alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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Float-explorer, a tool for generating very precise assembly programs to explore the darkest recesses of floating-point behavior on your processor without having to bully the compiler into generating the code for you.
And when I say darkest recesses, I'm not referring to "0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3" (which is fairly well-known) but things like "so when you turn on denormal flushing, how exactly are you defining it because there's at least three different definitions..." Or also "does my emulator actually emulate floating-point behavior correctly, or is it delegating to the current hardware which might have a slightly different definition?"
I built BookDMV (https://bookdmv.app), it watches DMV offices for open appointments and either alerts you or books one automatically.
We're working on Drawers (https://drawers.computer), a macOS app to give each of your projects its own dock, space, and windows.
We integrate with macOS spaces to switch out a project-specific dock on each space, containing only the resources you need for that project. We made it possible to add granular resources instead of full apps to the dock (think specific slack channels instead of the whole slack app), to keep the dock hyper focused on what you need.
We built this to stay focused while working on the computer, and we thought that the native interface mixed all our projects together, causing us to get distracted.
Looking for beta testers! Free download from https://drawers.computer
Mqtt broker on esp32 for long term deployments https://github.com/skittleson/mqtt_broker_esp
I have been working on two opensource tools:
https://dhuan.github.io/mock/latest/examples.html Command line utility that lets you build APIs with just one command.
https://github.com/dhuan/dop JSON/YAML manipulation with AWK style approach.
I’m continuing to work on my daily puzzle game Tiled Words!
Forbes just wrote an article about it which was a fun surprise! [1]
It recently turned 6 months old which is wild to me. My wife and I have made a new puzzle every day for half a year! I wrote a blog post about this [2]
I recently released user logins. That went well and a lot of people are using them. I also let you filter the backlog by completed puzzles based on player feedback.
This week I’m going to start releasing player submitted puzzles and release my puzzle building tools. You can watch a video for a sneak peek of those tools. [3]
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2026/05/02/bored-o...
2. https://paulmakeswebsites.com/writing/six-months-of-tiled-wo...
I've been working on an update to my flashcards app for over a year and half now and I'm finally nearing completion. This is for Mac and iOS only and the app uses Core Data with CloudKit for syncing its data, which has been interesting learning the ins and outs of. (For instance, CloudKit can throttle your sync if you have too many objects, so I ended up having to create snapshot objects to carry lots of records in bulk which I then expand in a local SQLite database to get around its limitations.)
The app has a lot of UX details that I've really enjoyed working on. I wrote up some notes about it here: https://www.freshcardsapp.com/3/
Separately, also working on a Zettelkasten notes app that pushes you to make small, atomic notes that you can organize in "collections" to provide structure beyond just hyperlinking in the note text: https://understory.ussherpress.com/ This has been a lot of fun iterating on. I started with a Miller Columns UI, like Finder, to visualize the graph of connections between notes, but I found that it was too overwhelming to use, so I scaled back and went with a more Notational Velocity-like quick search bar with note addressing. The app UI mimics a browser because I found that it works really well for something like this. I need to polish it a bit more and want to find people who will give it a beta test to help me iterate on the ideas some more.
[NO-AI]
Being a weightlifter for 20+ years now, I'm working on a barbell speed and path tracking sensor based on newer IMU hardware technologies, which makes it both more precise and cheaper than camera- or actuator-based systems. Ultimately it helps you lift and train safer and better.
It's an intersection of industrial design, hardware, firmware, and software (and some sport science, of course). This intersection is not yet dominated by LLMs so it's a breath of fresh air.
In an early prototype stage as in "strap a Raspberry Pi to a bar", but it looks promising and I'm happy to move forward, also using connections from my previous 12+ years in China.
A few OSS projects:
- NookJS: a Javascript/Typescript interpreter and sandbox written in Typescript (https://nookjs.dev)
- Litz: a thin React meta framework that uses RSC as purely a server transport, allowing for more flexible client/server architectures (https://litzjs.dev)
- Nativite: a Vite plugin for building for native platforms using web technologies, with a custom plugin/platform support (https://github.com/samlaycock/nativite)
- superformdata: superjson but for FormData/URLSearchParams (https://github.com/samlaycock/superformdata)
- NoSQL ODM: ODM for various noSQL (and “unstructured” SQL) data stores, supporting both lazy and active data migration strategies (https://github.com/samlaycock/nosql-odm)
Still building https://FastComments.com :) I'm planning on launching a desktop app for it soon with a combined forum. So you could have a community on something like discord, but all the chats are indexed and searchable through a web forum style interface as well. The desktop app is a native C++ app so no electron :)
I'm also working on launching https://watch.ly (network/fs sandbox with human in the loop for ai agents), mostly waiting for the entitlements from apple at this point...
oh and I launched https://dirtforever.net recently to keep Clubs going for Dirt Rally 2 without the EA servers. Learned about the egonet protocol and made a server.
I've had public dotfiles at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice for a long time but recently branded them and after having run native Linux for 6 months, I added a desktop environment based on using niri and Arch Linux.
It can get you up and running in a few minutes with an installer that can set up a new system or keep an existing system up to date. There's also a command line version that works on Arch and Debian based distros (including WSL 2) and macOS. I use it on my personal devices and a company issued MBP.
I'm not going to lie, I've been using computers for 25 years and this is the happiest I've ever been with using 1 machine for everything (software development, media creation, gaming, etc.).
I’ve been working on Broadcast since Sept 2024:
It’s a self-hosted email marketing/newsletter app. The basic idea is: own your subscriber database, run the app on your own server, and send through SES/Postmark/Mailgun/SMTP instead of being locked into another SaaS.
Not trying to be “Mailchimp but cheaper”. It’s more for technical founders, agencies, and consultants who want a boring, controllable email tool they can deploy for themselves or clients.
I’ve kept the changelog public because I wanted the work to be visible: https://sendbroadcast.net/changelog
My buyers are typically people who want to own their data and are in regions that have strict data privacy regulation/laws.
Interesting fact: This was my real last project where v1 was built by hand before AI coding became the norm in the software industry.
BrowserBox demos: https://win9-5.com/demo
These embed a remote browser in an iframe to give you “embed anything browser view” custom elements. The demos focus on retro desktops to emphasize the browser - as these common web tropes, the retro desktop, can never actually ship a real browser without something like bbx.
https://browserbox.io https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox
I finally managed to finish a project and publish my first game on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4195030/balls/
It's a short chain-reaction game in which you explode balls bouncing in the screen, and need to build up to target scores. You build bigger and bigger combos as the game progresses.
It was a blast to work on it, starting with a small toy and just adding features that "felt right" until I had a game that was fun to play. It was quite hard to find a balance though, so a lot of numbers are arbitrary - but I enjoy seeing people breaking the game in new ways and finding new builds.
These days I've been working on patching reported bugs and sharing the game with people. Now after the latest patch, I feel like I'm done, but I feel like going back at it and adding an idle mode. And maybe simplify the codebase so I can test and iterate better, and then add many more ball types...
I know that any good LLM could replicate this pretty quickly, but I made this myself and I'm still feeling proud of the accomplishment :)
I wanted a faster, easier mapping app to plan motorcycle rides for myself and with groups, so I finally bit the bullet and started building my own at the beginning of this year.
I got to the MVP state which was useful for my personal use case in about a month. I took it further than that as a learning exercise and as a means to share it with others. Some features that came later are live cursors (like Figma), elevation chart and grade overlay, and QR-code enabled collaboration links to make in-person sharing simple.
Check it out! https://plotalong.app
Figuring out the exact UI/UX I wanted was the hardest part. I did the branding myself, handdrawn on paper, traced in Procreate, and vectored in Sketch. Fast iterations and a good test suite made it possible to try lots of different approaches and refine the one I liked the most. There are roughly 4000 unit tests and over 300 e2e tests that run on multiple environments with fully automated CI/CD.
I’m using Mapbox for the frontend and the whole app is basically just a monolithic Cloudflare Worker. Claude pretty much implemented the entire thing. I got a lot of mileage out of self hosting a Gitea project and recording all my planning sessions as Milestones and Issues. Claude has his own account without admin privileges. The process of managing a team of agents to build this practically autonomously was a bit jaw dropping and eye opening to be honest.
I would love to hear from other pleasure & sport drivers about the features they use or want the most in a routing app. I have an Android app in Play Store review, if you’d like to be an early access tester shoot me an email at my handle @plotalong.app
I'm working on World Watcher (https://worldwatcher.live). It's an interactive map of livecams around the world.
The idea is to have a better experience for navigating livecam streams that are publicly available on YouTube. There are a few livecam aggregators that include maps, but I never felt that any of them were satisfying, as they always require you to open new pages to watch the streams. On World Watcher, you can jump from place to place seamlessly.
You can also filter the streams by type of place or features, for example beaches or cams with audio. And if you don't know where to go, just try out the Explore button.
I am working on a research institute for East Africa, https://maiyoinstitute.org/. I want to tackle the dire lack of environmental data, by using 1. low cost hardware 2. Artificial Intelligence 3. Long term horizon. The problem set is huge, but I am focusing on low cost sensors for Air and Water data collection plus bioacoustics for now.
I’m building a blackjack card counting tool for people to learn how to count and how to identify games that are winnable. It is designed to take a completely novice to an advanced, winning card counter, using a Duolingo like approach - mastery based learning across sequential modules. Minus the ads and dark patterns.
I've been working on RVW, my adaptation of the standard transformer model that is capable of online continual learning without catastrophic forgetting. I finally published the first pre-print of my early experiments: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20064617
Now I'm working on expanding the work into more parameters and improving performance. I just finished an extremely harsh test of a Nemotron-flavored RVW that consisted of stretches of a random assortment of domains interspersed with long runs of single domains. Across all of it the model didn't forget (and actually improved on some of the more challenging domains). PPL on SmolTalk is still in the ~18 range, which I'd like to get lower, but this is all with only 4B params.
Currently, I'm training a Llama 3.2-flavored RVW with only about 2B params to see how that turns out. Depending on results of that, I may take it to Gemma 4 next.
I’m working on a story time utility.(https://bedtimebookhelper.com/)
You build up a library from your physical books by scanning them in or discover OpenLibrary books to read in app. Then as you mark books in your library as read, it starts building a rotation and recommending books you haven’t read recently. I’ve been using this nightly to track my son’s 1000 books before kindergarten for the last couple of months.
Currently, I’m working to get the app out on Google Play and adding multiple story time attendee support.
I'm working on https://engine.build
It's a durable orchestration system for AI code generation which solves the problem of not being able to trust LLMs to complete long running (and high quality) implementations without having to babysit them and monitor the process, which is what I think is the most exhausting part of coding with AI.
You start with a spec or programmatic task list and the engine runs the whole workflow: implementation, verification, review, fixes, and finalization.
It treats agentic coding like a durable CI-style process, with state, retries, reviewer feedback, commits, and auditability built in. It's externally orchestrated, meaning it's not the agent running the loop, it's simply agents being used as tools and spawned in the loop as needed without awareness of the loop itself.
It's going to be open sourced soon and it's not meant to replace your IDE or Agentic Harness of choice. You keep using codex/claude code/open code/cursor/pi whatever you want and simply delegate the actual implementation to the engine, through MCP/CLI and other integration points.
It supports any LLM provider so you can have GPT 5.5 implementing and a mix of Opus 4.7 / Deepseek v4 Pro / GPT 5.5 reviewing at every phase for example.
Sign up on the website or follow us on https://x.com/enginedotbuild or me personally on https://x.com/aljosa , desperately need more followers :D
I’m an application developer by day, but lately Claude Code and Codex have finally made microcontrollers approachable enough for me to start tinkering with them on the side. I built this little “holographic” display that shows the surf forecast for any beach. While my friend built the casing, and mechanical part of it
https://x.com/paulnovacovici/status/2041722840190480581?s=46...
I've made https://rankr.click
It's a little web application that allows for the ranking of all kinds of abstract entities. Think of the merging of Goodreads for books, Vivino for wine, Letterboxd for film, etc. This will allow you to instead rank whatever you want across a variety of different categories in a single place.
Using your rankings across all these different fields, you can draw analysis of what you like, and in future I'd like to add a little personal (not an ad) recommendation engine to help you find new stuff based on your actual interests across loads of different categories.
From a technical point of view, its been a great learning opportunity on how to fully host a complete stack using an opiniated, but cross-platform orchestrator, allowing me to host this wherever (bare metal VPS, homebrew system, cloud provider) in a flash.
A no-code platform packaged as an AI tool for building data-driven applications and serving as a data store for AI to tell it interact with your data; https://saasufy.com/ - Tested with Claude Code and pi.
I am hacking on an alternative to Builtwith: bloomberry.com. Unlike Builtwith, you can search for companies that use any backend/backoffice product such as Jira/Atlassian, and Github (enterprise/free).
After quite a few years of coming up with and implementing 'great ideas' but not being able to follow through to making them revenue generating products, I'm on my best bet so far.
I always wanted to build a real-life puzzle game, which is app/mobile assisted. Had yet another eureka moment, and built a usable prototype (backend plus iOS app). Good feedback from a small circle.
For a while I was aware of someone (I knew by sight) who worked in the same sort of subject matter (but a non-tech). I approached her, we had a coffee, I pitched the idea and how she could bring it to life, as I made the tech side. She jumped on board.
We're two and a half weeks in, have gone full speed and are making something great (for our audience). My future co-founder is amazing, great insights, opinions, drive. We're potentially launching in a couple of weeks, a free/MVP version of a puzzle game.
I've been through many iterations of trying to get something off the ground. Tried tech co-founders, and the last years of going solo (very hard after you've done the coding). But this now feels right. A puzzle app/game for every day people to have some fun. And a future co-founder whose life is outside tech, who's bring a sort of fun energy outwith let's make loads of money or isn't the framework/AI cool.
Balance is good. Contact with reality is good too :)
Working on tsz (https://tsz.dev)
a performance-first TypeScript checker written in Rust. Started 5 months ago and it's been mostly AI-written code. 99.8% tsc conformance test pass rate today. Single file benchmarks are 3–5x faster than tsgo.
3 things
- AI assisted academic progress reports so parents can effortless stay on top of kids middle/high school academics. https://www.gpa.coach
- A family economy app where parents set the rules, kids earn credits for chores and good behavior and kids redeem credits for screen time, money, and other benefits. https://www.kredz.app
- AI first fun mobile media editor your parents could use. https://www.mix.photos/
I'm working on a general repo shape/structure linter (language agnostic)[0] - the idea is to enforce things like directory structure, existence of various files (LICENCE, etc.), file naming patterns, jsonpath + schema over json/yaml/toml, absence of potentially malicious unicode. It comes with rule bundles for various languages/presets which can be combined and extended. A goal is for it to be very fast, and useable on huge monorepos. I noticed myself having to add various forms of validation/scripts when coding using AI, and decided to build a reusable, fast tool for this purpose instead of rolling validation scripts for each project.
I do calisthenics 3×/week plus Ironman 70.3 prep, which means my training lives across Garmin, Polar, Withings + FIT files and front-lever sessions that no mainstream app models. So I built one that does both (and have been using for the past 4 years+): logs custom strength moves (front lever, FLAC, ¾ pull-ups), aggregates the connected devices (Polar, Garmin, Suunto, Withings, Apple Health) into one weekly view. Currently trying to see if can integrate some AI insights to my training routines. App is free for now as it does not cost me much (only servers for now), comment / use cases welcome: https://obitrain.com/
I've been working on a pure Clojure implementation of WebRTC Data Channels (SCTP over DTLS over UDP). The library provides a minimal, dependency-free (except for Clojure itself) way to establish peer-to-peer data channels on the JVM.
I've always wanted this and have used it to experiment with Gemini's cloud agent Google Jules.
I'm currently working on BetterCapture (https://github.com/jsattler/BetterCapture), which is a lightweight (~4MB size and low memory/cpu footprint) screen recorder for macOS that lives in your menu bar. It supports ProRes 422/4444, HEVC, and H.264 — including alpha channel and HDR. Frame rates from 24 to 120fps. System audio and mic simultaneously. You can also exclude specific things from recordings, like the menu bar, dock, or wallpaper.
No tracking, no analytics, no cloud uploads, no account. MIT licensed. Everything stays on your Mac.
I'm currently planning and designing a plugin system, so others can contribute new functionality without affecting the scope of BetterCapture itself - which should stay as small as possible.
* Tab Wrangler GitHub Project: https://github.com/tabwrangler/tabwrangler
* Tab Wrangler for Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tab-wrangler/egnjhc...
Continuing to work on Tab Wrangler, an extension for both Chrome and Firefox that has been available and open source for 10+ years. It auto-closes tabs when they have not been active for a configurable amount of time, similar to the feature built into Mobile Safari but more configurable.
I have been maintaining it and in the past few months added features that had been requested for a long time.
I'm building Deptheos (https://github.com/ryanmitts/deptheos), a photography/macro focus stacking program.
It works on MacOS, built with Swift and Metal. My goal is to make a super fast, and free, focus stacking program. I provided a notarized MacOS DMG for the initial release, but if built yourself, it will run on an M4/M5 series iPad Pro as well.
The core ability I wanted was to support RAW files as inputs, with DNG files as outputs. This is done using either LibRaw, or Adobe DNG Converter (runtime options).
I have been really into macro photography the last couple years, and have been slowly working on trying to build my own program to handle the focus stacking.
I'm working on a diffusion-powered UI design tool. My short term goal is to make AI-designed UI not look like Tailwind. My long-term goal is to be Figma, but powered by diffusion.
I quit Figma about 4mo ago to start working on this, and the gpt-image-2 drop really legitized the bet. I recently release Brands for diffui, which let you establish a design system and consistently generate with it. I made a Brand out of the recent UFO files release, which allow for some really fun designs:
https://diffui.ai/brand/2ff1b00a-d698-43ea-a42e-7c4a2e670c04 (no account required to generate with this if you want to try)
I'm working on a web app that animates hand drawn human characters. You try it here without any login or anything:
It doesn't use generative AI, instead it auto-rigs the drawings in just a few seconds.
Acoustic diagnosis of electrical problems on the electric grid!
I'm building a tool that allows you to determine the health of an electric transformer from only your phone. It tells you:
- the loading
- the health of the windings and core
- and whether the phases are unbalanced
Acoustic diagnosis of electric issues is FASCINATING, and it feels like there hasn't been a lot of research into this, so I have been slowly chasing down various acoustic patterns I find and try to derive them from first principles of physics.
I'm making an iPhone app for it, and Xcode has been truly awful: non-deterministic, crashing all the time, and error messages that tell me absolutely nothing. I would like to use xtool, but it doesn't have the preview, which I need for debugging.
As a data-obsessed golfer trying to get to single digits, I need a tracking app that picks up where Arccos leaves off. So I'm building one: https://shortgamewiz.com (still a bit WIP).
After a few rounds of using it, I already know a few things I didn't before: I suck at right-to-left breaking putts, I baby uphill putts too much, and getting out of bunkers consistently is not good enough if I can't sink the occasional save. So I know what to practice now.
Since getting laid off in Feb, I've been spending my free time polishing up my word game Gram Jam (https://gramjam.app).
I finally finished the (monumental) Svelte 4 -> 5 migration that had been getting dusty for the last year. This unlocked a higher performance ceiling for me to polish my animations and UX. Now I'm revamping my onboarding experience and taking another crack at marketing and promoting it. Last year, I was focusing on setting it up as a PWA and integrating Sentry monitoring and Stripe integration. All important stuff but not what got me excited about the process.
I've been pretty tied up with maintenance and admin work, and haven't gotten a chance to work on the actual game design in a while, so I'm very excited to return to that part of the project soon. I have ideas for new puzzles and modes spilling out of my ears and I feel like with LLMs my prototyping can finally keep up with my brain, now that I have a robust foundation for the game architecture.
A CLI to replace bookmarks in my browser because I noticed some tracking code lurking in my Firefox bookmarks. This is just personal tool for my own use. https://codeberg.org/Marking-Time/marksan
I built The Daily Baffle over at https://dailybaffle.com with a whole bunch of word and logic puzzles I designed.
There's Truthsorting, a logic puzzle where you have to order logical statements to make them true or false.
Pathword, a puzzle where you lay out letters along a path to spell out 4 words.
Morphology, a clued word ladder written by a different contribution daily.
And a few others!
I've been trying to promote it for a few months but I haven't had a ton of luck, to be honest. The audience hovers around 500 people and growing it beyond that has been pretty challenging.
Diving deeper into woodworking and knocking out a few cabinetry/storage projects with the work-in-progress up at at https://shopspec.io
I'm working on a tool to let sfotware developers write well-formatted ebooks and printed novels: https://frequal.com/epublish/
Example book here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYCZJVGX
Just started working on a book to celebrate the 50th year of our symposium, which is coming up in 5 years. The initial idea is a how-to book, filled with essays from past contributors, but since we only started yesterday - that may change.
I'm working on an AI-native email client that organizes, prioritizes, and drafts emails for you.
The vision is for everyone to have an executive assistant that manages their email. It's built for people who spend hours in their inbox every week.
It has automatic prioritization, split inboxes, snippets, bundles, automatic follow-up reminders, and an AI agent that can do stuff for you -- without deleting your emails.
If you've read this far, I'd encourage you to give it a try and let me know what you think!
I'm newly mostly-retired as a VFX software developer & CTO. I'm writing about AI, climate change and more in my blog, https://oberbrunner.com, running Long Now Boston (https://longnowboston.org) to promote long-term thinking, and working through my lifetime backlog of "wouldn't it be great if somebody wrote this" ideas using Claude, at https://github.com/garyo.
You should check out my new open source software build tool, https://pcons.org.
A couple of fun random projects:
- https://shirt.cash - Vibe code your t-shirt ideas and sell them.
- This weekend was substack MCP (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHARlcInLqU)
new ideas welcome lol
I'm building https://clipper.dev
Docker is...quite slow with large images. I've built a registry+pull client+buildkit builder to make it better. It splits apart layers, allowing for files to be shared between related images. In a robotics context, it can make pulls 10x faster. And in a cloud context, the format allows for pulling an image in 15 or 20 seconds instead of 60, without having to do a FUSE w/lazy pulling. Builds are faster, I store 7x less data due to better deduplication, I can run security scans faster due to not having to unpack tarball layers, etc, etc. I want to be the default registry for all ML related work, in the future.
I made https://poemd.dev/ as an online markdown scratchpad that supports GitHub Flavoured Markdown and stores all data in the URL. This means there are no accounts to work with and everything is basically stored in bookmarks if you choose to.
The persistence model makes documents somewhat sharable, but I do find Open Graph previews to be mixed. In Messenger it renders the whole URL, which is quite long due to encoding, and that kills the conversation view.
Research grade orbital mechanics, specifically of asteroids/comets. I've been working on it for 4 years now, finally tried using some AI tooling the last few months and ended up vibe coding a fun little visualization.
(Desktop Strongly recommended) https://dahlend.github.io/ketev/