firmware is available publicly.
https://crit.md - a CLI tool for reviewing AI coding agent output like a GitHub PR.
I got frustrated with Claude Code and Cursor producing plausible-but-wrong changes with no easy way to annotate and push back, without making a full PR. crit makes the review stage fun again!
Works on both plans as well as code itself. It’s been very rewarding hearing from folks who use it, everyone has been very kind! My most successful side project already :)
I'm working on several things:
1. Better GitHub insights at https://temporiohq.com (public and very early stage). Demo of what the product can do here: https://temporiohq.com/open-source/github/symfony/symfony
2. My art. Mostly at https://instagram.com/marc.in.space or at https://harmonique.one/works
I have been building an agentic code IDE (like everybody else :)).
Native cross platform app coded in rust + tauri.
I prefer using it to the other agentic code apps I have used. It has multi tab worktree isolated agents, sandboxed tools, git integration, built in code editor (with inline generation), searchable document support (i.e. upload your docs, datasheet and you or the agent can use them) and even built in local image generation (using stable diffusion and flux schnell) and asset handling for game developers. Oh it also has a remote feature so you can share the gui or deploy it on a server and access it on the go.
Working on adding text to 3d also.
It is a hobby project that has grown quite large. Feel free to try it out.
I've been working on https://www.photogenesis.app/
It's an iOS app that applies various generative art effects to your photos, letting you turn your photos into creative animated works of art. It's fully offline, no AI, no subscriptions, no ads, etc.
I'm really proud of it and if you've been in the generative art space for a while you'll instantly recognise many of the techniques I use (circle packing, line walkers, mosaic grid patterns, marching squares, voronoi tessellation, glitch art, string art, perlin flow fields, etc.) pretty much directly inspired by various Coding Train videos.
Direct download link on the App Store is https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photogenesis-photo-art/id67597... if you want to try it out.
* Coming to Android soon too.
https://github.com/exabrial/petrify
Petrify is a machine learning model compiler for the the JVM. It reads your model from an ONNX or other model format, walks the Trees or Linear models, and encodes the model in equivalent JVM bytecode as a stateless class you can invoke.
This differs from every other ONNX Runtime that I know of, which are essentially interpreters. The ONNX Runtimes are also huge (90+mb!?!), JNI, and drag gargantuan dependencies!
This just compiles your models to native bytecode. Much simpler and you end up with 0 dependencies! (you need one interface technically, but I digress).
I'm working on Watch.ly - a remote human-in-the-loop networking and FS sandbox for AI agents like openclaw: https://watch.ly/
Also this week launching https://dirtforever.net/ which is an open alternative to RaceNet Clubs for Dirt Rally 2, since EA is shutting that down.
I'm also expanding the SDK and plugin space for https://fastcomments.com and am planning on adding AI agents because everyone expects that now :) a big challenge is building it in a way that doesn't make half the users mad. So I'm planning on marking any comments left by AI mods with a "bot" tag, and having the system email users on why it made certain decisions, with an option to contest that loops in a real person. I'm hoping this provides value to site owners while not angering real people. The agents could also just do non-invasive things like notify certain moderators when comments violate community standards in some way, or give out awards. I'm also hoping at some point I can run my own hardware for the LLMs so I don't have to share people's data with third parties.
I made a Slack reader/inbox that allows customizable categories / inboxes, message categorization with rules and/or Claude (optional), and fast keyboard navigation:
Also put together a directory of 31k+ personal websites, tagged with design keywords so they're searchable. As someone who loves personal sites, I think it's one of the more comprehensive list of indie / personal sites on the web:
I’m working on (and inside) https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw. It started as “my own OpenClaw” and quickly became an entire workspace to develop and test stuff in. It currently runs my homelab, my Obsidian vault, my blog static generator, a lot of my ARM low level stuff, and after some M365 hackery, my personal mail and calendar as well, all properly sandboxed. The home page at https://taoofmac.com has a list of things I’ve been doing with it over the past few weeks.
I’m building HobbyBoard - A private(self-hosted) visual library(A Pinterest alternative).
Mostly for myself to use for my hobby. Sharing with everyone because I find it genuinely useful.
Yes, it is coded with assistance of LLMs, but I care for the details and it is not vibe-coded in hours.
https://hobbyboard.aravindh.net/
GitHub: https://github.com/aravindhsampath/hobbyboard
Demo (resets every hour): https://demo.hobbyboard.aravindh.net/
Almost ready to do a show HN :-)
Fungi vision detection on the browser. Offline
Trained to detect a few thousands species pretty accurately in near real time.
Now working on expanding to far more species and exploring other CNN architectures.
Just recently launched my suite of media inspection and encoding tools based on FFmpeg.
Still iterating through refinement and features. It's built on Rust + Tauri with a React frontend, in case anyone is curious.
I've created various open-source and commercial tools in the multimedia space over the last 10+ years and wanted to put it all together into something more premium.
Since blacksmith labs and phoenix ai - the ai assisted automotive r&d, security and compliance engineering tool has been on the backburner for a while, I've been helping a couple of blockchain projects and built some tools, besides tinkering with my real-time EVM contract and transaction heuristics and classification engine.
- ETH Watchtower: a real-time EVM monitoring tool with heuristics and classification of contracts and transactions: https://ethwatchtower.xyz
- P2P SSL VPN provider/consumer tools using a blockchain as announcement and settlement layer: https://github.com/rnts08/blockchain-vpn
- OrdexNetwork: https://ordexnetwork.org, I've built https://ordexswap.online and https://ordexswap.online/wallet/ as well as an Umbrel variant of a self-hosted wallet.
- Waya Wolf Coin v3: Helped the team to compile binaries for linux, and modernizing the libraries: https://github.com/rnts08/WWC3-Linux-binaries / https://github.com/Waya-Wolf/WWC3
- Low Cap Exchange algorithmic trading bots with machine learning and automatic ghost trading, because I wanted to see what the most common shapes are on smaller exchanges: https://github.com/rnts08/low-cap-exchange-trading-bot
However, I am really looking for Sr. DevOps/Platform Eng/SRE/System/Network Admin/Infra Engineering or similar, full-time or contract work, see https://timhbergstrom.pro for contact details.
A small project but something that I'm happy about: Postgresql backed persistent queues crate for Rust.
I couldn't find any crate that would be ergonomic enough to use and provide features I deem essential, i.e. retryability, scheduling, poison job detection, barriers, backoff strategies etc.
it's an area I'm familiar with so after spending 2 days trying to integrate external libs I decided to roll my own and I'm quite happy how it turned out in 2 days of development.
I plan to open-source it in the near future but right now using it in my another project and it's running quite well.
Also see:
3 days ago, 220 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700460
5 days ago, 51 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47679021
8 days ago, 21 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47639039
11 days ago, 22 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47600204
A couple of things: 1. data management for music publishers. This came out of nowhere but has got me back into coding, deploying, test. And I've got real lessons using AI-generated code that I wouldn't have got just reading other ppl's blog posts! We've been mapping all the data formats publishers work with, how to organise them better and build a suite of apps around it.
2. the other projects it the framework. Aside from the product itself, I've ended up with a really nice framework (FE and BE) and playbook for copilot to follow. I've hit multiple problems with AI generated code and had to rework it like I have for junior devs! But now, the framework focuses the work and stops the slop!
I want to build out all the product-dev-helper tools I've wanted in the past. I've already got a lovely schema-UI system, UI components which are data-aware and the basis of some low-ish-code tools. I've also nearly got a "run tests and fix" local LLM which saves tokens.
Really enjoying this.
Trying out games posted to HN so i can add them to https://hn-games.marcolabarile.me/
Testing out some ideas to automate data entry workflows from an italian powerlifting federation (FIPL) to OPL https://www.openpowerlifting.org/
A programming language to hack music with
https://github.com/audion-lang/audion
The idea came after I finished a permanent piece for a museum using MaxMsp and python. I always had this thought in the back of my mind that "I could express this so much easier in a few lines of code.."
Check the docs folder for the full language spec.
I really liked how objects came out, I don't think it needs any more since I can do object composition.
There are some nice functions to generate rhythms and melodies with combinatorics, see src/sequences.rs and melodies.rs
Its a WIP but you can use it now to create music with whatever you want: hardware/daws/supercollider , download the nightly release.
supercollider is tightly integrated but not required. I havent had time to develop userland libraries yet but I'm working on it
Have been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix:
https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations.
https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic.
https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".
I built a cooking timer that solves the mental arithmetic of roasting multiple things at once. Pick chicken legs, sweet potato, green beans, etc and it'll give you a simple plan telling you when to put things in, flip them and take them out. Trying to eat more veggies and home cooking so this has helped me a lot!
Still working on:
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - Internet meta database
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds - list of Internet feeds
- https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy - crawling framework
- https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2026 - link meta from year 2026
- https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2025 - link meta from year 2025
Still (in fits and starts) working toward a Bitemporal SQLite based (SaaS, for now) software architecture, because of an obsession with this notion of "Sovereign Software". Any SaaS I build should never lock in customer data, for example.
Current state of work: The implementation of the core data model is wrong. I need to throw it away and redo it from scratch.
Whiplash status: WTF, Time. y u move so fast?
This thread made me---forced me---to accept that it's been well over a year of the agony and ecstasy of solo software construction. Or maybe 2026 is moving way too freaking fast. Or it's good to be obsessive I guess.
Coding agent that seems to beat Claude Code on SWE-bench at half the cost.
8/15 on SWE-bench Verified vs Claude Code's 5/15, ~$0.06/instance vs ~$0.12. Small sample, single repo, lots of caveats. But the direction feels right. Event-sourced reducer, no framework deps beyond the Anthropic SDK.
I'm beginning to homeschool my kids in computing, and we are pairing up chapters of The Elements of Computing System (the Nand2Tetris book) with games that teach similar skills/kinds of thinking (Human Resource Machine, Comet 64, etc...), but we didn't find anything to supplement the first two chapters (where you build basic chips up to an ALU in HDL). I ended up starting creating a kind of browser based kata for those chapters here:
https://virissimo.info/build-your-own-alu/
LMK what you think.
An app for supplementing learning in my masters program [1]. I'm currently in enrolled in the MCS Online from UIUC. My first course, Natural Language Processing, has been interesting, but it's a coursera-based course. This means the lectures are pre-recorded and mostly just the professor reading the slides. It's hard for me to stay engaged and really learn the material. So I started with a series of claude prompts that took the lecture slides and created a pre-watch summary, and then helped me drill the concepts after each lecture. I think converted those into a platform where I can upload notes/lecture slides and have it generate quizzes. It starts with recognition(multiple choice) questions, and eventually moves to recall(short answer) once you prove mastery of a topic. It also generates flashcards from failed answers. It extracts topics from the uploaded materials, and tracks mastery over time. Mastery rots if you don't touch the platform/topic for a while.
I'm not sure if I'll every productize it in any way, but I could see a world where it's used by people prepping for the bar, med boards, various continuing education stuff. Right now it's just a fun platform to build on as I explore the current wave of technologies. Building a framework for evaluating different LLMs for best price/accuracy. Adding a RAG pipeline so wrong answers can point back to source material for further review, etc.
I'm looking at moving from backend engineering to a more MLE or agent pipeline role, so this is giving me something more than school projects to build on. While also helping me do better at school.
https://larm.dev, an uptime monitoring service with a focus on reliability and reduction in false positives. I’ve been building it for myself really but I figure it’s worth sharing it with people in case someone else finds it useful too.
It’s also a lot of fun to work on. Phoenix LiveView dashboard, go probes running on 4 continents, connected to the backend using websocket tunnels. Clickhouse for reporting. Even did a CLI and an MCP for fun.
You can take the probes for a spin with the free response time checking tool and see how fast your site is https://larm.dev/tools/response-time
Game Boy app to explore 4-bit synthesis and "modular" sequencing, smth similar to https://roberthenke.com/technology/inside8032av.html but for Game Boy instead of Commodore PC
i am working on blind relay https://nfltr.xyz - tunnels local services and lets you access them from the internet
Im working on a all-in-one event management platform for studios, event planner etc..,
It consists of CRM, Expense tracking, Equipment Management, Event Gallery( photo share, Face Detection based download, Guest Upload) etc..,
Currently working on moving it from cloud supabase to self hosted version.
I'm trying to get back to verifying some of my old fun ideas. I want to finally build my 3D QR cube (https://deriese.net/qrcubes.html?s=hn) by sending a design to a laser shop, and I also want to find someone with a few termocouples to verify my results to the coffee cup cooling problem (https://deriese.net/coffee.html?s=hn). If anyone wants to help, feel free to send me a message.
I've worked with data my entire career. We need to alt tab so much. What if we put it all on a canvas? Thats what I'm building with Kavla!
Right now working on a CLI that connects a user's local machine to a canvas via websockets. It's open source here: https://github.com/aleda145/kavla-cli
Next steps I want to do more stuff with agents. I have a feeling that the canvas is an awesome interace to see agents working.
Built with tldraw, duckdb and cloudflare
I'm working on an app called Limberly. It focuses on health and ergonomics for sedentary workers - probably most of us here :)
It is scientifically proven[1] that sitting is detrimental to our health, with increased mortality rates. The primary way to reduce the negative effects of sedentary work is to move.
This means doing sessions of resistance training (gym), running, biking, but also taking micro-breaks during work sessions and performing light exercises and stretches.
Research has shown[2] that taking short breaks during work reduces fatigue, and in some cases actually boosts performance.
There are plenty of running and gym apps out there, so Limberly focuses on the last part - helping you take micro-breaks, reminding you to change your posture between sitting and standing, changing which hand holds the mouse (if you're into that) etc.
It is still in early development, so if you'd like to help test and shape the app as we go, please sign up for the waitlist and I'll add you to the testers group. Feel free to also DM me here with any questions or feedback.
Oh, I am also writing a series of articles that explains it more in depth: https://prodzen.dev/articles/building-limberly-part-1-we-re-...
1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10799265/
2: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Nothing fancy, building a local platform to rent/rent-out video games.
Coming from a place where buying games is very expensive, and gaming is an expensive hobby in general.
Tried rotating games locally between friends and friends of friends, now scaling it up.
I'm working on the jank programming language!
https://github.com/jank-lang/jank
It's a native Clojure dialect which is also a C++ dialect, including a JIT compiler and nREPL server. I'm currently building out a custom IR so I can do optimization passes at the level of Clojure semantics, since LLVM will not be able to do them at the LLVM IR level.
B2B SaaS to host 3D scans of DataCenters and industrial plants.
Basically a google streetview tour of your Datacenter or large industrial plant.
You can do some nice things like draw 3D linework to trace the paths of pipes, conduits, eg : https://youtu.be/t8nRhWUl-vA add notes with markdown and html links at useful places in the 3D space.
We have add-ons for generating an 'xray' view floorplan to make it nicer to navigate a large space.
I think we are the first to have a web uploader that can preview and import .e57 panoramas, directly in the web page [ and skip the points if you dont need them ]
Currently in use by a telco in the Americas.
I've got a mobile app.
It allows you to get a wake up call from someone friendly, somewhere out there in the world.
It's got a handful of regular users and it's mostly me making the calls, but it's great fun to wake people up!
No phone number required - these are VoIP calls via the app.
Built it because I think it's cool.
I'm making capability security for distributed systems. The primitives and engine are both open source. Primitives: https://github.com/Hessra-Labs/hessra-tokens Engine: https://github.com/Hessra-Labs/hessra-cap
It's built using biscuits and written in rust. I'm really into it. Using capability security as a model makes building things feel like they snap together a lot more naturally. At least for me.
I've also got a blog post describing it in more detail: https://www.hessra.net/blog/what-problem-led-me-to-capabilit...
Working on Fronteer, a project management app that (1) integrates messaging more cohesively with tasks and (2) better supports external collaborators - think agency clients, customers, etc.
Some of the biggest pain points we’ve seen is chat being separate from a solid task manager, and the pain of collaborating with people outside your own org.
We’re currently in private beta and hope to open it up to the general public soon!
I am working on https://github.com/xi/xiio, a minimal async runtime for python. It is mostly feature complete with a fraction of the code of asyncio or trio. It is great fun to get into low level stuff and hopefully it helps me to better understand the finer details of async programming.
Developing a rigorous scientific definition of what make complex systems persist.
The opposite of the favorite questions: Why did that company I worked for fail? Why did Rome collapse? Why do people get old and die?
Combining information theory with thermodynamics and control theory you get: 1) A set of six pillars that all systems that persist must have. 2) A fundamental 'Action' that all of these systems take. 3) A set of three rules for how system that persists must subdivide
This lets you do things like look at something that is failing and know that there are the 6 pillars and you can then identify them to determine what is failing. (For example there is a system that clears that brain of amyloid plaque and it can fail).
I have applied this to countless systems including Religion, Language, AI Models, Business, the cell, quantum physics, number theory and much more. It is a Rosetta Stone for persistent systems. When there is an unsolved problem in one domain I can map it through this to any other domain that has already solved it.
Note that this doesn't apply to all complex systems, only those that persist.
And to keep this HackerNews related, been applying it to LLM's as they are just a stream of tokens that try to persist to incredible success I might add. Being able to pull from any domain do this brand new field is a giant cheat code.
I’ve been building quantum photonics experiments. Repeating the Bell inequality tests that won the 2022 Nobel, quantum erasers, etc.
I just published a fun interactive 3D demo of SPDC, one of the most common and accessible ways to create entangled pairs of photons. I'm hoping to publish a series of articles on other cool learnings about doing quantum photonics in the lab.
I am mostly polishing old code and old documentation, nothing fascinating. For instance yesterday I fixed a small project called "environment", or fixed it to about 90% - output example here:
https://i.imgur.com/uHpnUox.png
(Don't mind the errors or display issues for now; this project will report which versions of programs are installed on the given computer, and which ones could be updated. A few smaller bugs still remain but the main rewrite was finished now.)
For work-related reasons I have to expand on some python tasks in the coming weeks. Trying to find something interesting here, but I guess I'll just focus on various bioinformatics-related tasks (also related to work). Programming for the most part is not extremely interesting - the only part I actually like is any creativity and useful end results. Fixing bugs is annoying to no ends. Writing documentation is also boring, but can not be avoided.