alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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This is my side project turned solo bootstrapped startup that I've been working on over the past 2.5 years. Pastmaps has been solely a US-focused platform since it's initial launch but I'm currently working on launching to the UK and Ireland within the next week. If all goes as planned then I should have a first wave of 30K fully digitized, hi-res, and fully georeferenced 1800s ordnance maps available soon to help folks discover the history all around them.
I'm likely going to need to start building out my own global LiDAR dataset next though. My coverage for the US is quite stellar thanks to the data provided by the USGS' 3DEP program but I'm way out of touch with what's available and possible in the EU. It's gonna be a challenge but I'm excited to dive in.
I'm working on https://artifacts.iofold.com, a way to use artifacts (self contained html + optional assets like image/video/json) easily across agents, with feedback loop and docsend style wttribiti gates.
Have made it agent friendly enough that my teammates' agents can read and drop commennts on specs/storyboards etc, and my agent can close the loop by iterating with a new artifact version.
Automated network port change detection. Scan17 provides a solution to the question:
So your CTO decides to outsource firewall management - and the vendor carelessly leaves a network port open, exposing your production database. How does your team find out before an attacker?
Think of it as nmap port scan diff-ing. If a network port goes from closed to open you get an email or webhook alert. There is a REST API for automated workflows and privately hosted engines will be supported for some plans. There is a wait-list form on the website if you want to stay in the loop.
If you work in infosec / cyber security and are interested in being an early product designer / beta tester, let's chat! See my profile for how to get in touch.
Building South Africa's version of TCGPlayer/Cardmarket/etc, for Yu-Gi-Oh! https://lekkerduelist.co.za
There's competition in the other TCGs, and of course a 2-sided marketplace is one of the hardest things to seed. So this is mostly just a project that I can put any fresh ideas into that I wouldn't be able to at my dayjob.
Koji (https://github.com/iam-mhaseeb/koji) - A dead simple personal website engine for developers focused on simplicity.
Salahmate (https://salahmate.app) - A mobile app that helps Muslims build the habit of praying gently.
Still working on https://compears.shop we’ve added some new features to help people shop in the EU for cheap. I’m hoping we get to expand this to more EU countries
I released 3 games my friend designed, and built a game framework in WebAssembly for building them. Some 9 or 10 months ago I asked my friend (legendary game designer Mike Elliott) if he wanted to work through his backlog of designs he has that he'd love to see brought to life. I'm very protective of my family life and dedicate a lot of my time to it, and have a normal full time job, and so LLM-agents really enabled being able to make stuff like this happen in a reasonable timeframe just working on and off in my free time.
I started them with ebitengine (Golang) but got somewhat frustrated with its web builds, and so built my own thing for small games that I want to work great on mobile or native PC, but also on web. I call it NanoGame, the host is written in Rust and the games are AssemblyScript. I've ported a number of other small games I had written to it as well, but haven't released any.
Two of the games I released a couple days ago were actually the ebitengine versions, but have partial ports to my framework, and the third I released the version using my stuff.
https://scramblequest.app - ebitengine, word search game where you slay monsters with the words, has a long campaign as well as a daily challenge and unlimited play
https://wordpeek.app - ebitengine, another word search game, this one reveals pieces of a picture and your goal is to guess the picture
https://playsilhouette.app - my own framework, this is a simple matching/hidden object(ish) game, more for kids
I also made a little umbrella site for them at https://playthese.wtf
Underscore: https://underscore.audio/
On-demand, procedural audio programs (w/LLMs). I’m working to make these embeddable in software such as games and health/wellness apps.
Would love to hear how developers might use it.
A daily meditation "instrument". I'm a big fan of Waking Up but I've kinda outgrown the catalogue. I know what to do now. I just need a timer and a couple of prompts...
Self hosted media platform with similarity search, face search and clustering, a great fun media player with shuffle, VS mode where you rank your media resulting in an elo, remote access to app over the web, a TikTok style "swipe" mode of your own media. Started as just a good media viewer over 5 years ago but I just keep adding things. Has a small patreon following so people seem to like it. https://lowkeyviewer.com/
I’m still working on a price API for the Counter-Strike 2 market that provides real-time & historical data.
Since my last post in February, I’ve gotten to ~25 paying users, which is cool considering it started as a fun project. Sorta a niche within a niche here.
The market is distributed across a bunch of 3rd-party marketplaces, and there's no 'simple' API that provides genuinely high-quality data for the few marketplaces that matter. It’s a surprisingly complex problem, which is probably why nobody else is bothering :).
It's been a super fun project, and I've been able to learn about collecting & managing a high (to me) scale of data, building an API from the ground-up, and creating my first 'commercial' website.
Website is @ https://cs2.sh/
The API is built w/ Go & Clickhouse, which I've also been super impressed with so far in terms of performance and efficiency.
Web design is inspired/somewhat taken from turbopuffer's site, since I really liked it.
I built my own weather prediction / visualization app: https://wx.rsp.li (on-device temperature lapsing, on device interpolation modes, user-selectable aggregations, etc…). One of these days I should do a writeup.
I also asked Claude to build a photo gallery for me https://places.pascalspoerri.ch (HDR, map support, similar images)
I have a daily puzzle game called https://lettered.io and I’ve been playing around with shareable replay gifs via gifenc. It’s been fun trying to get good looking replays without sacrificing size for quality
The age of AI has been incredible for the daily game space because you can play around with ideas so much faster and riff to find something that works. On the flip side, there’s a lot more games that just rip off another idea and change some mechanic slightly to make it “new”
I’m working on https://checkpost.dev, a lightweight and easy-to-use osquery manager. It is open source, easy to self-host, and ships as a single binary. It only requires osquery to be installed on the endpoints. Checkpost is readonly and doesn't make any changes on the enrolled hosts.
It can run adhoc or scheduled queries and send the results to ClickHouse, or store them locally in Parquet files and use DuckDB to browse the results. It can also initiate YARA scans and collect the results. It also supports policy evaluation and alerting.
I'm working on a side project to clean up and fix EPUB files with transcription errors, incomplete or inaccurate metadata, and other issues. Users can accept/reject/edit the fixes as they go through it. I have the command-line interface and TUI working (thanks to Ratatui), but I'm still working on a Calibre plugin and web-based version using WASM.
I am working on a Jupyter notebook client for VisionOS. It allows for 3D data to be visualized on visionOS. Right now it supports point cloud data, USDZ models and Gaussian Splats. I am working on it to launch on the App Store. Sign up for more information at http://www.pulto.org
In my free time, I'm building an iPad game to help Autistic kids practice real world skills in a virtual town - https://pocketown.app/
Many things:
- BrowserBox just landed WebAuthn (passkeys) - for now just macOS clients: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox
- This website is served entirely from a 200Kb binary: https://200kb.freelang.dev
- An open SSH server with a TUI web browser: ssh krnl.duetbrowser.com
- All the government's 300K+ pages of UFO files released so far: https://hypergrid.systems/war.gov-ufo-viewer/microfilm5?fram...
And more
I’m working on https://main-duck.com/ which simplifies converting your code to mcp. I plan to make this easy to integrate into CI so mcps can be updated easily. It’s hosted remotely and I’m very excited about where it’ll go.
Working on full stack prototyping agents that own their own Aws account (zero deploy friction). Think speed of lovable/ base44 with power of Aws services
Launched a suite of media inspection and encoding tools a few months ago, based on FFmpeg. Slowly getting more customers.
Constantly 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 with an IDE-like experience.
AnswerJournal lets you save AI answers to a personal journal just by saying "save that to my AnswerJournal" mid-conversation.
Each answer gets its own URL, and posts can be public or private. It's a bit like GitHub meets Stack Overflow for the answers AI gives you.
It connects to any MCP-compatible AI (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, etc.) through one server URL.
I am working in https://GoLazy.dev for the last 5 years, but only since last month full time.
It is an opinionated golang web framework for LLM, that comes with some defaults, no OEM (On purpose because I don't believe a ORM is good in go) and based on SVC (Service, View, Controller).
Still not happy with it to publicly announce it, but fuck it. Still WIP and the web needs a mayor clean up.
I made an HN filter for substacks and blogs: https://hnsubstacks.com/
It allowed me to explore a serverless deployement (on CF workers) with a toy project, that I wanted to make for myself.
Repo here: https://github.com/ariroffe/hnsubstacks/
A focused and functional service for event hosts to collect guest photos through a shared link/QR code that leads to an upload page. Think photo gathering for weddings, bachelor/bachelorette parties, corporate events, big birthdays, etc.
There are many of these out there, but I found most unintuitive ("too complicated for Grandma"), too featureful, and/or much too expensive.
I am helping a not-for-profit, [NavSahyog](https://navsahyog.org/), build a custom software for their entire operations and programs that also tracks longitudinal impact. The organization conducts programs for children in Indian villages after school to build live skills.
This is my second iteration because the first version felt like a simplistic fit and improvement over their existing vendor provided app.
I have now designed a domain model based on my understanding and observations. I have a day job so I can't spend a lot of time in sync with the team. I have created a web app where the NGO management can test scenarios (by recording voice), and the AI (Claude Agent SDK) runs it past the domain model. In case, there is a gap, they can persist the scenario. After every iteration, I read through the scenarios and assimilate them into the domain model.
I'm working on a multiplayer RPG https://grimrain.com - calling it an MMO is quite bold, but the gameplay fits that genre. The game server is designed to be self-hostable too, so it's like Valheim meets OSRS
Java Server Side Rendering Web Framework -- zero external runtime dependencies outside the web server layer -- https://github.com/vadimv/server-components The idea is to provide complete Java-centric modern web UI stack for building internal tools and admin panels.
Working on https://razzify.in - Learn hacking using CTF challenges and get hired. https://securepilot.in - Indias first cybersecurity incident management platform for individuals.
Working on Morpheus, an experiment to improve tool usage over small llm like Qwen 30b by introducing JEPA (https://github.com/ichiriac/morpheus)
Just finished working on a new version of customizable Clarity Linux (GTK+) icons.
Created a new website and new icon manager: https://clarity.pl.eu.org
Complite - Elventy template/starter
And a Polish WikiZEIT project:
And ALT - LanguageTool for Emacs
A Web-based, self-hosted database client and editor for teams - https://github.com/p-raj/collab-sqlc
Supports - Postgres - DynamoDB - Clickhouse - Redis
Primary idea is to evolve from SQL client to a Database Client, where users would be able to host queries, share queries and the work remains auditable.
Previously it was an SQL client, a PopSQL alternative. But I am trying to re-work the architecture so that it can support more databases, and services (query-as-service, query-as-reporting-job, etc).
I'm working on a nationwide US parcel dataset: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/landrecordsus/us-parcel-laye....
It's mostly "public" data, but incumbent data vendors charge $90k+ for this data because it has to be acquired and aggregated from 3200+ US counties. This is a lot of work if you aren't using LLMs and agents to do much of the work for you.
I'm trying to make quality parcel data more accessible to everyone.
Part of my job is to approve / reject MCP servers based on how secure they are and whether they are suitable for use in an enterprise environment. I was tired of my team being called the bottleneck to AI adoption, so I set out to automate the whole process.
I periodically collect the MCP servers and every new version from the Official MCP registry and assign them a score based on 29 distinct criteria like runtime guardrails (e.g. destructive tools, over broad permissions, rug pulls), SAST scans and transport & trust model.
As a result of this exercise, I found that 1 in every 10 MCP servers is pretty much unusable (score 40/100 or below). 18% of the popular MCP servers with 1000+ GitHub stars contain one or more security issues. 184 servers to date have changed their tool definitions after publication, which may indicate a "rug pull" attack.
I built this for security minded people who also want to be at the forefront of AI adoption and for security teams who are tired to be called the bottleneck.
Browsing the index is completely free, you only have to request an API key if you want automated, programmatic lookups for any workflow.
Feedback is always welcome!
I'm working on https://topicle.com/ An alternative to Reddit that more aggressively polices bots, spam and astroturfing and has strong guardrails in place against bad moderation. No private profiles that bots use to hide, every mod action can be appealed, mod logs are public, LLM posts are blocked. There's so much obviously inauthentic activity and questionable moderation on Reddit, I decided to try addressing it.
I got tired of Codex/Claude not being able to write good UI reliably, so I made a TypeScript library toolbox to help with that.
https://github.com/yuechen-li-dev/MachinaLayout.JS
Pretty much just SwiftUI-like layout/style in TypeScript with a bunch of utility tools from other languages I like, like Rust's payload enums, table helpers, LINQ-like queries, state management, etc. It's framework neutral so it works with React, React Native, and Vue right now. Everything is just plain TypeScript that compiles to the DOM, so no HTML or CSS needed for most normal web apps, they can all be written in plain .ts or tsx files.
https://github.com/duriantaco/ravage. Working on an autonomous pentester!
Still working on Study Engine and Nomnominees(more or less done for now).
StudyEngine is a webapp I'm using while doing my masters in comp sci. I upload lecture notes, textbooks, papers, etc. It then extracts topics and tracks my mastery of them over time. It uses an LLM to generate questions and flash cards. It loops in some newer learning science ideas. It tests recognition first(multiple choice), and then once a level of mastery is matched, it switches to recall. Working on adding RAG to it, so I can surface where in the source material something can be reviewed when going over quiz results. Currently just for me an some friends. If can get a good eval set up, I might work on optimizing cost and seeing if it could be opened up.
NomNominees is simple webapp that tracks James Beard, Great American Beer Festival, Festival of Barrel Aged Beers, and other awards. I use it when I'm traveling to find places to check out. Even just a cluster on a map shows me neighborhoods I might want to check out.
It's a calculator for what an AI feature costs to serve. Cost per request, cost per month, which part of the bill is eating you (output tokens, usually). No signup, all the math is on the page. Any feedback is welcome.
I am building https://nexaflow.com - a customer support AI agent with built-in modules so small businesses need not buy 4-5 services to run a business. We ship with CRM, Ticketing, Appointment/Scheduler, Booking management system (for Small clinics, etc). Nexaflow agents can answer (and take action on) customer queries coming from Whatsapp, Email, Web (widget) and more.
Working on https://github.com/AqilbekAbilaev/ozendb
Free, open-source and drop-in replacement for Studio-3T. All the featured behind Studio-3T subscription for free in OzenDB.
Released beta version recently. Feel free to check out. Will be glad for feedback)
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. Supports price for most Indian investment vehicles and US stocks.
Most recently we added support for creating custom dashboards. You can compare return with leading/trailing/rolling charts for investment options and benchmark (create custom dashboards tracking nav and value chart of) your portfolio (or a subset of assets you own) and US stocks, etfs etc. And family dashboard (e.g. you can see networth, cashflows, income, use sheets at family level and more). See https://finbodhi.com/changelog for details.
We also write about related topics:
We wrote about comparing investment options: https://finbodhi.com/docs/blog/compare-charts
Benchmarking your returns: https://finbodhi.com/docs/blog/benchmark-scenarios
Understanding double entry account: https://finbodhi.com/docs/understanding-double-entry
I am building https://EasyAnalytica.com - single place for all your dashboards. It generates dashboards automatically from data without using ai. It supports getting data from google sheets, api's, url's etc. I have recently added support for gsc as data source and i plan to continue adding more in coming weeks.
Same as last month for once - optimizing how well agents can work with a new language [1]. I've been able to 2-3x success rate and drop total tokens for complex tasks significantly (though the initial syntax dump is rough - need to do some ablation there to get it down).
The best part has been that I think it's significantly improved things for humans too; it's weirdly satisfying to be able to measure improved ergonomics. Also, since a big pitch/theory was that the language should be ideal for agents as a result of the original nice things for humans it was designed for, it's a relief to be able actually measure a concrete lift.
[1] https://trilogydata.dev/ - SQL with types, composable functions of arbitrary complexity, and a native semantic layer.
I'm working on a large open-world terrain-rendering library for threejs's webgpu renderer! https://hello-terrain.kenny.wtf/
At its core, it uses quadtrees, and has affordances for arbitrary topologies. Check out the planet and donut-world demos!!!!
- https://hello-terrain.kenny.wtf/examples/torus - https://hello-terrain.kenny.wtf/examples/cube-sphere - https://hello-terrain.kenny.wtf/examples/raycast-character-c... (a little slow to load~)
Currently working on a CLI tool that performs property-based testing from Arazzo documents: https://github.com/IgnacioGoldchluk/cuerdo
A competitive word guessing game, play against family/colleagues etc, it tracks your solves and some other fun metrics. Totally free, no ads or other crap. No login needed to play.
Note: this involves blockchain VMs. If that's a dealbreaker, feel free to skip. I get it.
I've spent 8 years working on RISC-V VMs for blockchains, recently also contributing to ZK VMs. Modern blockchain VMs are drastically more powerful, and I'm curious how far we can push them. I started porting real game logic to blockchain VMs, running game loop, physics simulation, collision detection, etc., on blockchain VMs. So far I have:
* Teeworlds to CKB-VM: https://xuejie.space/2026_06_16_teeworlds_on_ckb/
* One Hour One Life to CKB-VM: https://xuejie.space/2026_06_29_porting_one_hour_one_life_ga...
* A small ray tracer to Jolt ZK VM: https://xuejie.space/2026_07_10_cpp_ray_tracer_on_jolt_zk_vm...
Source is available for 2 of the 3, I need to clean up the OHOL one.
Some context: CKB-VM [1] is a RISC-V virtual machine I designed for Nervos starting in 2018. Jolt ZK VM [2] is a zero-knowledge virtual machine developed by a16z. Both execute RISC-V code, but due to different design, Jolt ZK VM is a much faster CPU than CKB-VM.
Technically this is a fun challenge. Many techniques I used resemble game development tricks from the 90s on game consoles: fixed point math, banked memory in ROMs, aggressively inlining tricks, etc. I want to push to see where the ceiling is. Right now I'm trying to get a Godot [3] + JoltPhysics [4] game loop running on Jolt ZK VM.
Happy to answer questions about the VM internals, the porting process, or anything in general.
[1] https://github.com/nervosnetwork/ckb-vm
Currently further developing https://www.brickifyme.com, where i added a anon process for generating the images and running some A/B tests.
Also working on https://wk-pool.com to further develop it for not only World Cup predictions, but aiming to compete with Scorito in two years!