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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I am building a dev envirnmont to use Claude Code (or other agentic coding tools) for electronics development. I give Claude access to my lab equipment like my scope. That way I can let claude programm an MCU and at the same time verify that it creates the right output. Also, it can correlate spice simulations with the actual measurements. Which is often tedious to do "manuall" and verify how good my spice simulations are. I am going to record a longer demo, but here is very short video I made about it: https://lucasgerads.com/blog/lecroy-mcp-tutorial/
My wife is on a business trip and so it's just me. Some learnings to share on how the house works:
- Weirdly, the kitchen sink is almost exactly the geometric center of the house; hence, equal probability for odors to travel.
- And that reminds me: Need to download PDF for dishwasher operation.
- Day 2 (Friday) of my wonderful better half's travels, I started laundry. I remembered less then 2 days later that I need to transfer the clean (??) clothes from the bottom device (water/soap) to the upper "dryer" -- this device produces some serious heat. Kills odor causing bacteria, and stuff. Will call that a success.
- I find my clothes are scattered on the floor randomly. Seriously high entropy -- reminds me of CloudFlare's lava lamp application: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand
- Yep, total regression to the mean of bachelor-self and loving life..and the miracles of modern technology, where like the water automatically fills in the washing device. But not the soap.
I am building a virtual machine that starts as fast as containers and can be made portable and easy to use like containers.
free, open source -> https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm
I worked with firecracker a lot back in the day and realized it was a pain to use. And containers had a lot of gotchas too.
Since sandboxing is all the rage now - I think it'd be a better infra primitive than firecracker that works locally/remote and etc.
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".
Games. Well, mostly tooling surrounding them it seems. In the last 2 months I've made a pixel art editor for Android, a headless population simulator(still balancing parameters on this one, not enough NPC's turn to crime at present, and I've also run into some weird issues with market prices, in one instance the price of meat rose enough to cause a integer overflow. I could switch to i64, but honestly meat was supposed to cost around 20 moneys, not 2³²
I'm also working on a 2d procedural animation plugin for bevy, a autotiling plugin for bevy (using 16 tile-dual grid, which the default bevy autotiling plug-in didn't support) and ofc my android pixel editor now has a rig editor mode and a tile editor mode that integrates with the plugins.
Making video games is hard! I keep getting side tracked!
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.
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.
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.
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
I built a desktop X.509 certificate decoder, and a user recently asked for a CLI version that outputs JSON — so I ended up building x509dump.
It’s a command-line tool for decoding certificates and CSRs into structured JSON rather than OpenSSL-style text output.
It decodes the underlying ASN.1/DER structure so fields and extensions are fully expanded, making the output easier to work with programmatically.
I’m planning to expand it to support more PKI artefacts (e.g. CRLs, Keys) over time.
I’m also planning to handle less well-formed inputs (e.g. missing PEM headers/footers, whitespace, or extra surrounding text), which tends to come up in real-world data.
It’s free to download — would be great to get feedback if anyone tries it.
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.
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...
Trying to improve my fine tuned whisper through more custom dataset. I can still see it not understanding certain things currectly.
I've been working on cardcast.gg. It gives you the ability to play Magic: The Gathering with your friends remotely using a webcam.
I got back into MTG back during the pandemic after a long hiatus and Spelltable is what brought me back. My playgroup lamented more features and something tailored to our needs, so curiosity got the better of me and here we are. :)
I've never worked with computer vision before, but I went through a whole journey that started with the classical computer vision techniques and ended with recently migrating to the transformer-based models. Been a really cool adventure!
My playgroup has been loving it so far, and I would love for people to try it and tell me what breaks! Discord is on the site.
http://grandpacad.com - 3D Modeling tool intended for creating 3D prints. AI based. Allows for dimensionally accurate parts as well as organic shapes.
I massively improve it every month. Pretty proud of it.
https://finbodhi.com — It's an app for your financial journey. It helps you track, understand, benchmark and plan your finances - with double-entry accounting. You own your financial data. It’s local-first, syncs across devices, and everything’s encrypted in transit (we do have your email for subscription tracking and analytics). Supports multiple-accounts (track as a family or even as an advisor), multi-currency, a custom sheet/calculator to operate on your accounts (calculate taxes etc) and much more. Most recently, we added support for benchmarking (create custom dashboards tracking nav and value chart of subsets of your portfolio) and US stocks, etfs etc. We recently added family dashboard (e.g. you can see networth, cashflows, income, use sheets at family level and more).
We also write about like:
How fund performance explain part of returns, rest is explained by timing. And ways to tease those out: https://finbodhi.com/docs/blog/benchmark-scenarios
Or, understanding double entry account: https://finbodhi.com/docs/understanding-double-entry
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...
I'm building a website integrity and security monitor. The backend is written in Java/PostgreSQL. The front end is written in JS/React. It will allow for interactive use via front end or be API driven.
I initially was using SSE to push events down to the front end during long scans but decided to switch over to plain old HTTP polling for better reliability across different browsers (and versions of different browsers).
Here are the areas of analysis:
- accessibility
-- check for images with missing alt text
-- check for various form controls missing labels
-- headings not following (h1->h2->h3...)
-- missing lang attribute on <html>
- content
-- check for forbidden words and phrases
-- check for required words and phrases
- performance
-- evaluate time to load page
-- check for excessive inline JS
-- check for inline styles
- security
-- check for SSL certificate expiring soon
-- check for security HTTP headers
-- check whether Server HTTP header is too revealing
- seo
-- check for missing title in head section
-- check for missing meta description
-- check for multiple H1 headings
- site integrity
-- check for broken links
-- check for use of deprecated tags
-- check for insecure http link
- spell check
-- check for possibly misspelled words
Going for a 100% self-service model. No corporate sales cycles, no slide decks, no meetings.
Targeting a June launch.
Working on an Emacs-like editor that uses Clojure instead of Emacs Lisp. It has a C kernel and then uses libsci (Small Clojure Interpreter, built with GraalVM, so it has no Java dependency at runtime).
I call it Hammock, in honor of Rich Hickey's "Hammock Driven Design" https://github.com/tlehman/hammock
I'm working on TableForge[0], it's a browser based, solo or multiplayer, D&D 5e game. TTRPG DMing can be effort-heavy and my friend group constantly has trouble finding enough time to play together let alone set it up. In TableForge, the DM is agentic with access to tools strictly following 5e rules. The DM is responsible for narration and reacting to players but your character sheet, inventory, spells are all real server resources you manage. The DM can interact with them through deterministic 5e-based tools (dice rolls, damage, sheet updates, memory). Players can play in real time or async.
You can provide the DM a premise (or pick one from the library) and it'll flesh out a full campaign story arc. Either way it's a fresh story arc reacting to your actual decisions, every time.
I noticed every competitor in this space was a chatbot with only the last ~10-15 messages stuffed into context. They forgot things, made up dice rolls and rules, and was generally not what I was looking for. So far TableForge has been working well for my friend groups and some random folks from Reddit/organic search. Solo TTRPGers seem to like it too.
It's still in early stages but fully playable. I don't feel comfortable charging anything for yet until I know people enjoy it. If you like it enough to hit the free tier limit, send me some feedback in the webapp and I'll gladly extend your free trial. If you hate it, please also let me know!
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'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.
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/
Jacobin[0] a JVM written in entirely in go. While we still have a way to go to get to feature parity for Java 21, we can sit back and watch the bytecode instructions fly by as they execute, which is something you can't do with the JDK due to the HotSpot JVM's architecture and the fact that it's written in both Java and C++.
We just crossed 5,000 commits. Also, we take testing very seriously: our test code base is presently 160% the size of our production code.
[0] jacobin.org
PSA: This is the best place to collect upvotes for your vibe coded ideas/projects that you think might not be up to "Show HN" quality yet, whether reproducible at the source code or prompting level(s) of software development or not... the bar is understood to be much lower here.
PSA PS. Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans https://news.ycomtem?id=47340079
Working on tooling to help make working with agents in parallel easier, with minimal tools/no deps - https://github.com/andrewhathaway/ag.sh I don’t want to manually manage worktrees, tmux sessions, branches but want to remain in the terminal.
Also recently built a home energy cost/consumption display for the TRMNL - https://andrewhathaway.net/blog/ambient-cost-display-for-oct...
I wanted to make it easier to quickly see/study trending articles on Wikipedia because they tend to make good topics to know before going to trivia night.
I've had the domain for awhile, but just made the app today on a whim.
I use Wikimedia's api to get the trending articles, curate them a bit, add some annotations to provide some context, then push to deploy the static site.
It's web service that allows you to channel your google docs through a more human-friendly name. So, you link
opendocs.to/your-name/resume (an example link)
to your public resume at docs.google.com/dlkjbalksdfd
It's a simple redirect service, but it just looks nicer, and I think the opendocs.to sounds natural. Got to learn a lot with this one, using Vite/React, Node, Postgres all in Docker, with a local profile that builds nginx inside with the containers, or a prod profile on the server where nginx proxies into the containers.
Anyways, check it out!
Right now, only free tier available as I some last tweaking and checking.
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.
Synchronous P2P file sharing tool with post-quantum encryption and virtual mount point (https://keibisoft.com/tools/keibidrop.html)
Both peers mount a virtual FUSE folder. Files shared by one side appear in the other's folder in real time. You can open, copy, and browse your peer's files as if they were local. Files go directly between devices over encrypted gRPC. (by default it tries over LAN, then direct IPV6, then uses a data relay).
The hardest part has been making git repos work through the FUSE mount between peers.
(Been developing the tool for 12 months now, very close to a full release)
I'm working on a new 1v1 scrabble/wordle style game - iOS and Android versions are cooking as well, thanks to Expo.dev. A friend described it as "scrabble that doesn't drag", and I've had a few friends and family members playing hundreds of games (and especially the daily game) over the last few weeks, which has been really encouraging. Play here:
If you're enjoying it, please leave me some feedback: https://discord.gg/pFjEcbQsv
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'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.
Secret Hangout: Private themed lounges for karaoke, board games, and video games, with drinks and snacks. Just launched it a couple weeks ago. https://mysecrethangout.com/
Building up the marketing now. Starting to get some coverage on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/DWxWo_oDfkm/
Worked on some features at open reader, a local-first PDF TTS reader that highlights the words spoken and uses the excellent local kokoro tts engine.
Got fed up with web tech, it's so slow and clunky, so made my own version in python and qt. I changed the design to be based on a doclayout llm, so you can skip or include things like tables and references easily.
It now works so beautifully fast, it's code is readable and simple, no apis or multiple services. Just a qt app, some local llms that can run on a decent cpu and word-leven highlighting and playback selection.
https://github.com/thepycoder/projectwhy-tts
I can listen to papers now!
Adding a scheduler to my hobby kernel with the goal of a full shell coming soon, and an inference engine from scratch in C++. It's been fun.
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 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.
Got fed up that startups and small companies having to pay for Enterprise level compliance and sustainability tools, to be considered as a supplier.
So built Sustalium (https://sustalium.com) which is designed to be easier and faster for micro-small-medium businesses to comply with majority of compliance & sustainability frameworks.
I recently built Cranki [0], a free little PWA that generates crosswords using your Anki flashcard lists. It's aimed at language learners (who find flashcards boring and crossword fun!).
To be honest I built it just for me and then decided it might be useful for others.
It's all local, no server, no database, etc. Mobile and desktop friendly.
I am building devlens.io, an open source tool for codebase visualization tool for easy onboarding and easy PR review. The most interesting and loved feature of the tool is blast radius i.e., If I change this component, how far will the effect be propogated ?
github repo if you wanna check : https://github.com/devlensio/devlensOSS website : https://devlens.io
Just today I helped co-host the SF Permacomputing Club.
It was a lot of fun and I love all the good energy people bring to the conversation about long lasting and community driven tech.
Hi HN,
I’m working on OurCodeLab, a Singapore-based startup. After 11+ years in DevSecOps, I noticed a lot of local SMEs are either overpaying for simple sites or using insecure, bloated templates.
I’m trying to solve this by building high-quality, lightweight landing pages at the most affordable rate possible. Right now, I’m running a promotion: we’ll build your landing page (up to 2 pages) for free if we handle your domain hosting.
I craft each site individually to ensure they meet modern web and cyber standards—no copy-paste layouts. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the model or any feedback on the tech stack.
If you're an SME or know one that needs a hand, reach out at [email protected] for a non-obligatory chat.
I’ve been working on modernizing https://thelounge.chat, a self-hostable web based IRC client
Modernizing in two ways: migrating to new JS tooling (webpack -> vite, Node’s built in sqlite, etc) and adopting ircv3 features like emoji reactions, threaded replies, and typing indicators. Trying to bring IRC into the 21st century.
Its easy to contribute to and we have an active irc channel (perks of building an always-on client…) - feel free to join us! #thelounge on irc.libera.chat
Check out the bundle / CPU savings by leaving webpack: https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge/pull/5064
My daughter introduced me to Pokémon TCG. We found a local group and have been playing for about a year and a half. At this point we have so many bulk cards that it takes way too long to search through them. Other than a few specific pulls we keep in a binder, we honestly have no idea what we own.
I’ve been building a phone app + website (https://MyBulkCards.com) to scan cards and organize where everything is. It’s pretty basic right now, but I can store cards in boxes like “Box 1 AAA, Box 1 BBB, …” and find cards easy peasy. There’s also a friends feature so I can see what others have locally. We borrow cards from each other quite a bit.
It’s been a fun project to build. I trained one model to find a card in the camera frame and another to identify it. Still iterating a lot. One epoch on my Mac M4 takes about 2 hours, and I’m still seeing improvements past epoch 10. Even now, it can find and identify a card more often than not, even without the OCR bits. Both models are under 20MB, run directly in the camera frame, and are fast enough to identify a card as I slide it into view.
I started with Android since that’s what I have, and I’ve shared the app store testing link with my local group for testing. The app is built in React Native, and I’m hoping to get an iPhone version out soon since there are a bunch of iPhone peeps. A couple of the players also got me into MTG, so now I’ve got a pile of Turtles cards too. I’ll be training an MTG model next. I don’t think it’ll be too bad since I can reuse most of the same approach.
I've been working on https://game-pick.eu , a website for friends to easily decide on games to play together. It is voting-based and can show who has which game in their library to see who would yet have to buy it. I'm planning on adding features for finding new friends to play with also. It's my first real web project, so I'm excited how it will go.
I recently rebuilt my homelab after moving countries, and in the process updated Proxmox to v9.1.6. Been playing with centralizing my databases into their own LXCs rather than creating an individual one for each application.
When I started doing this, I also decided to try Proxmox's new OCI compatibility, which seems to be working well so far, so I am removing all my Docker VMs and recreating the containers directly on my hypervisor.
A TUI written in gnuCOBOL to show and interact with the API of my cs student associations cursed member kiosk system. (Using curl, as I still want to live).
For said same association, templating and assembling a book of songs and other oddities in Typst for the associations 50th anniversary.
Next project is figuring out what to do with my personal website!
I’m working on my own markdown IDE / Google Docs competitor with an AI agentic editor that coaches on strategy in addition to proof reading. I made it as a side project. Designed it entirely by taking screenshots, annotating them, and giving feedback to codex. Basically applied everything I learned utilizing Claude code a d codex extensively at work to this side project to see how fast I could ship something that felt complete. Check it out: https://clarus.page
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