alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?
Comments
I want to try again using AI to build an app, and also learn some Rails. I consult at a company that uses ServiceNow for change control and it's absolutely horrible, and they have busted processes atop it. I dream of a change control app that has templates, has better visual indicators of an RFC's stage in the workflow and exactly what needs done to push it along, and just something that doesn't suck as much as SNOW.
I was curious if AI agents could go beyond just making SVGs and create entire skits with them.
So I built a platform to do that. Results were meh until Astra, so I finally open sourced it last weekend.
I'm making a language. Its name is Pergyra Lang, and there's nothing particularly special about it.
I've been doing a bunch of stuff with using a PUT[1] to simulate an IF (Integrate and Fire) neuron[2]. Right now I'm experimenting with variations of pulse-width and frequency of the input spike train, seeing how that affects when the "neuron" fires. In a future step I'll add a resistor to bleed off some of the charge from the timing capacitor, to make it more of a "Leaky Integrate and Fire" neuron.
And then ... well, we'll see. I'm also reading a lot of books and stuff on neuroscience, neuromorphic computing[3], analog computing, etc. I don't have some "grand unified theory" or anything, just playing around in this space.
There's a lot more I could say about this, but I'll save that for a blog post or something. That said, if anybody wants to see some pictures and read some write-ups of some of this stuff, add me on LinkedIn[4] and you'll see some of that stuff in my activity there.
EDIT:
What the heck, here's a picture for anybody who's interested.
https://fogbeam.com/images/scope_20260913_202613.png
The magenta trace is the "spike train" which is output from a Rigol DG4162 Function Generator. The yellow trace is the voltage at the anode of the PUT, which simulates the "action potential" of the neuron membrane. And the cyan trace is the cathode of the PUT, which simulates the output of the neuron. What we see here are several input pulses hitting, with each bumping the action potential up a little, until it finally hits a threshold and then "fires" and resets. Lather rinse repeat.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_unijunction_trans...
[2]: https://neuronaldynamics.epfl.ch/online/Ch1.S3.html
I'm working through: https://modernaicourse.org/.
I appreciate that it makes me revisit some math which i've forgotten like directional derivative and why gradient points to highest ascent.
Interesting but hard as well.
https://github.com/amir734jj/symmetric-crypto-chat-room
Share an encryption key with someone offline, then chat with them (text + voice + video + file) encrypted with that key. Your JavaScript browser only knows that key. Nothing is shared. True end-to-end encryption in your browser.
LumifyHub.io
Recently got genomic DNA purification automated for yeast (plus have automated library prep for nanopore+ a promethion)! As part of the DNA purification task, I had to journey up to Healdsburg to buy some lysis enzyme (thank god for winemakers, 100x cheaper than the biotech grade stuff), and noticed catalogs of different yeast strains with all their flavor profiles and stuff characterized.
I'm thinking about buying all the strains and pushing them through my automated sequencing pipeline, and building a yeast genotype -> flavor converter. Then, I think it'd be neat if you could have someone try a bunch of wines to get their favorite, and then genetically engineer a yeast strain specifically for their favorite flavors. Think that could be neat.
i don't know what to do in my 27 age
a marketplace for people to safely collect their own AI sessions in their own S3 compat buckets so they can sell them later to dataset buyers.
i don't know what to do in my 28
ssh sshfighter.com
Been optimising an ssh ansi rendering engine for six months, starting to look great. Homepage is slop please forgive
I’ve been building an offline first animation webapp. CRDT-driven to support eventual team features. Just got tweening working this weekend, exporting to video is next.
An integrated softphone, email client, CRM and task manager https://www.benko.app/
1) I've been running a bunch of little daily puzzle games for my friends for a while, finally got around to polishing one for public release
Not like I'm gonna anything much with it, just was fun to get something nice-looking and presentable up for once. Working on polishing more of them and, of course, designing new ones.
2) A font generation system, inspired by Iosevka, albeit much much simpler. Learning tons of interesting technical things about TTF and WOFF2.
Software to promote live music and drink specials so I don't have to check dozens of Instagram accounts to find out what's happening tonight.
I wrote my own site parsing toolkit which removed the friction I have with the current ones. It's now easy to add new locations quickly to scale.
All those things I use once in a while, I put them on one place without ads or bs. Optimized for usability, not impressions or whatever.
If there's a tool you'd like to see there, let me know and I'll add it.
A social media platform trying to solve misinformation, astroturfing and inauthentic posting. I also thought there was a real space for some non-US-based social media, so this is based in Australia. This is owing to all the political instability going on in the US right now and especially stuff like users' identities being subpoenaed for criticising the government. It was a pet peeve of mine seeing threads of comments that are obviously artificially created to push some kind of narrative, and the ability to buy likes and upvotes to shape opinion. Nothing ever seems to get done about it on big platforms, so I wanted to make some small contribution towards fixing it. And there's an element of self-interest here, because I want to be able to read a platform where every comment is authentic.
I've been working on it since 2023 and launched in March this year. Recently, native mobile apps have been launched. It was also an experiment in seeing whether Swift Vapor can be used to build a complex backend and the answer appears to be yes. It's a lot of fun to see how bad actors are joining the site, then building automated mechanisms to counter them, using AI to improve detection, without impacting legitimate users. It's also been a great technical challenge to try to support features that the big players support, like video upload and encoding, image upload, CSAM detection, NSFW detection, LLM-generated text detection and auto-translation using DeepL.
There are also lots of legal compliance challenges now with age verification laws coming in around the world, and ensuring you employ all the correct Apple and Google-specific verification (Declared Age Range, Play Age Signals) in the correct global regions. It's also fascinating to see behind the scenes how tight or not so tight current age verification actually is.
Recently, I've been polishing the iOS version to try to hit the 120 Hz target frame rate while scrolling feeds and finding SwiftUI is much less capable at this than the old UIKit approach. I'm also trying to teach myself marketing and how to keep users engaged. I'm primarily code-oriented and historically haven't had to do any marketing myself, and this is a vertical learning curve. I have gained a great deal of respect for those who have 'figured out' marketing, seeing how difficult it is starting from nothing.
It's also satisfying to take a feature from a user suggestion in the morning to an app release including that feature in the evening. This is a speed of delivery that would be unthinkable in the corporate world, where I previously worked, and it's very gratifying to put a complete feature in a user's hands within 24 hours.
Anyway, it's a very long and tough road and may amount to nothing in the end. But if nothing else, it's been immensely educational and enjoyable. Thanks for reading and feel free to check it out:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.topicle.ap...
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I am working on these open source projects:
https://github.com/office-42/word42
https://github.com/office-42/math42
https://github.com/office-42/office42
https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/northstar-browser