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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I have been building document intelligence in enterprise for a long time now, and even with sota OCR, SLMs, LLMs, all the myriad of services now offering this - most of them miss something.
So over the years me (and my team) have built up a lot of experience dealing with these for sensitive industries like healthcare/insurace/lending etc.
We are bringing these ideas out as a router to other parsers, but with some key takes that allow you to manage failures. "Failure is inevitable so route for it."
It is called Openreading - https://openreading.ai/ and open core here: https://github.com/openreading-ai/openreading-core
It is still WIP and will be more polished in a month after some more rigorous testing and benchmarks.
If this is a problem you deal with, would love to chat.
Note: the intent is to launch a managed version that provides more durable compute/retries, parallel execution, intent understanding etc but this is for later.
I'm working on a way to make some pretty advanced software in a single HTML file.
The idea is simple: store state you'd normally store in a separate database in the document itself.
Then, also give the the document a bunch of powerful APIs granted to it by its host:
(1) Sync changes to the document with live collaborators
(2) Extract data from the document using a simple JSON map config
(3) Boot up a full content CMS from the same simple JSON map config
(4) More features added every month
I'm really excited with even the tiny bit of early traction I've gotten. About a dozen paying users so far.
Long term, I'd love to have this file type (vanilla HTML file + some extra features granted by the host) become a file type other companies offer tools and their own hosting for (like Wordpress).
Hosted platform: https://hyperclay.com
Native offline apps (source available, almost MIT license):
Me and my wife (then my girlfriend) have written "realistic" space sci-fi in Finnish for over 20 years. Now with AI we are finally able to translate our stories to English. The quality starts to be there.
There are a lot of small languages in the world, and translation used to be extremely expensive. And there is never too much good space sci-fi.
(We don't write space battles or wars. Our style is slower and bit more philosophical. Light speed is the limit, and travel takes centuries.)
https://grandpacad.com - AI modeling for 3D printing Been at it for about year and a half.
Really exciting stuff is happening literally every month, because underlying models are getting better and better. When I started it was pretty basic: “make a cube with a hole through it”. Now it’s at the point “make a raspberry pi 4 case” and the agent searches, builds, verifies…
What surprised me in this process is how little meaning AI benchmarks have. Pareto frontier for my use case looks completely different than any other benchmark portrays.
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/
working on adding webmcp support to my new free tool https://easyanalytica.com/tools/gsc-insight , webmcp was recently added to codex desktop app and it would be interesting to see how users use it with ai, would it get good adoption or it would just go away.
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
I've been slowly working on https://github.com/CanineHQ/canine for about 2 years now. Basically a self hosted, FOSS that turns a Kubernetes cluster into something as easy to use as Heroku. Its grown to about 2000 active developers using it host small things at https://canine.sh
It was a pain point from a start up I cofounded before where we needed Kubernetes flexibility but developers hated using it. I figured there was no reason why it had to be hard to use and thus Canine was born.
Lately been playing around with setting up remote dev containers on your own compute as well -- basically like github codespaces, except self hosted.
Built in Rails + Stimulus
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 a website for discovering first names that’s enjoyable to explore: https://abracadanames.com
It started with a family member telling me they were frustrated with existing websites. What I noticed is that in many cases they feel cluttered and not smooth to use, almost like a 1-to-1 translation of the underlying database queries, where they have you choose filters and sorting options upfront then browse the paginated results.
I wanted to avoid all of that by creating a different experience; I built an interactive full-screen wall UI with infinite browsing so that most of the screen space is dedicated to the core content. I worked on the name sampling algorithm to try to make it as enjoyable to browse as I could, and the only filter displayed by default is the one to select genders.
More advanced queries are available through the search field which supports natural language queries, running on a local multilingual interpretation engine with a cloud LLM fallback. The database engine is custom built with Rust, compiled to WASM for higher performance when running on CloudFlare Workers. I don’t use an external DB service for names today.
What I’m pretty proud of is to know a lot of technical work is hidden behind that UI, and how it has been shaped by the experience I wanted instead of the other way around.
I'm building an expedition weather app that works via satellite messengers like Garmin inReach, ZOLEO, and iPhone satellite messaging.
It has been really interesting trying to fit a detailed weather forecast into about 1,000 bits. I'm using an rANS entropy coder fitted on historical weather forecasts. I'm able to fit about 100 time periods (~4 days of hourly data) into a 160 character message, using just a couple bits per variable on average.
Github: https://github.com/aaasen/goingblue Site: https://going.blue
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
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.
I built a simple, stoic and free markdown note app (free) called Beauty. https://www.markdown.beauty/
Why? There's no why. The world doesn't need another Markdown editor. I still made one.
Everything is on-device, purposefully human-centric without being anti-AI. I built this because I wanted to work on a project that I could sweat the details unconstrained by deadlines, investors, etc.
I was frustrated with other writing experiences, and like most I gravitated to Apple Notes due to simplicity, but I still missed so many things. As someone that's spent the last 2 years immersed in Cursor, Codex and CC, I wished some of their input behaviors existed in a regular text editor.
For example, you can use / to add styles, or : to add emojis, shortcuts like < 3 for a heart, - > for an arrow, and so on. It honestly feels great.
Is it radically different than other editors? I don't think so. But I think it's well executed across every dimension possible.
Maybe one different thing: multiplayer. It's live editing like google docs, but P2P using WebRTC and strong cryptography. The limitation here is that you can only share a file while having it open yourself.
Great care was taken to performance and portability. This is one of the areas where I spent a ridiculous amount of time simply because I enjoyed pushing the limits of the stack. While using you will notice that rendering, GPU, RAM and bundle sizes were heavily optimized. The Mac app is < 50mb.
Very soon, I'll launch an iOS version with iCloud sync. In the future, I might launch basic AI features. If you miss a great text editor in your life, give it a try.
Haven’t started, still in the planning phase, but I want to build a Tamagotchi for readers. I’m calling it Tome & Tail: a little black dragon living in a pixel-art library on an ESP32-S3 with a small round AMOLED screen.
You’d start a reading session and the dragon would read alongside you. What you read would influence its appearance and habits; lots of sci-fi might give it starry wings, for example. It won’t die if you go a week without reading.
The plan is to keep it playable offline, with optional syncing to Booklary, the reading tracker I’m building. I’m leaning toward C++, which I never used, so it’ll be a learning experience.
Currently waiting for the Waveshare board to arrive so I can start development, and looking for an artist to commission the pixel art. Used GPT to design a concept[1], which I’ll use as examples to the artist.
This will be my first ESP32 project, so getting the dragon blinking on screen is the first milestone.
[1]: https://i.cpimg.sh/57EC5380-0FF7-4646-A943-971350FF98D2.png
I got so fed up with my support system, and after years of using tools like Intercom, I built my own platform with everything I've ever wanted in a support desk. The biggest upgrade for me was the MCP connection. I can pull down a ticket with a bug and solve it with Claude (or Codex) and get the agent to fix and then draft a reply in my own voice. It also allows customers to connect their agent to my support desk and ask questions. This would be agent to agent with a human in the loop. But the normal day to day stuff is mainly live support or AI enabled support.
I've been working on a cross-platform GUI system called Affiche.
The basic idea is to separate an application's UI semantics from the toolkit that actually renders it. The same application can currently be presented using native Win32, Cocoa/AppKit, Qt6, GTK3, GTK4, Swing, or a web browser. The UI can run locally or be rendered remotely by a client, without the application itself being rewritten for that environment.
I've also been working on a declarative layout format and, lately, a visual designer.
It started as a rewrite of an architecture I worked on many years ago, mostly because I wanted to see how far the idea could be pushed with modern systems. It has turned into a considerably larger project than I expected.
Still private and very much under development, but I'm curious whether other people have run into the same problem: maintaining applications that need to survive changes in GUI toolkits, operating systems, deployment models, or client environments.
I'm building https://matgoat.com/en/
A way for BJJ and martial arts academy owners to manage attendance, payments, class schedules, and student progress.
I train BJJ myself and saw how much time instructors lose to admin work, so I wanted something simpler and more focused than the generic gym software out there and have been having a lot of fun building it with feedback from real academies.
A web app for saving internet recipe pages that strips out all the crap.
I made a database[1] a few months ago and now I'm beginning work on a Github replacement (for me). Here's what I'm thinking for the UI[2]. I'm not trying to have feature-parity out the gate, I just want something that doesn't give me the ick. I self-host public repos with cgit but that's too basic and there's no built-in support for private repos.
The existing Github alternatives...look like someone drawing Github from memory.
[1]: https://disc.sh / https://disc.md
[2]: https://social.coop/@netopwibby/117227113793136781A FHIR Validator and Snapshot Generator that works offline and can communicate with the German national Terminology service
I'm making a WebGPU renderer with WebGL fallbacks, with a path tracer for 'photo mode', specifically targeting agents writing web 3D things. I'm not especially far into it though. It doesn't use 3D models; there's a DSL for making things.
There's a demo app here that only works on desktop - https://fab.ooer.com/ (scroll down in the right hand menu to quality and change to 'trace' for photo mode)
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've been working on PCB generation projects with MCPs, mostly with KiCAD because of the ROI.
- Flexible rp2040-based instrument tuner
- Stratocaster-style PCB art pickguards
- NeXTBus experimentation board (not that I'll ever use it, but I'll be darned if I don't understand the nuances between NeXT and Apple's NuBUS implementations better now)
This extends to firmware and emulation projects like Doom and the Quake trilogy running in Jira Cloud (https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/3372062249/doom-for-j...) and a fork of 86box dedicated to NeXTstep systems (i want an emulated object.station, darnit)
It's an extension of a longer-running project (https://www.forth.news) where it exposes and organizes 100s of newsworthy primary sources -- statements, press releases, press pool reports, emergency alerts, etc, whether from press email lists, X/Twitter, Bluesky, RSS, etc. The web UI is similar to TweetDeck - and it sends notifications.
Latest update now allows some panels to be based on an LLM prompt (i.e. "everything about the Iran War and its effects in the U.S.") which searches the entire catalog of sources as they are posted.
Jane Street released a new challenge so I'm considering picking it up. It hasn't fully captured my brain, but I can feel it in there from time to time and depending how it lands it might be my next project [0]. I'm not really a hardware person but I'm close enough that it's maybe within reach
[0] https://blog.janestreet.com/protocol-emulator-asic-competiti...
Working on a better way to do email. Every solution I've seen so far is trying to solve the problem from the wrong end in my opinion. Filtering, privacy extensions, walled gardens, throwaway email addresses.
https://dmcn.dev - an email where you can be sure who it's from. And you get to decide whether to trust it.
We're working on a better change management process for production deployments and SOC 2 audit evidence. https://www.approvegate.io
I'm a Senior Eng on Wall Street, so I have my own personal experience with this problem, but i'd love to connect with other leads, release managers, etc to get their thoughts, suggestions, and what their current process looks like.
Been working on a replacement for my Git GUI of choice, Tower, for the last few months. I've been using Tower 2 for almost a decade now, refusing the monthly subscription to upgrade to a fresher version. I'm going to keep mine a one time purchase with support guaranteed for a year. If a major version releases after that, it'll be another perpetual license for the new version. If you want the new features, you can choose to upgrade, if you don't stay on the version you're on until new feature warrant it.
I'm building InterviewMe ( https://interviewme.now/ ). It lets employers interview you via AI and is intended as a better way for people to get deep answers about your work history and experience than they could by looking at a simple online resume or LinkedIn. You upload your resume, answer some questions about your background, optionally upload any other documents you have (cover letters, awards, articles, etc) and it ingests all of that and creates a conversational agent people can use to ask questions about your professional experience. Check out my profile to get an idea of how it works: https://interviewme.now/@max and then get your own: It's free!
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.
I’m working on two projects that make public data easier to explore through maps.
US Energy Cost Explorer (https://energy-maps.com) is a free tool for exploring electricity and natural gas costs across the US. You can compare states, follow prices over time, and look at bills and energy burden. I work in energy affordability, and I wanted to make this information easier for people to access and understand.
MarketGround (https://marketground.io) lets you draw an area or choose a travel time around a location, then explore its population, income, housing, and nearby businesses. It also shows daytime versus nighttime population, which is useful when thinking about who might actually be around a potential store or restaurant during business hours.
MarketGround is a side project, and I’ve found getting it in front of potential users harder than building it. I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who has evaluated a retail or franchise location. What information mattered most, and what was difficult to find?
Still plugging away teaching kids to code and hand draw their own computer games:
https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids
Have been running an in-school pilot over the last school term. Has been super insightful and led to a heap of changes to optimize UX. However, the biggest challenge has been delivery in this environment.
Trying to run a game in a browser on school iPads powered by really locked down networks has been challenging. Some school iPads will crash (out of memory) when launching the camera view, whilst others run flawlessly. We use a fork of Godot, and are constantly fighting to strike a balance between UX (increased parallelism) and browser device constraints i.e. a limit on how many web workers we can fit in memory.
In addition to our main (build and play your own RPG) experience, we also stream games direct to iPad. In particular a modded version of Overcooked! 2 that teaches kids to code — Overcooked itself was never even released on iPad. We've built our own Kubernetes system that spins up (a license limited number of) games/pods on demand backed by (time sliced) NVidia GPUs. This is literally running out of my home office. Despite the complexity of building all that, the Kubernetes and GPU time slicing wasn't even the largest hurdle. Turns out UDP is a no-go on the school network, so direct WebRTC was out the window. Instead we're using Cloudflare's TURN relay with TCP. Which much to my surprise, is holding up quite well.
Definitely a learning experience. However, kids are having a blast. Can't wait to roll this out further!
Working on two things seriously. One is an ssh based tunneling tool to share localhost ports over the internet - https://pinggy.io
And the other one is a AI rank monitoring for brands - https://lumirank.ai
I'm looking for land to buy in Wyoming to build my AI apocalypse bunker on.
I’m building TraceDB[1] because I think observability needs an overhaul. We pay a premium to index millions of near-identical spans, sample away the rare ones that might explain an outage, and still have to piece together what failed, where it started, and how it spread. All the data is largely there, but no one can make sense of it! Observability was hallucinating before AI made it fashionable.
I’m seeing near-100% root-cause accuracy on synthetic test data and am looking to validate that on real production workloads using OpenTelemetry tracing. If you’re open to chatting or experimenting, drop me a line! I’d also love to hear ideas or how we can improve observability.
I’m working on an app to help my late diagnosed ADHD - through sound.
The app wraps whatever is playing on mac through device convolution (old radio, hifi system) - Room convolution (a bedroom, a forest) and adds ambience (rain, wind, waves) and Apples spatial processing - so it sounds like a real space.
For me - hearing the sound in a space really helps more than just the dry sound.
Porting over Video Hub App - my 8.5 year old app from Electron to Tauri
https://videohubapp.com/ - an application that lets you browse, search, organize, etc the videos you have on your computer, external hard drives, or network drives.
Working on a full workout and dieting stack!
17,000+ users already! It's a completely ad free, subscription free product. MacroCodex app, which results in guaranteed weight loss or weight gain outcomes within 2-3 weeks. Many people will start seeing results within the first week. Don't believe? Read the reviews.
MacroCodex is a "Total Calorie Burn of the day" using completely sensorless method explained here: https://macrocodex.app/knowledge/macrocodex/smart-calorie-bu...
CalorieCodex - calorie tracking app which has a Agent Harness built in using BYOK (bring your own key model). How does it help? Using this anyone can track calories and plan their meals. Agent includes skills which help you accurately track calories and plan meals.
Symbiote App - Think "BoostCamp" but completely free, no ads, and fully programmable workout tracker
Example of GZCLP: https://symbiote-studio.macrocodex.app/?builtin=gzclp
Hey everyone!
Last year, Mozilla released Orbit, an AI-powered browser summarizer hosted on a GCP server. After people started digging into the extension, they discovered things like backend endpoints such as store_result. Eventually, Mozilla discontinued the project. For the past month, I’ve been trying to rebuild Orbit from scratch, but with one major difference: Apogee is fully local and privacy-focused. Apogee doesn’t send or store your data. It can directly connect to your local Ollama instance for inference. I’ve also added WebGPU integration for Chrome and Transformers.js for Firefox to provide faster, local responses.
It can summarize: Articles and websites, YouTube and Billie videos, Wikipedia articles, Hacker News and Reddit threads.
You can check out the source code here: https://github.com/darshi1337/apogee
Install Apogee:
Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/apogee/pgemlpomhkdc...
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/apogeeext/
Obviously it is far from complete. Would love to hear your feedback and suggestions!
Static site generators are super passe in 2026, but I spent the last couple of days on mine. https://get-taxus.org
Big re-factoring, I have a data model now and am closing functionality gaps with Zola and the like. Also, I wanted actual documentation. No one else seems to care about that.
Check it out! I'd appreciate someone other than me banging on it.
Using AI to catch up on reinforcement learning advances, trying to 'solve' Gin Rummy. Will move on harder games after that.
ChonkyBlox: A new approach to Block based coding - instead of complicated algorithms to derive the code from block programs I am using AI on the back-end, which actually makes a higher level of abstraction possible with the blocks. Each block has an LLM instruction attached, along with rules defined in the bespoke back-end harness.
Also: kids can code using cardboard cut-out blocks and just take a photo to import, generate Arduino firmware, compile and flash to ESP32 - all from a single docker web application.
Hoping to bootstrap a cheaper, open source alternative to current systems (one of which my son is using at his school). I have had success doing this with another project on Patreon so that's where it is going to be launched. https://www.patreon.com/ChonkyBlox - so far just a couple of demo video's but code will be released in full once I have added more blocks and a tutorial.
Ultimately this is aimed at the South African education sector, where many schools may have only one computer available for a classroom to share, hence the cardboard cut-outs. There is also a hardware component still in development - a simple pcb breadboard break-out with connectors for components instead of kids having to use jumper cables on the breadboared. We also have a working Desktop application which does code assistance from within the Arduino IDE - using the same web server with api, so literally everything from very small kids to advanced is covered.
Working on Clor, an agent multiplexer for Claude and Codex with shared memory. It's free on your own machines.
The idea is to help developers multiplex agent sessions and run Claude and Codex together, which is much more powerful than running one or the other alone.
My secret goal is to figure out how to make software development the kind of focused, meditative work it used to be.
Very happy to get critical feedback from any HN'ers: [email protected]
I'm making a language. Its name is Pergyra Lang, and there's nothing particularly special about it.
I’ve been working on Foreclosure Data Hub, which aggregates foreclosure auction data across the US.
The interesting part has been the data pipeline rather than the website itself. Foreclosure information is scattered across county sites, auction platforms, and other sources, all with different formats and update schedules.
I’m currently pulling from 20+ sources, normalizing the records, deduplicating properties, and enriching them with property/location data. One surprisingly difficult problem has been handling stale records when upstream sources change or republish old auction information.
Still working on improving data freshness and coverage:
https://www.foreclosuredatahub.com/
Would be interested to hear from anyone who’s worked on aggregating messy public datasets at scale.
Recently refreshed my FFmpeg command builder tool:
I originally built this around 7 years ago in Vue2 and Bootstrap as a simple static frontend tool to generate common ffmpeg commands.
I recently ported it over to Vite/React/Tailwind via Claude (Opus 5) and thought it did a pretty good job. So refreshed it as a version 2.0.
Quite impressed how fast AI was able to port this over. It made me think about revitalizing some old projects. :)
Eylo (a take on Hello) a voice first agent platform, multi-tenant, focused on B2B2C use-cases - https://github.com/DigiCred-OSS/eylo-os
It’s a distilled fork of a closed source product that we are offering to our customers.
My funny essays newsletter on substack. Link to latest post: https://yelluwcomedy.substack.com/p/the-fascinating-world-of...
Please let me know if you enjoy!
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://nashist.naiyerasif.com