alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (November 2026)
What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?
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working on AudioWeave, an ad free, offline first Android podcast player.
switching from iOS, I wasn't happy with the existing podcast apps, so I built this mostly for myself. I've been using it for the last six months and finally pushed a public beta.
My day to day is BE so I used the project to learn Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. Everything is strictly native using Room and Media3/ExoPlayer. I wanted a nice looking (subjective), privacy-focused app without any tracking or ads.
I'm considering open sourcing it soon.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.enyodigita...
i've been building wearover and getalcor.com -- a chain of apps handing off content where possible with use of on-device AI , but burning tokens and building more than serving the product well to end users, and might just wind up my startup experiment and take up a job or contract.
Indieweb/blogosphere index, search, and exploration.
Taking a break from features to focus on refining content filters and expunging sites that slipped through. Looking at you, .ai TLD.
Still Raygum! Letterboxd for music - https://raygum.com
Still plugging away on Slopjective-C 3.0 https://github.com/doublemover/Slopjective-C/pull/8278
and many other things
I’m based in Berlin and currently working on ChatFrom.io . You upload your knowledge base, and it uses advanced RAG with hybrid search and reranking to find answers when someone asks a question. It connects to Stripe, Shopify, and other tools, and works on Telegram, Slack, and more. Free to start.
My main project is trying not to lose my mind, given all the things I can now create thanks to AI.
Jokes aside (although I'm not entirely joking about my mental health), my main project is https://auradistill.com: First-principles thinking for your AI agents.
It's not just about giving your personal AI agents "memory". It's about encoding memories in a way that can handle ambiguity and contradictions.
That project alone has got me completely hooked on building for and with LLMs.
I've got other projects too, but this is probably the one I've poured the most time and energy into.
I wanted to try and build something in a completely saturated market, so I’ve built a handful of movie themed daily games into a hub.
tirreno - security framework
https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno
Live demo: https://play.tirreno.com
https://github.com/hnarayanan/hello-guix - A GNU Guix installer for Apple Silicon Macs. :)
I've been building MiserablyUnemployed for the better part of this year. https://miserablyunemployed.com/
It's a free job site with some resume tools bolted on. Lots of people from all over the world are using it and that feels great.
It has 2.7M+ jobs and automatically removes any job older than 7 days. We never allow reposts because, frankly, the job market is a nightmare and any job that has been up for 7+ days almost certainly has 1000+ applicants already. You're just feeding your resume into a wood chipper.
Come and try it. It's awesome.
https://arcaide.foo - to visualize the architecture of your (LLM's) code.
Adding tufting support to RapidCAM.app for CNC run makers. RapidCAM already supports 2.5D CNC, laser and rotary axis so tufting was a good fit.
I'm a really big fan of Grand Theft Auto IV but its online scene never took off. I'm trying to build a multiplayer client a la FiveM/RageMP for it.
Koaches.app helping prepare and practice behaviorial interviews.
working on an app which you/agents can put exact pieces from any websites you need into a one screen.(https://banquish.space)
I didn't want to switch/refresh bunch of tabs. That's why I made this one.
not screenshots. so you can still interact with the pieces like in normal web browsers.
working on talk deep https://talkdeep.me, a little app for keeping in touch with friends after i moved countries. you pair with a friend and get one question a day, or go through decks of deeper questions together. i've never done an app before so building something from scratch has been a really fun creative outlet
been building BuildOpsy mostly writing about system design, infrastructure failures and the occasional “well, that was an expensive outage” postmortem.
Also building calculators for things engineers usually calculate in a spreadsheet at 2am. you can see some on the site(https://buildopsy.com/calculators.html)
Side hobby: Improving the gameplay of a multiplayer browser game. Rimpark (https://rimpark.gg) launched ~1.5y ago.
I'm self hosting a GLM 5.3 Flash, and with it: adding new mechanics, fixing bugs, etc.
It's been a learning journey so far: how to run inference, setup agentic systems, experimental loops, and prevent slop.
This week, I'm happy that my agent system can implement a new feature e2e with not a lot of human intervention in code reviews. Still reading every line, didn't YOLO (yet lol).
Reddit alternative https://hissy.app it is currently offline though
I keep doing the independent research in theory of AI despite my odds
I want to make app like action but for repairs, like electronics and cars.
Client posts request and masters respond with their offers.
What you think about that guys?
oh you know, just ai-stuff
Not really sure what to call it, Linux kernel ish implemented in JS so you can run it in the browser. Each program runs in WASM. Everything bootstrapped from a C/Cpp compiler compiled from source with a new target. Also kinda turned into Docker for WASM.
Recommended for people that feel a strong urge to run a browser inside a browser.
https://slopshare.dev/v0.1.5/wine/
Also quite useful to run coding agents sandboxed inside the browser, with HTTP policies and "backend managed skills/extensions". Compiles Codex from source (has a rust compiler), runs pi agent and CC (the old node one) on a custom javascript runtime on top of quickjs compiled inside the environment.
Everything is static JS (or the robots are lying to me)
My next sci-fi or fantasy novel - it could go either way at the moment.
Since the 1.0 announcement for flet.dev I have been working on making small apps to make DXF files for CNC projects with drawn previews.
https://studio.flet.dev/run/bicQWc3Aul/
which is now at a working state for rabbet joinery boxes with a sliding lid, or omitting the lid:
https://community.carbide3d.com/uploads/default/original/3X/...
Next up is a hinged lid option and cleaning up the wireframe preview to look better/be more accurate.
I’ve been fooling around with a lot of consumer GPU hardware and having a fun time. There are so many rabbit holes and interesting parts available to piece a Rube Goldberg of a performant clanker together.
I am building Esara – the AI hiring platform for candidate sourcing and explainable evaluation.
We’ve just incorporated in Berlin together with two great co-founding colleagues. Honestly never felt more excited.
Though it is a B2B tool, check it out: https://esara.ai
My husband created an AI-powered website, and I've been using it to generate engaging AI videos for social media. This not only helps promote his website (seedeo.ai) but also expands our website's content library, which gives me a great sense of accomplishment.
For years, I struggled to make any headway with Linux - I get so frustrated at how obscure, inscrutable, and unintuitive TUIs are! God I don’t want to waste my life typing esoteric strings of commands into the terminal. When I started with computers that was all there was, and once GUIs happened I never looked back.
Good news though, these days Claude will just do it for me!
I’ve been working on setting up a home media server, using headless Debian on a pi - I’ve got it set up to stream music and videos, hold all my ROMs, I’ve got it automatically standardizing file names and handling tagging and subtitles - all attached to a big 6-drive enclosure that I just stuffed all my random old HDDs into.
Even though I haven’t written more than a dozen lines of code or commands for the whole thing, I am pretty fuckin pleased that now I can just wave a magic wand and say “I want all my video game soundtracks filed under the game name rather than the artist” and Claude uh finds a way to grant my wish. I spend about an hour each night tweaking it and it’s so easy to customize to be exactly what I need.
Honestly? Still just trying to get hired.
But apart from that, I just updated my website's theme to something I wanted to do for quite a while now – a fantasy desktop! If you'd like to check it out: https://0xff.nu
I'm also trying to just learn new things with the time I was refunded by being unemployed.
I am working on a Rust-based ext4 driver. The idea is that it can be re-used as a FUSE-based driver as well as (Windows) kernel driver (eventually).
Most of the essential features are implemented so far, but some (mandatory) features are lacking (xattrs support). My goal is to get to a full ext4 implementation that also supports ext2 and ext3 read/write.
The initial motivation was to have a pet project with a use-case for Rust, as I wanted to improve my Rust coding skills, after I did some work on a game server implementation in Rust earlier [1]. My goal is to have an implementation where I have digested every line mentally, which is something that pretty much excludes slop-like use of AI for large scale code generation. And of course I want to really trust the code that touches my files via raw hard disk access. Hence, I use AI mainly for unit tests and (scoped) code rewriting when my code gets too verbose and cumbersome.
In the long run I'd want to add fuzzing to the implementation, so if anyone has experience on this, I'd be interested in getting some pointers.
AT1C Protocol AI Agents require Human consent. Don't trust us Verify the Receipt. https://www.npmjs.com/package/@at1c/sdk
Building a tool that finds code problems before they become "quick" Friday fixes. Currently teaching it to be less dramatic than the linter :)
I'm rebuilding a benchtop CNC milling machine.
www.statsbrowser.com, a web-based statistical analysis app built on top of webR with step by step test guides and result insights intended to make performing stats easier for students.
I'm nearing the end of a somewhat long and arduous journey of writing a GPU-accelerated voxel terrain generator and editor.
The terrain and editor pipeline is a three stage process. The first stage is user-configurable; users write an arbitrary 'shaping' shader in GLSL. The second stage is a fused stage; it does a convolution on the output of the first stage to compute a normal, runs a second user-configurable 'decoration' function, and finally applies edits. Edits are collections of SDFs that are 'compiled' from a graph structure on the CPU into a bytecode, and interpreted in the shader. The last stage runs another convolution to compute the final normal, then packs an occupancy bit, color, and normal down into a 32-bit representation, suitable for transfer back to the CPU. I expect I will expand this to include additional user-level bits for encoding biome type and GPU-driven spawning.
The entire shader pipeline is one fused 'ubershader' .. everything is bound at startup and the shader is dispatched three times, incrementing a 'Stage' uniform on each dispatch. This strategy conceptually makes the driver overhead nearly zero, and the profile agrees.
The final step in the process is giving the CPU a chance to spawn additional entities and structures after generation. This is not completely fleshed out, but the bones are there. The idea is that the results of the GPU work are passed back to the CPU, which can run arbitrary callbacks to spawn additional edits and entities. Once spawning is complete, the result is meshed using a fast binary meshing algorithm and uploaded to the GPU. I keep 16 bits of data per voxel from the GPU work, 1 bit of occupancy, and 15 bits of normal for collision response, which works out to half a megabyte per chunk. At the moment I only keep chunks which contain a piece of the world surface, and discard the rest. Surface chunks are dense, and may be compressed in the future, but keeping this amount of data scales to world sizes greater than 1B voxels cubed, which seems good enough for now.
In terms of raw performance, GPUs are ridiculous. My 3080ti mobile gets somewhere on the order of 500B-1T perlin samples per second with a naive perlin implementation. Compared to FastNoise2, that's about 1000x more, which sounds wrong since my GPU only has 35x more capacity, but, that's what my initial profiling said. That number is the marketing number; the real throughput is significantly less due to multi-stage nature of the system, but, there's a lot of headroom for improvement. For example, dropping the backing textures from 32bit to 16bit roughly quadruples performance. Since we only really care about the surface where values are near zero, I believe using 8 or 16 bit is a viable option, though this claim will require a fair amount of study to validate.
All in all, I'm pleased with how this is all working out. My original goal was to write a highly flexible system giving users both easy-to-use tools and granular control over the final output. I think I've done a fairly good job at that, and the fact it's also super fast is the cherry on top.
Finding purpose in life.
Launched Diligly today. Investor-ready data rooms for startups.
I "accidentally" created one of the fastest modern JavaScript frameworks out there: https://signy.dev/
...according to my own benchmarks (yeah, I know how that sounds).
Next, I'm planning to submit it to independent third party benchmarks, hoping to find out whether my results are accurate... or not :)
I've also just finished a CSS framework: https://iriscss.com/
Now I'm working on a new backend programming language that runs on the Erlang BEAM, along with a few web applications built using this tech stack.
https://github.com/timbran-project/moor
Multiuser programmable persistent worlds. Compatible with LambdaMOO. Since 2022.
working on apyhub mcp: to enable all apyhub apis to be available for agents. https://apyhub.com/mcp
Ur is an (in-progress) universal formatter and linter for every programming language. It's in preview right now, which just means friends are messing around with it and having a good time pointing out all the bugs. Docs are mostly up to date, but buyer beware.
I'm working on decorating my homepage[1]. Other than that, I'm working on a language.
Currently working on adding support for iPhone Duo to my hacker news app Hack. The app has been around for 9 years and when I made it, the menu bars and navigation buttons were custom views. That doesn't seem to work well for iPhone duo due to its vertical stack menu on the right side. So, I've been switching over to iOS native navigation bars and menu bars along with a bunch of other improvements. I was hoping to have it done couple weeks ago but I had to leave country for a family emergency. So I am working on it this week. It's mostly done, I'm just doing some final testing now and will submit to Apple this week:
infra engineering meanwhile trying to build some stuff for my own. also trying to finish cs master’s
Another novel.
Currently, I'm in the midst of ricing my 3D printer - an Ender 3 V3 SE which has been sitting unloved for quite some time. Fresh filament, cleaning, mechanical tuneup, and now running through the very nice suite of calibration prints that are included in Orca slicer (which is new to me). It's been fun to get my hands around something physical.
Also been playing a bit of Blood Dungeon, which is pretty fun. I've also got a Factorio save that has mildly petered out after landing on Vulcanus (which I have kinda taken advantage of to break the addiction lol, but I'm sure I'll get back in there sometime over the winter).
I've been kinda deliberately taking a bit of a break from programming "side projects" after spending a humongous amount of free time and energy on a conference talk I gave a few weeks ago. It was titled "Human Creativity in the Age of AI" (which I later learned was an unfortunately generic title, lol), and I built this whole big musical and visual contraption that drove the presentation, including a "guitar solo generator" which recuts phrases of my own playing into a new solo on the fly.
It was a really rewarding project overall but definitely made me remember why I hadn't done public speaking for quite some time before - I am way too perfectionistic about it and it just becomes a massive time sink.
This one was worth it though, got a great reception and I'm really proud of the talk on the whole.
In the 2-3 weeks after the talk I spent a ton of time editing and laying out a really nice video of it, which I am also quite proud of. I didn't know anything about Davinci Resolve and I was able to get a really nice jump start with some help from Codex. I'm sure I don't know 98% of what a software package this big can do, but I did learn enough to be dangerous, and also enough to cut together some nice short clips of the talk as well.
It's been pretty rewarding to get a handle on a powerful bit of creativity kit like Resolve. It's incredibly capable and I'm really delighted with the results I was able to get. Obviously I am a rank amateur but to my untrained eye, my videos look pretty damn good. (And I could go on for another few paragraphs about how much work it took to get good results from the relatively shitty source video and audio I was working with).
I'm planning on doing some writeups because there was so much interesting tooling that came together as I worked on the talk and the videos, I could mine this one project for a year's worth of blog posts if I wanted to!
Anyway: links.
OrcaSlicer calibration guide - seriously great: https://www.orcaslicer.com/wiki/guides/calibration_guide
Blood Dungeon: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2431080/Blood_Dungeon/
I assume a link to Factorio is unnecessary here, ha.
My talk "landing page": https://epiccoleman.com/tripulator
Talk video: https://youtu.be/kD5qYiLIhJc
One of the shorts - the guitar solo part. I'm really stoked on the "presentation" bells and whistles in this video (though I think they're a bit mismatched to the regular intent of YouTube Shorts - analytics indicate that the intro part I slaved over is probably too long and people swipe away before the good stuff, but oh well).
I've been learning kubernetes with the help of Claude Opus and trying to build it into a course which others might find useful: https://gravitypersists.github.io/kubernetes-from-the-proble...
It's not meant to be super in-depth, more so aimed at understanding the high-level details and motivations of k8s. I figured that the best way to do that was to pose each chapter as an evolution of a startup experiencing a problem, and showing how k8s solves that problem, by treating the reader like the technical manager in the situation.
I'm not a k8s expert, so I can't definitively say it's "my course" but I will say, we're at an interesting time where you can contribute authorship to something and learn it at the same time. I'm spending more time steering the output the more I learn things, so it's not just slop.