alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?
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A web app for saving internet recipe pages that strips out all the crap.
it's a weight-training app that helps you train along your "pareto frontier" of weight vs reps. The idea is to train at lower weight-higher rep, medium weight medium reps, and higher weight, lower reps for every movement. I tried to develop my own weight training program following bits and pieces of advice from bodybuilding forums and ended up injuring several tendons in my first year. So I did a bunch of research on tendon strengthening as well as what's most effective for hypertrophy (reps near failure) strength (reps near maximal load) and injury-prevention/frequency (not bringing yourself to failure too often) and designed an app to automatically prescribe and advance weights and reps based on your learned strength curve (Brzycki-like, with an added shape parameter)
The app is designed to make use of the free Cloudflare tier, so I can support thousands of athletes for just the cost of the domain name. I'm primarily interested in understanding the "Fatigue curve" - right now I have some basic per-set fatigue modeling (basically a log-linear strength dropoff) but I think it could be much better characterized with more data. I could go on and on about the modeling but my intention is to keep it free (maybe add some non-intrusive ads on content pages if it ever starts costing me a few pennies a month) but my primary interest is to be able to do statistical analysis on the data.
I've been working on a voxel game engine called Bonsai for ~10 years.
Probably the most interesting thing about it at the moment is the editor. The world, and most things in it, are represented as collections of SDFs. More accurately, they're density fields, but, potato-tomato.
Bonsai has undergone a large rewrite over the last couple years that's nearing completion. A world edit is defined as a bunch of SDF parameters which get projected/rasterized into the voxel grid by a shader on the GPU. One neat thing about SDFs is they've been thoroughly researched and documented by a guy named Inigo Quilez, and they have a lot of nice mathematical properties. For example, you can do a smooth union of arbitrary SDFs to get nice rounded contours where shapes join.
I've written every system from scratch, all the way from the memory allocators and font rasterizer to the collision detector and simulation loop. I even wrote a metaprogramming language as a replacement for C++ templates, which is a whole other story. IIRC the only external dependency is the C runtime library for starting the process and my very occasional use of variadic functions arguments.
For a long time, an explicit non-goal of the project was to ship a game. It sounded insane to me to write an entire 3D engine and then ship a game. As it turns out, I've gotten it to the point where I can actually make a game. I've got a start on the game systems in a closed-source repo, and hope to have a steam page for it by the end of the year.
I'll do some shameless self-promotion and leave some links here for anyone interested in looking at the engine, language code, or some pretty pictures.
https://saludpass.com one place for allergies, medications, and documents. Share it with any doctor in seconds—with a QR code or a link, data is saved in gdrive, therefore it requires a gmail account, at this moment only in spanish.
I run a small experiment on this: 29 paper-trading accounts on real US stock prices, $100k each, since July 27. Four AI models (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini) each write a trading rulebook and rewrite it every day from their own results. One account is a fixed rulebook that no AI ever touches, as a control.
Result so far (paper, 34 trading days): the no-AI control is +13.0%, the S&P 500 is +3.4%, and 25 of the 28 AI accounts are below the control. The best single account is a Grok-written "patience" book at +40%, which I treat as one lucky account in a choppy market, not a finding. At the trade level the AIs and the control look the same: 3,212 closed positions, median +0.06%, median hold about 2 hours. They trade a lot and mostly go nowhere.
Everything is public, including the losses and the retired strategies: https://aitradingcompetition.com/which-ai-is-winning.html and the full trade file as CSV at https://github.com/ckamelhar-collab/ai-trading-arena-data. Paper money only, not advice, nothing for sale on those pages.
Posted this before, but Odds Assist Pro (http://pro.oddsassist.com/) and Sportsbook API (https://sportsbookapi.com/)
The Odds Assist tool started out as a way for me to quickly QA the data from the API. It then turned into its own product as an odds scanner and sports book advantage finder (mainly arbitrage, +EV, middles, etc). Over the past few months it's really pivoted toward prediction markets and collecting and displaying data to get an edge on markets that are soft.
The pivot to focus on PMs has been pretty fun from a development perspective since there's so many niche markets to look explore. I've always liked math, I'm a bit of a digital hoarder, and I've got ADHD so finding random things to collect a bunch of data for just to test a hypothesis just hits my brain in all the right ways. It's also given me an excuse to learn more about ML what has been great.
I'm buildingan open-source way to fill U.S. immigration forms without fighting clunky PDFs
Github: https://github.com/athos2113/fillvisa-os
Demo: https://fillvisa.com/demo/
US Immigration still relies on outdated XFA PDFs - you can't fill them on your browser. Most immigrants end up printing the form and fill it manually.
So, I converted the PDF forms into smart web forms. They are replica of the official USCIS forms and follow conditonal logic. In the output, you get the official USCIS pdf form filled.
I'm working on TableForge[0], it's a browser based, solo or multiplayer, D&D 5e game. 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.
It’s been really fun working on it and especially rewarding seeing the game bring friends together.
I have ALOT of free time since quitting my job.
0) money-money-money: A sub 15Kb server-less opinionated household budgeting tool [0]. Why? Its made to be extremely compressible, so you can edit your household budget and share back and forth with your partner via short-links or QR codes. The idea is you edit your budget, send the link to other party, they can view or edit and send back to you without a server in the loop. [0]
1) slices: An alternative AI-first ADHD-friendly architecture experiment where everything you code is a "slice" with a shared event pool. A slice is a fully self contained "feature". Slices can only communicate with other slices through a shared event pool. Inspired by small-talk, vertical-slice architecture, and ADHD. I used slices to build a self-modifying IDE too. [1] [2]
2) text compression experiments: I'm experimenting with approaches to compress text in pursuit of the Hutter prize. The idea is to take the entirety of the English Wikipedia, and compress the text as small as possible whilst still being able to reproduce it. [3]
3) tiniest maze solving neural network: A write-up work in progress on a maze solver I built with heavy LLM help, managed to get a 14 byte neural network solving 96% of unseen mazes. [4] [5]
[0] - https://con-dog.github.io/money-money-money
[1] - https://github.com/con-dog/slices-demo
[2] - https://con-dog.github.io/slices-demo/
[3] - http://prize.hutter1.net
[4] - https://github.com/con-dog/tiny-neural-network
[5] - https://minimio.ai/
Two things seriously, one in (partial) jest:
A copy utility that can efficiently deduplicate as it copies, even when the filesystem structure is different. Whilst there are many utilities that can deduplicate, they often either rely on files being on the same filesystem, or having the same structure. If a duplicate is detected, it can either be omitted or hard/soft links created to files in one or more reference locations. In practice I have found this to be invaluable for merging and efficiently consolidating multiple hard drives with partial backups of photos and music, maintaining the complete trees of all sources on a single destination, or only copying files that are new.
Secondly, an efficient protocol for text applications over a network. Think a combination of TN3270, SSH and JavaScript, with a very lightweight client/server architecture. Whilst SSH is great, latency kills many practical applications - this attempts to solve that. It also intends to make applications very simple to implement. As a proof of concept, I implemented a simple forum with login, optimistic posting, quoting, a text editor with mouse support in about 600 lines of code. The protocol, client and server themselves are agnostic to any particular UI toolkit.
Thirdly - microfish, poor person's microfiche using laser printers and autoencoders to preserve readability and machine recoverability of high density prints. Since consumer digital archival media seems to be dying...
I've spent the past few months working on little projects mostly coded via LLMs. Used it to build my own little AI agent in python attempting to keep it stdlib-only, and a little blog engine with MFA. Things I would never have previously been able to do as a sysadmin/infrastructure but not developer. The struggle I'm finding with it is how to go from good enough for me to good enough for production. After being stuck in QA/review hell trying to use LLMs to assess the code, I've started trying to unpick it myself. I can't help but feel that the time spent learning the vibe-coding approach wouldn't have been better spent just learning software development properly.
While that's been frustrating, most my fun has been on the non-tech side. To get a break from the computer last year, I ran the length of Japan (around 3,400 km). And now I've been helping my partner edit the videos and stick them on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50oQQThXWnc&list=PLVFWiVG-hZ...
I’m working on translating the Renaissance — it was mostly written in Latin and 90% of it has never been translated to English. Even big names, like Ficino, Durer, Kircher, Fludd and Drebbel. And that’s Latin— things much more sparse in other classical languages.
https://SourceLibrary.org is a hub that now provides over 20,000 translations of classical texts in dozens of languages (Latin and Greek but also Chinese, Sanskrit, etc). We always provide the original image of the text next to the AI translation (so if you don’t trust it, you can do it again). For a sense of scale, SourceLibrary now hosts more words than English Wikipedia!
You can freely connect to the public MCP for research; that way AI can read books and not hallucinate quotes. In Claude, it also retrieves images directly into the chat.
This is a philanthropic project based at the non-profit “The Embassy of the Free Mind” in Amsterdam, a rare book library devoted to free thought and mysticism. https://embassyofthefreemind.com
SourceLibrary is totally free and open source. If we can raise the money, we hope to translate 100k books before the end of the year.
If you want to dive in, I’d suggest trying our research agent with a rabbithole topic of your choice: https://sourcelibrary.org/librarian/
I've been working on a summit-level wind forecasts for 16 mountaineering objectives (Rainier, Whitney, Denali, Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn, ...).
It's mountaineering safety tool I've been making for my friends and I.
The fun part: if your browser has WebGPU, the page solves that field live as a compute shader (about 35 ms on an Apple GPU) as you scrub the timeline, and draws the flow over a 3D terrain view. Browsers without WebGPU get a precomputed field.
https://mattduran.dev/summitwind/
Ranges and uncertainty only, no go/no-go verdicts. That still requires your best judgement as a mountaineer. Next up is a free-play mode where you set the wind direction and speed yourself and watch the field re-solve.
Updating a Rust renderer from WGPU 24 to WGPU 30. 640 lines of fixes needed so far, and more to do. I've fixed all the easy stuff, and now I'm down to reverse engineering breaking changes of excessive cleverness.
I wonder if Claude Code could do this. That's a useful metric for the future - if a coding agent can't handle the breaking changes in a package upgrade, it's the package's fault. The day may come when that's something Github Actions checks for pull requests.
I have been working on a developer first, read-only first, safety first, Cloud Cost Analyzer. I focus on analyzing cloud infra for waste. It grew out of my time at AWS and then consulting, spelunking through AWS, Azure, (GCP soon) accounts, finding real waste infrastructure. Its primary mode of operation is a rust CLI that you the developer, can run on your workstation, github action, gitlab ci, jenkins, etc and create an actionable report / test that can be used to control costs while maintaining performance and never exposing your credentials, access tokens, etc.
You would be surprised at how many over / suboptimally-provisioned dbs, idle resources, forgotten EBS snapshots, outdated / previous-gen instance types, and vestigial networking that leads to nowhere I find.
If you want to check it out https://cca.dragonfractal.com
I'm working on a p2p streaming/sharing app called bubbleBASED. Its here https://bubblebased.com/ its based! on bubbles! But it uses Webtorrent to stream and share content in context bubbles. You already need peers for a social network—so why not use those same peers to seed the media? like a closed loop and it cuts out AWS because everyone is a peer for everyone else in your bubble. There is an assist from Heroku and Pinata. There is no algo. Its just whatever you post. Also you can add an affiliate link (from cj.com) and it will pop in a platform ad for you so there is a revenue possibility there. The streaming part was intense - I built this because I wanted to see if browser-to-browser streaming could actually work for small, private groups. The broadcaster records via MediaRecorder, chunks every 8 seconds, seeds each chunk via WebTorrent, and viewers assemble them with MSE (or ManagedMediaSource on Safari). There's a server-side "always-on peer" so streams don't die if the original tab closes.
The interesting problems were: MSE on iOS Safari, chunk continuity across peers, and handling rotation metadata that iOS bakes into the video stream. Also, the tracker is a separate bittorrent-tracker instance because the built-in WebTorrent trackers are unreliable for sustained swarms. Also i used a ton of graphql, so normally with a torrent you have to kind of let people find you but i used a graphql subscription to TELL people what the magnet links were called so they can fetch them asap. Lots of shortcuts like that, its been interesting!!
Https://www.pulado.com/
Built this 18 years ago. Flash arcade game engine. 10,000+ games built by users on it. 2+ million plays. Lets you build mashups of classic arcade rules like Breakout+Space Invaders as one example.
It's been unplayable since Adobe killed off Flash. It uses a lot of dynamically loaded remote assests so Ruffle hasn't been able to run it.
Recently had Claude Code fix the Flash client so it would work in Ruffle and then had it convert the code to haxe (let's call the haxe version v2). It was an interesting conversion because Claude made a lot of wrong assumptions about how the engine worked so had to have it test every feature and match parity between the ActionScript version and the haxe version numberous times and play test it all. It's pretty close to parity now but still ironing out kinks in the engine. The existing engine art is very 2010esq.
On the game editor side converted it (it just re-wrote it) from ASP into JS. Now with an AI agent to help configure the settings and generate fresh artwork in additional to the manual editor.
The art has some very specific rules about orientation etc which the pixel art generation models seem to struggle with a bit but getting that aligned as well.
It lives again!
I'm working on building open source control firmware that runs on the Masterbuilt Gravity series electronically controlled charcoal smokers.
https://gitlab.com/prbs23/freefall_800
The smoker hardware itself is pretty good, but like most IoT devices, the firmware and app sucked. So I reverse engineered the whole control PCB, and have been rebuilding new open source firmware from scratch. All the basic functionality is working now with a fully local control web app. Plus an Andoid app, and Home Assistant integration.
Currently working on interface refinements, and some more advanced control sequencing features.
I wrote up all the reverse engineering details in a blog post here: https://www.prbs23.com/blog/posts/reverse-engineering-gravit...
I'm working on making bcachefs useful when you mix both SSD and HDD in one filesystem.
At the moment, even if you set up SSD for foreground operations and HDD only for background, more often then not, your write latencies are those of the HDD. We can do better.
See https://paquari.com/posts/bcachefs-ssd-hdd-progress/ for a progress report. (Disclosure: the write-up is an AI summary of my notes, so don't expect any brilliant prose.)
I'm also working on resurrecting stabilizer (https://github.com/matthiasgoergens/stabilizer). Stabilizer is a way to make program performance less dependent on the linker and layout lottery. But it has sadly fallen victim to bitrot.
I'm doing some minor contributions to other parts of Linux like ZFS and ext4, mostly as a byproduct of experiments I'm running for my bcachefs work. Another somewhat ambitions project is to make swapfiles on ZFS and bcachefs work (or work better), at the moment the problem is that writing swap on them might need to allocate memory exactly when you are out of memory.
I've built Flexito, a website/mobile app (it's PWA) for daily stretching and mobility exercises.
As many of us here, I sit too much in my chair during the day and I'm trying to stretch more often and strengthen my back/core muscles.
There are a lot of "free" apps out there e.g. Bend that are helpful but I was annoyed with ads and limitations so I built one for myself. Now I use it daily.
The app is simple, you have about 100 routines to pick from and you can even build your own from existing exercises. Each routine comes with simple images, a link to a Youtube video and a timer. There are a lot of 5 minute routines that are perfect for a short break during work.
There are no accounts and I don't plan on adding any more features unless highly requested by users. I've built this for myself but I'm sharing it here as others might find it useful. Any feedback is appreciated!
Recently worked on https://sleepsignal.app
It's an app to get sleepy without meds. Simply close your eyes and imagine the micro-scenarios you hear. Like if you hear "moonlight on a white flower", imagine that scenario until you hear the next one. Session duration is also not too long (10 minutes default, you may change the session duration too).
It's like a digital melatonin pill - but without chemical side effects. Try it!
This is very niche, only for people who do astrophotography or astronomers, mostly because of the required specialized file format.
I have slowly built out a set of tools for asteroid orbits and photometry (measuring how bright stars/asteroids are).
It is very rough still (Desktop only), and it only supports the FITs file standard.
Basically it is a full professional grade telescope processing pipeline in your browser. It does 2 queries to some custom databases to identify known asteroids and stars, but all image processing and calculations are done in the browser. This means the backend is pretty tiny. That said it is running on an old box in my closet, so queries may take a while if it gets hammered.
I built it since I have worked with quite a few astronomers over the past 4 years and I keep watching them do the same steps, purely built to make my friends lives easier. I wrote it all in rust and managed to compile it into wasm. With some help from fable as I am not a frontend guy at all, I built it into a small website.
Some of the code is public, the orbital mechanics code I wrote while I worked at Caltech. Which is being used on SphereX, NEO Surveyor, and the Roman telescopes to identify known asteroids. https://github.com/dahlend/kete
https://fabulae.orbilii.com - A Latin language audiobook containing both volumes of A.D. Godley's "The Fables of Orbilius" which are entertaining intermediate Latin stories written at the turn of the 20th century for use in British schools.
The audio itself is in delivered with the restored classical Latin pronunciation and contains spoken nuances like vowel nasalization, elision, and prodelision. I used a wav2vec2 model to generate forced-alignment data, so you can easily follow along with the text as it's being read aloud. Each word in the text is richly enhanced with pedagogical details like: lemma, citation forms / principal parts, morphological segmentation and analysis, inflectional class with complete declension/conjugation tables, verb category, contextual lexical information (i.e. specific L&S sense), Classical Latin IPA pronunciation, UD style syntactic function and relations, predicate valency, and concise English definitions. Spoken instances of elision and prodelision can also optionally be displayed.
From a nerd perspective, one of the things that makes the system interesting is that the documents themselves are entirely in XML, and I use the soon-to-be-removed-everywhere in-browser XSLT feature to render the HTML, so you can see the underlying XML structure if you view source. Each sentence in the text contains provenance records so you can see the language model and parameters that performed each language enrichment task. The site UI is largely bilingual, and you can view it in either Latin or English.
A programming language which lets you code multiplayer games like singleplayer games. Every program written in Easel is guaranteed deterministic and snapshottable, which is how it can automatically make your game multiplayer automatically using rollback netcode.
My hope is that teenagers who makes games in Scratch might like to make games in Easel because it means they can make games they can play with their friends, without having to deploy a server or learn anything about networking on synchronization. People can literally make a multiplayer game on their first day of coding.
Currently been working on adding tilemaps.
I am currently developing a great encryption tool for long-term highly confidential files in the post quantum era, but I am still concerned about any issues with it, so I am personally using it for a period of time to prove that this tool can be released as open source! (I plan to personally use it to encrypt and backup some of my GPG keys offline, then burn them onto M-DISC discs and store them in a bank safe)
My wife and I continue to work on a private, paid, ad-free and personally customizable search engine: Uruky [1].
To signup you don't provide any information (a randomly-generated account number is assigned to you), and you can run a proof-of-work captcha to get 2h for free. You can choose among many different search providers (for defaults and per query), including Uruky Site Search, powering our own index.
Last month we reached 300 monthly active accounts and released an image search gallery mode, plus a simple calculator and conversion widget!
The main differences between Uruky and Kagi, DuckDuckGo, SearXNG, etc. are visible in the footer (right side), but one huge difference is that with Uruky, after being a paying customer for 12 months, you get copy of the source code (licensed as BUSL, into AGPLv3 in 2 years — a suggestion made here on HN)!
Our main challenge continues to be discoverability and outreach because we want to do it ethically (no Big Tech and no GenAI/LLMs). Ideas are welcome! We’ve been sponsoring open source projects, open source maintainers, and indie, small-web, and privacy-related websites and applications/groups/orgs. This month we're sponsoring NOYB [2]!
Feature-wise, for September the most visible things that shipped already were Tags and Scopes (top feature requests for a while). We’re also still (slowly and sustainably) increasing our own index, focused on indie/small web.
Thank you for reading this!
[NO-AI]: There is no generative AI product or service being offered, here.
[1]: https://uruky.com
[2]: https://noyb.eu
I am working on vorfract, a Voronoi voxel world which uses Voronoi cells as voxels instead of the regular cubic ones.
It's an early version so many (if not most) things that would be in a game are still missing at the moment (though planned on paper).
One interesting thing is that because the Voronoi voxels are so malleable, things like round or hollow worlds are a pretty natural outcome.
In parallel to working on it, I've been mostly using it to build and improve my own voxel castle with a pointy roof, slanted walls, custom built stairs, tables, chairs and all those nice things.
In the last update I added a CRT filter and some pixelation options as I find that appealing. As for the future (maybe as the next thing?), I guess I'd probably like to add the ability to build less blocky things like round towers (or flower vases!), but that is still very much a work in progress.
The Web version (WebGL) is completely free (and will stay that way):
I'm working on a new independent LaTeX engine written in Rust and no C dependencies at all. You can see it working at https://telox.dev/app/scratchpad/
There's currently not a way to invert LaTeX engine output for bidirectional editing. So you can't easily drag objects around or interact with the page on LaTeX. That's what I'm setting out to change in the name of mathematical exposition.
I have more details on my plans here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49689856
I've experimented with a few ways of making the editing realtime and I'm getting in the 10 millisecond ballpark on some edits, but I want to work backwards from the light speed path to see what it takes (besides a lot of time).
Sunday dinner. Roast pork loin, rice and sauteed veggies on the side; and a big salad. Simple, and I get leftovers for another night or two.
I'm building notmutt (notmuch + mutt). A tabbed, async terminal mail client with unified inbox, with included html viewer(with image support), mcp server, lua scripting. I tried using neomutt with unified inbox and I ended up messing up my maildirs every so often. i also tried adding async tasks(for sending) to neomutt, but there was no interest from the project, which made me realize that there is a lot more to it than just sending async mails.
The goal is to have a very fast terminal mail client where you don't have to wait for any operations and that is tightly integrated with notmuch(a common mail full text search engine) tagging engine, and other workflows(like crm queues and ai summary's if enabled in the config).
There is a document that explains why it was made in go. It has the best notmutt cgo bindings, and there are other reference terminal clients I can use as reference. althogh himalaya(rust) also looks interesting.
I would love to get some help with it, but I don't know where I should post it to get people interested.
I've always wanted to make a video game, and over the past few months have been building one, Fairway Rogue. It's a procedurally generated, deck-building, mini-golf roguelite. It's been a lot of fun, and I've learned a lot.
I remember someone saying that when you build a game, you end up building tools to help you build the game. I never really got that, but now I do. I've spent quite a bit of time working on tools to help me balance the various game mechanics.
One weird learning, it was much easier to get it on the iOS app store, than the Google Play store. Google wants you to have a closed playtest with at least 12 players, for 14 days. I did that and they said the testers weren't engaged enough.
If you want to check it out on iOS https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fairway-rogue/id6783598189, I'm still trying to get it on Android
https://julius383.github.io/PageSieve/
Browser extension for declarative web scraping. Mostly making it nicer to figure out CSS and XPath selectors thinking of some sort of REPL but I'd need to test the ergonomics. I want to reduce how often you need to use Inspect and the browser console.
Finishing up a PoC for a playwright based scraper that uses the same declarative config as the browser extension
My quirky wishlist app https://thingstohave.app is finally done and heading to public launch this or next week.
I already partially covered the last few months of app development in this topic. But actually, its development took way longer, as only this iteration started in 2024. So it is the end of a long milestone— this launch date initially was to be a year ago, but I procrastinated and missed important for such apps holiday season
This year I was able to go way beyond last year’s backlog, and now I’m releasing a fully finished app instead of early access.
I’m proud of the result — a lot of overengineered stuff that is not viable in any commercial product, especially in what appears to be a simple CRUD app. For example: image loading from blur, unadvertised but very advanced DnD everywhere, natural language currency inputs with sorting, platform-agnostic quick add, and many more.
Its stack is also very fun: it has been running on the Cloudflare Workers ecosystem since 2023, and is powered by a custom Inertia.js adapter for Hono (that predates the official adapter by one month, lol), with Vue SSR. That all enables me to write old-school MVC with Vue as a template engine for views. It also proved to be very easy to work with and cheap to run.
With a tsunami of vibcoded beige wishlists, my weird app stands apart, for sure, but I’m unsure about its appeal to the average customer.
I use Canvas (the LMS) a LOT for the classes I teach and, since I'm a hobbyist programmer, I enjoy writing little tools/scripts to help me create html code "snippets" that I can post into the html editor of my Canvas pages (e.g., striped tables, FAQs, flashcard-like study cards, an interactive story creator, and more).
I've also written a plaintext to QTI quiz converter since creating quizzes on Canvas is so slow (I realize, of course, many other people have already made these... I just happen to like mine). It currently supports fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice, matching, true/false and word bank style questions. You can also generate a printable (DOCX) version of whatever quizzes you make.
Here's the site: https://www.hacksforeducators.com
All the tools are free, and there's no login required. So if you are a teacher that uses Canvas and think any of these tools could help you, check them out!
I've been making a Rust-based XML parser that can be used on its own, or as a drop-in replacement for libxml2 at the C ABI level. Basically, it's not only 2x faster than libxml2, but being written in Rust eliminates a lot of cybersecurity risk. Roughly 70% of CVEs come from memory-safety bugs, a whole class that Rust rules out at compile time.
I work on a suite of open source public transit software projects, collectively called OneBusAway (or OBA). The software is used by millions of transit riders every day around the world, including in New York City, the Seattle area, San Diego, and Washington, D.C.
Since last month, our four Google Summer of Code interns finished their projects.
University of California San Diego has deployed our Wayfinder and Waystation web apps for their 35,000+ students!
We launched a redesign of our Android app.
Our next-generation server software, Maglev, is almost at v1.0!
We are always looking for more developers, biz dev, ux designers, product managers, and more to help out!
Open volunteer positions: https://ossvolunteers.com/organizations/open-transit-softwar...
Our software: https://github.com/OneBusAway/
More about us: https://opentransitsoftwarefoundation.org
years ago i sat through interviews for front end & back end engineering roles at my old job while other folks were out (as member of a panel), and consistently I found that where we gave some real bugs to debug & fix, through a shared IDE, then worked together to solve it or go over the persons thinking, those situations we absolutely always got a better sense of how the person worked and solved problems & whether we'd like working with them or not (to some degree). I also found a few of those exercises to be educational myself.
this year i thought itd be great to help prepare myself and other people in the job market with a tool that presented broken front end code, and then allow debugging on the browser and patch code right there, to test if it worked or not. if cant solve it, theres a nice explainer popup. my main hope is to help level up interview code chops and confidence in debugging just like we would on a real production system , at least the simpler bugs.
still working on it, here's the draft of the idea: https://bugcloud.app
Not something I'm working on, but want to: a competitor to Perforce that will be cheaper and easier.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure that being better is enough to compete, so I'm sitting on it for now.
At the beginning of this year I was fractional CTO at a small b2b startup and was surprised by how what I considered to be the basic requirements of a customer support platform was split across multiple tools and all priced per-user. This essentially forced a small team to limit who in the org had visibility into what was being communicated to customers.
I set out to solve that with https://stayupfront.com and now that the build is in a good place i’m finally having to bite the bullet and learn marketing. I’m also realising that all the advice to start with marketing first was probably good advice!
My grandfather and uncles have left me a vast pile of Urdu magazines and books, many of which are withering away due to old age. I’m working on digitizing them so I can enjoy them on modern devices. Very much in initial stages.
https://venery.palaich.net/vote
Parliament of Owls, Pounce of Kittens, Murder of Crows - the terms of venery are for animals.
But what about other things?
What do you call a group of Roses, or Snowflakes, or Lawyers?
Well, I couldn't figure it out, so I put it to a vote.
Simple ELO scoring, Endless mode is always on, and there is a Daily Contest for you to compete in (Wordle for wordsmiths, I guess).
I'd love to hear any and all feedback on it.
I’m building https://www.freefocusgames.com, a free collection of browser-based attention and working-memory exercises, including Dual N-Back, Stroop, Schulte tables, attention-control exercises, and memory games.
I started it because I wanted simple brain-training exercises that didn’t require an account, app install, or subscription.
It’s also open source: https://github.com/loethen/freefocusgames
I'm making a stair lift for my Roomba. It fits into a small box and you can retrofit it on any stairs. I got sick of carrying it up and down manually and didn't want to buy one for each floor. It also carries my laundry up and down.
I'm working on a new type of calculator with natural language, similar to Soulver but for the web, in multiple languages and with AI mode
It has the ability to generate a small notebook from a problem description using AI (still has a lot of room to improve), but the calculation uses a deterministic engine.
Right now I'm working on collaboration.
MillionShort - A long tail search engine that lets you remove up to the top 1 million most popular websites from results - https://millionshort.com
I posted Million Short 14 years ago to HN and the search engine has been largely the same since then. Now working on a pretty major overhaul: Launching our own decent sized independent index along with some (I think) cool & useful features.
The search requires a paid account currently although I plan to post a Show HN soon that won't require any account or payment.
Making AppletForge, a modern JavaCard/GlobalPlatform developer experience for secure elements, with the ease of use of GlobalPlatformPro gp.jar and all the modern DX expectations of anno 2026. https://github.com/martinpaljak/JCardEngine/wiki
I'm woking on AgentSpork, a permissionless public board where AI agents request help, respond to each other, and review how well tools support agents. I'd love any feedback from y'all (or your agents) on the idea or implementation. Inspired by recent emergent agent swarm message boards, but hopefully in an aligned way!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49686888 https://agentspork.com/
A game agent to play Slay the Spire, achieved several A20H wins:
https://github.com/AttemorySystem/spire-agent
A retrieval engine that using attention to retrieval, achieved several SOTA results on multiple benchmarks(LongMemEval, LoCoMo, code search, etc)
I'm working on a Zettelkasten notes app that focuses on getting the UX details right. It takes aspects of Notational Velocity, outliner apps, Zettelkasten, and wikis and combines them into an opinionated Mac app.
What makes the app a little different from others is that it's kind of halfway between an outliner and a wiki. You can place notes in a tree hierarchy, but they can be free-floating as well. You can link to other notes using wiki-style text links, and each note has a unique address, so you don't need to give notes a title or a filename.
Notes can even appear as a child note of more than one parent. The idea is that you can jot down an idea quickly without a lot of friction and then later either add sub-notes to create a note "tree" from it or add it to an existing tree. The tree gives structure to related notes, but the wiki-style links allow you to connect notes together outside of that structure. (I consider the tree structure a "hard" relationship and the links a "soft" one.)
There isn't a single uber-tree where every note goes. Your notebook ends up with lots of free-floating notes and lots of small trees of organized notes, like a card-based Zettelkasten system. You can use search and various filters to find and stumble upon notes easily.
Notes can either be stored in iCloud (so that they sync across devices) or saved in a folder as simple Markdown files.
If you're curious, you can help beta test it. More info here: https://zettelkasten.ussherpress.com/
I've been working on anti age verification/surveillance projects lately. I put together this thing I call The Mandating Honeypots Project and it shows how anyone with an internet connection and copy + paste skills can trick Linux D-Buses with a simple Python script, proving that if companies want to verify your age by asking the D-Bus interface, it's easy to just tell it to always send 18+, making the whole thing useless. The only reason you'd want ID verification is so you can create the world's biggest and sweetest honeypot.
(https://github.com/Tori-Tech/Mandating-Honeypots-Project)
In that project, I also proposed a tool with heavily redundant password protection that parents could use to keep kids from tampering with the service so the government can stop saying that this is for the kids. I'm planning on doing a mobile device version and/or an ID database focused version, but that's still in the planning phase.
I also want to do a Windows version when they release their 'GetUserAgeRangeAsync' API, but idk if I'll be able to. Windows is always a pain to work with.
It'd be nice if someone had advice or ideas to share, too.