Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2026)

1 points by meerita ↗ HN
What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?

70 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] thread
I'm working on a book starring the 6 Simple Machines. I already did one book called "Simple Machines Made Simple." I'm now doing a follow up book that I'm thinking will likely be titled "Simple Machines Made Complicated" (or maybe Complex). Each page is a working mechanism. Kind of like a book full of fidget toys. So I want to have one page for each simple machine, and some of the progressions to complex are easy i.e. (wheel -> gears), but the one I'm currently stuck on is the pulley. My first book had a compound pulley, but now I'm struggling to figure out a more complex pulley example that I can recreate with less than 5mm for the page thickness. My first idea was to do like a roman blind mechanism with a pinch-stop type thing for the cord, but the more I played with it, the more I felt like this wasn't any different from the first book. I also like the idea of a chain hoist type mechanism, but I'm worried there isn't enough visual pay off for what you put into it. Like you move this chain thing around a bunch, but you only get a very small movement on the other end. Anyway, that's I'm working on. It might take me another 6 months, but I'm sure I'll figure something out ;)
There are posted later in the month. Don't post a new copy on the 1st. The most recent is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49686380
I think a biweekly post cadence versus monthly might be beneficial due to the thread locking after 14 days, which would ensure there is always an active thread for folks to share what they're hacking on (and they might not be ready or in a position for a Show HN thread). Otherwise, there is a period of time where you cannot share between the last thread when it closes and the next thread. 1st and 15th of the month, for example. Or perhaps allow these specific threads a longer active window before they close to new comments.

(n=1, ymmv)

looking at the post dates, there doesn't seem to be a schedule at all. it's posted randomly... posts on 9th through the 30th. Back in 2024, it was even posted regularly on the 1st.

IMO if there isn't a schedule, then posting it on the 1st sounds good.. since that's when the other posts like this are submitted.

I'd look deeper than the dates. There is a fairly consistent schedule posted by david927. Read the comments on the first few and you'll see some discussion about the whole thing with dang. Everything else is other people rando posting the same thing, whenever they feel like it.

So there is a schedule. But the noise from everyone ignoring it and posting their own copy masks it, which is exactly why I dislike these rando copies of the question.

> There is a fairly consistent schedule posted by david927.

My comment about the schedule is based only on david927's posting schedule. I don't see the schedule.. they look like random dates during the month. If you see a pattern there, feel free to spell it out for me.

I also couldn't find any discussion with dang. link?

Working on an interactive explainer for code. When agents write most of the code, I find I'm losing the working theory of the code/architecture. Code review had typically served a couple of purposes, two of which are catching errors and disseminating codebase knowledge amongst the team. I find that adversarial agent reviews are good at catching errors, and that I prefer to learn about the architecture before/while I'm designing the next feature, rather than after.

I've also been designing a APL/BQN-like language that uses Korean as a way to compact and compose the meanings of the operations.

Working on an Apple Notes clone, but everything is a local Markdown file. Currently free, macOS (Silicon + Intel) and Windows. Has tags and priorities, can display many scientific syntaxes (mhchem, most TeX / LaTeX stuff, Excalidraw, PlantUML, Graphviz / DOT, Vega-Lite, and actual Markdown footnotes). Can show notes in vertical lanes like JIRA does. Free iCloud sync too. Still early alpha.

https://notesplus.io

Laboratory.love, still a one-person side project, and the goal is still to make supply chains transparent with regard to plastic chemicals.

If you eat the same product every morning please consider kicking off a crowdfunding page to get it tested.

Check what's been tested so far here: https://laboratory.love/results

This is a really cool idea!

If you don't mind a little feedback:

- It took me a lot longer than it should have to figure out how to click into an item on the results list; I instinctually clicked on the card and then the photo of the item, assumed that they weren't clickable, then accidentally clicked into one before realizing that only the name of the item is linked. The grid cards on the main homepage don't have this issue.

- The visual design of the Child/Adult radio group makes me think that the white item is selected, but I'm pretty sure it's the black one (based on the fact that the Medium ratings turn to High when Child is rendered black). It's clear enough in the filter at the top that the item rendered black is the one selected, but it wasn't clear to me in the radio group.

I've been working on a website monitoring service written in Rust. I had to port from using the reqwest library to libcurl in order to properly capture DNS/connect/TLS/first-byte timing. I basically ran the new engine side by side with the original for a few weeks, running 100k+ checks daily to get a 99.8% agreement. The mismatches were interesting because of the Cloudflare challenge that returned 403 based on the http/2 fingerprint, no matter the user-agent used.
I'm making a browser-based MMO experience of sorts for the 1999 Dreamcast game Shenmue - it's still pretty rough around the edges but people who like the game have liked it so far:

https://www.newyokosuka.com/

I'm also close to finishing an browser-based client for the MMOFPS Planetside:

https://terrasunder.net/play/

I'm getting reports of performance issues for TerraSunder from a couple people so if you run into them, submitting a performance report in the settings would help me a lot!

I have some other cool projects listed on my site here, including a browser-based version of EverQuest that plays itself: https://brynnbateman.com/

Im building serverless hosting for Wordpress (+ serverless mariadb) with the dev tooling I wish Wordpress had.. including mcp and cli that fully exposes the wp cli, mariadb, and all of the underlying infrastructure. So everything you can do through the dashboard, an agent can do via mcp or cli.

For example, if Im debugging a plugin, an agent can just connect to the site, read or modify the code, see what it's writing to disk or db, test it's changes, etc.

And this is standard WP -- this isn't a rewrite like emdash. So the fun part is figuring out how to make it all work without modifying WP, or requiring plugins to be installed, etc.

https://www.agiler.io

I'm building Eigakan Guide (https://eigakanguide.jp/en), a cinema showtime aggregator for Japan. It allows searching for showtimes all over Japan by area, cinema, date, time, and features like IMAX and Dolby Cinema.

When I posted in the last "Ask HN: What are you working on?" thread I only had support for two cinema chains and no English metadata. Right now I've got 27 cinema chains, 373 cinemas, almost full English metadata coverage, and I've added English audio and English subtitles filtering.

So you can basically search for stuff like movies showing in Shinjuku on Saturday starting after 6PM, finishing before 11PM, with English audio in IMAX, and it'll give you every showtime from every cinema in Shinjuku grouped by movie.

I'm currently building a ChatGPT plugin which will allow searching showtimes through ChatGPT using natural language and later on I will add AI chat search features to the actual site as well.

My goal is to make finding movie showtimes as simple as possible and I would love to get feedback or suggestions for new features people want.

I've gotten quite far on my free, open source, language-learning tool for teaching Brazilian Portuguese. It's flashcard based, focused on verb/vocabulary-drilling, where you get the English version and have to produce the Portuguese. There's also a "Foco"-mode, with smartness in what flashcards to drill per day.

The site is completely static, no build step, and even offers optional cross-device progress sync between devices and browsers, through a tiny worker keyed by a sync code, totally account-less. Works on all platforms and browsers, no install required.

I've found it super helpful for my own PT-BR progress!

Website: https://falagringo.com/

GitHub: https://github.com/henrikhestnes/fala-gringo

I am working on my very own Web App for Todos and notes. I wanted to take a real new take on todos, because most apps I used show a simple list and does not give me the option to see what is really important right now and how big a task is. Also tools are very different the way they work with subtasks and projects. Most tools have separate concepts for each (or none at all). So I decided to let the user decide for each task what it is: every task can have nested tasks layered as deep as it wants and there is a grouping feature to work smart with these tasks. It support also notes, links and files. I use it daily for work, it is in active development (new version coming out today) and it also has a Mac app. Feedback is more than welcome. You can try it here: https://aevo.so
I am working on a new kind of sorting "algorithm" for when the cost of comparisons is high and heterogeneous. The ideal use case is as a methodology for minimizing the number of pairwise human evaluations: in AI, marketing, search evaluation, clinical trials, etc... It works by keeping track of what pairs are solidly established, which parts of the ranking are still ambiguous, what alternatives are still possible/impactful and from this deduce the fraction of the sorting that can be reused during updates.

Think of it as reversible incremental ranking with information-theoretic guarantees and updates that scale linearly with the number of items to rank. From this I realized there was a direct application in machine learning: differential sorting and ranking. I've been exploring this space for the past couple days and it seems I could be flirting with state of the art performances. To sort 8000 items, softsort takes 1.9 secs to complete one forward and one backward pass. My implementation takes 27ms. 488Mo for softsort. 0.18Mo for me. Sorting 10^6 items costs about 100ms and 15Mo. Softsort can't run at this scale. Alas softsort isn't SOTA, fastsoftsort is. We both run in O(n log n) in time and O(n) in space, and have very similar raw performance profiles except that my thing takes 3x as much memory ... which allows me to update the ranking in linear time on the next runs. Mmmh!

I'm working on Aficionado (https://aficiona.do) - a scrapbook/tracker for media aficionados to remember, share and discover films, games, music, books and tv shows they enjoy(ed).

It's been a lot of fun working on it and using it myself, hopefully other might find it useful.

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I’m working on local GitHub-like app where you can comfortably review code written by your agents before the code will ever leave your computer. Once installed, your agent can send you a link to GitWarren each time it will finish a piece of work for you to make a review. The idea is to replicate the GitHub code-review experience.

Free and open source: https://github.com/klarluft/gitwarren-app

It works as a local WebUi or desktop app. Also works well with tailnet and ssh if you review a code on remote machines. If your phone is in tailnet you can make reviews on your mobile.