Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

by david927 1178 comments 347 points
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1178 comments

[−] cmos 32d ago
My mother is living alone in her house and we are getting to the point where she might not be able to live alone. I built "Still Kicking", a picture frame that monitors her motion and sends back basic reports and can detect falls and sleep quality to a phone app, to help give her more time at home.

It's just an mmWave sensor connected to an ESP32. But it works nicely, and I'm thinking of starting a company making them, though I'm not clear if the elderly would be ok with this minimal (no camera) intrusion.

It would just work out of the box.. the real one would have a small cell modem so it wouldn't need any networking setup, and it would act as a gateway if you have more than one in a house. There are industrial versions of this for nursing homes. This would be a bit more warm and fuzzy for home use.

https://moveometer.com

[−] digitaltrees 32d ago
I own a national home care provider (in 13 states) and EHR. We are looking for products like this. Book office hours if you’re interested in discussing:

https://calendly.com/ryanwmartin/open-office-hours

[−] taylorhou 32d ago
Booked a time! We built senior smartphone assistance without humans
[−] cmos 30d ago
Booked a time!
[−] popupeyecare 32d ago
I love it. As a physician, I see so many cases of elderly patients who have fallen and not been found for hours if not days.

In elder care, I am building https://statphone.com - one emergency number that rings multiple family members simultaneously and breaks through DND. Would love to chat/collaborate.

[−] naikrovek 32d ago
“Still Kicking” is a fantastic name for that.
[−] lurkshark 32d ago
There was a Minnesota company called Healthsense (was acquired by GreatCall which was then acquired by BestBuy, not sure if the company/tech exists anymore) that had a similar approach on a broader scale. Their system used a bunch of mundane smart home sensors in the usual configuration (e.g. contact sensors on doors, motion sensors, etc) but also for tracking patterns and habits, like the refrigerator door, toilet seat, bed, etc. The idea being that an abrupt shift in behavior would trigger a notice for a loved one or nurse to check in. I always thought this was a cool idea and it's a shame it didn't take off a bit more.

The question of "intrusion" was always interesting to me because old folks often face going from nothing to assisted living or nursing home which is often quite intrusive, where somewhat ironically adding a bunch of sensors to your home allows you a bit more privacy.

Kind of a tangent, but I like your type of system as an alternative to the emergency pendants. It always struck me as strange to expect old folks at risk of fall to remember to charge and wear a pendant at all times.

[−] Aboutplants 32d ago
Start this company! You see the responses from just a small sample, this is your sign to go in on it! Good luck!
[−] tortugapatrick 32d ago
Mom had a stroke a few years ago and while thankfully she's recovered well, I'd buy this. Having designed for seniors and helped senior care focused companies, it's not so much the senior that you'd sell to but their adult children.

Good luck and for what it's worth, go for it!

[−] akg_67 32d ago
Look into some of the products and services used in Japan for elderly care at home.

My FIL, in his late 80's was living at home alone. My wife used a monitoring service, provided by local package delivery company. They installed motion sensors in the toilet and on the door. If no motion detected for 24 hours, the company will alert my wife by phone and send the nearest delivery driver to check on him.

I myself have tried Home Assistant setup on Raspberry Pi and variety of sensors for different purposes.

[−] rjha 32d ago
This was covered on HN a while back, https://alvis.care/
[−] GFischer 31d ago
Pretty cool... I dabbled into the idea of having a super simple tablet on a frame with a one-touch call function to family members - obviously with a camera and much different, but also revolving about the photo frame idea.
[−] idorosen 32d ago
I would buy it. I have built a similar contraption. Let's connect.
[−] ricardo_lien 32d ago
Your verification email is pointing to http://localhost:3000/ lol
[−] dailoxxxx 24d ago
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[−] francoiaia 32d ago
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[−] kokkis 32d ago
I'm building a financial censorship monitor at https://nofunds.org/, that tells a story of how money has been turned into a political weapon to silence journalists, activists, and civil society by freezing assets, blocking accounts, sanctioning, and banning payments. It's part of my master's thesis https://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/187407 and also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36430596, but now I wanted to make a more comprehensive list, using Claude API and manual work. I'm designing a website right now, and the site is live within 2 months (given the API rate limitations currently to process articles). I know Hacker News is quite critical of Bitcoin, but it's also worthy to warn that, indeed, Bitcoin is at least a marginal tool to those whose bank accounts may be endangered. I'm basically arguing that Bitcoin can be used to resist such financial censorship, deplatforming and so on.
[−] paulmooreparks 32d ago
I'm building Tela (https://github.com/paulmooreparks/tela), a self-hosted relay that tunnels TCP services through encrypted WireGuard connections. The key difference from Tailscale and similar tools is that it requires no TUN adapter, no root access, and no admin privileges on either end. It runs entirely in userspace.

My initial motivation was wanting to RDP and SSH into my home workstation from a locked-down corporate laptop when I travel. I couldn't install Tailscale on the laptop, and I didn't want to pay for a cloud VM just to do SSH port forwarding. Now I use it to tie together half a dozen machines, both locally and on Hetzner & Linode. I can SSH and RDP into remote machines, host a git repo on one machine and access it from the others, and (optionally) share files across all of them on a local mount.

You run a hub (telahubd), register machines with a lightweight agent (telad), and connect from anywhere with the client (tela). All three are single Go binaries with no external dependencies. The hub never sees your traffic. It just relays opaque WireGuard ciphertext.

All binaries run on Windows, Linux, and macOS. There is also a desktop GUI app, TelaVisor, that wraps the client and enables remote management of hubs and agents.

It's Apache 2.0-license and pre-1.0 release, but I'm polishing it for a stable 1.0 release in the next month or so.

I'm also working on an enterprise-grade management portal that works with Tela, https://awansaya.net/

[−] dhrm1k 32d ago
ah nice. i’ve actually been building something pretty similar on top of wireguard too

my use case is a bit different though. i started because i wanted to give friends access to specific things in my homelab, but very selectively. like “you can use jellyfin on this one machine, but you can’t ssh, and you can’t even see my other devices”

tailscale is honestly amazing for getting devices connected, i still use it a lot. but once i started trying to do these very specific “this machine can talk to that machine only on this port” kind of setups, it started feeling more complex than it should be, at least for personal use. ACL editor is more confusing when it comes to this. i know we have got option for tags and things, but those are very poorly documented and i haven't found a single tutorial that works nicely.

your userspace approach is really interesting btw, especially the no tun / no root part. makes sense to run it on rigit enterprise environments.

[−] paulmooreparks 32d ago
Tela has ACLs per machine, but not per service. That's an interesting use case, and I'm shocked that I missed it. I've added it to the pre-1.0 roadmap. Thank you!

Another thing on the release roadmap is a TUN/root story, since there is value in having that layer as well. Tela will always support the user-space approach, however, so that unlike Tailscale it's always accessible.

[−] Ingon 32d ago
I've been working on a similar tool for a while - connet (https://github.com/connet-dev/connet). It builds upon QUIC (instead of wireguard), but I think from an enduser perspective the results ends up looking pretty similar.
[−] mentalgear 32d ago
Very interesting - but I also find it important for solutions to state the trade-offs if they provide a novel approach that doesn't have the same requirements as the main contenders. In your case, what are the trade offs for running in user space ?
[−] paulmooreparks 32d ago
That's true. I'd say, probably performance is the first trade-off, weighing kernel against user-space. For the sorts of scenarios I envision for Tela, it's probably not a huge loss (I won't be running Facebook off of a Tela hub, I don't think). Another is that I have to run and tear down the client myself, though I do have support for running the tela client as a service.

It's funny... I've started using so many of the nifty management features of TelaVisor and Awan Saya that I am now considering adding lower-level support for the features that I explicitly wrote for user-space.

[−] nine_k 32d ago
Nice! It looks essentially like userspace NAT, only active for particular ports. I'm contemplating a similar setup to handle access to my home machines: when I'm in my home network, some ports are forwarded to 127.x.y.z directly from the remote machine, and when I'm away, the same ports are forwarded via a Wireguard connection. This way, at home I can use the full speed of the LAN, and when away, the speed is limited by the Wireguard gateway, but I still connect to the same host:port, wherever I am.
[−] DevDesmond 32d ago
I got addicted to scrolling content on my phone, so I built a digital pet whose growth and well-being depends on you staying off your phone! This way, if I spend all night scrolling the browser, my pet will get depression.

Unlike similar apps such as Focus Friend or Forest, which use active timers to police screen time, my app is an inversion that works like an idle game; All screen time is tracked all day, (with double the punishments at night), and upon check-in, you get feedback on your device usage.

https://automatisolutions.com/products/phreepet/

[−] memonkey 32d ago
I've always been very interested in these types of games. Grew up playing Neopets which was inspiration to becoming a software engineer. Am interested in gamified aspects as well. The thing I've not quite figured out is how to make these types of games _actually_ addictive? Neopets had a lot going for it IMO. Would love to know if this is actually working for you (and maybe others) personally and why.
[−] mghackerlady 32d ago
I wish I knew why these games are so addictive, I collected Tamagotchi a few years back and ended up with a handful of originals and one of the fancy new color screen ones (that now goes for obscene amounts of money on ebay).
[−] varenc 32d ago
How are you able to track all screen time on an iOS device? I had thought the APIs to do this aren't available.
[−] buddybuilder 32d ago
I believe Apple opened up their screen time APIs https://developer.apple.com/documentation/screentime
[−] paulhebert 32d ago
I'm continuing to hack on Tiled Words, my daily word puzzle!

https://tiledwords.com

After winning the Playlin Player's Choice award I've noticed an uptick in players as well as some people sharing videos on YouTube which has been fun. I've got a few thousand people playing every day.

I just launched user accounts today so user's can now track their progress across devices and share their stats with each other. This ended up being a bigger chunk of work than I expected but I'm really pleased with how it turned out. (Though I launched it 15 minutes ago so I'm holding my breath for bug reports)

I'm fine-tuning my internal puzzle-building now with the goal of letting people use them to make and share their own puzzles soon!

[−] dodu_ 32d ago
I can't say I'm a regular user but a while ago I stumbled upon another post about tiledwords while a loved one was in the hospital and it was a fun and welcome distraction to solve some of the puzzles together while stuck in an otherwise grim environment.

Thanks for making this and I wish you all the success in the future.

[−] paulhebert 32d ago
I’m glad Tiled Words could make that hard time a little easier. I hope your loved one has recovered and is doing better now
[−] martimchaves 32d ago
I love tiled words, I've actually been doing the daily puzzle for a while, have completed over a 100 of them! It's part of my morning routine :)

I'm not sure if it would fit the theme, but sometimes I end up searching what an expression means, or where does it come from. Maybe it would be cool to have a little info box after you discover what the word is. Just an idea! Not sure if it would clutter things, and you can always search it yourself, but something I've been thinking about. I still remember looking up peanut gallery and sand dollar!

[−] paulhebert 32d ago
Thanks for playing! Congrats on 100 puzzles!

That’s a fun idea. I often stumble across fun facts while making the clues. I’ll think about this more and experiment a bit when I have time!

[−] rnoorda 32d ago
I've been enjoying Tiled Words! I find myself playing in a weird way, by totally ignoring the clues. I look at the title and try to puzzle out all the answers myself. I don't know if I'm alone in that, but it could be a neat mode to have a setting to hide the clues.
[−] paulhebert 32d ago
Thanks! I’ve heard that from a few people! Adding that as an official mode is on my road map but there are a few big features ahead of it right now
[−] mockingloris 32d ago
Thanks for making this. It's totally refreshingly intuitive while doing the practice puzzle!

Just tried it out on my browser. Will be following this.

Also would love to see your workflow you spoke about, on coming up with puzzle ideas and tile arrangements. Cheers!

[−] paulhebert 32d ago
Thanks for checking it out! I’ll try to share that soon
[−] vlatoshi 32d ago
this is so cool, i liked the musical instruments one!

would be super interested to hear more about the puzzle-making process too, is it fully automated with AI at this point or is there still a good amount of manual work and fine-tuning involved?

bookmarked already, can't wait to play tomorrow again

[−] paulhebert 32d ago
Thanks!

It’s a lot of manual work right now. I don’t use AI in the process. I think it could help with some of the brainstorming but I kind of like the human connection of making a puzzle and having people solve it.

Here’s the basic process.

My wife and I do this part together:

- Think of a theme

- Think of words related to that theme, ideally with a second meaning

- Think of clues for those words

Once we have a good set of clues I plug them into a program I wrote to make crosswords.

The program isn’t that smart. It tries making random crosswords. I run it 1500 times and then sort the results to get the best ones. This brute force approach works pretty well for how simple it is.

I pick the crossword I want and then I use another tool to split up and rearrange the tiles. This step could probably be automated but there’s some finicky logic to the best way to split up the tiles and it goes pretty fast manually.

I’ve been meaning to make a video of the process! I’ll share it here when I do

[−] tele_ski 32d ago
Very nice, the movement and snapping of the tiles is very nicely done, enjoyed today's puzzle!
[−] paulhebert 32d ago
Haha I spent a looong time perfecting that so I’m glad it’s appreciated!
[−] digdeep 32d ago
That's a very fun puzzle, nice work! I'll be telling my friends.
[−] paulhebert 32d ago
Thanks!
[−] kvirani 32d ago
Oh wow. This seems like it was a lot of work. Bookmarked and installed!
[−] lilygirl85 32d ago
I just tried this out for the first time and really enjoyed it!
[−] gaurav_singh09 30d ago
Congratulations on the award and the user accounts launch! A few thousand daily players as a solo founder is genuinely impressive traction.

Curious about the user-created puzzles feature you're working toward - that's a classic community moat play. Once players can make and share puzzles, your distribution essentially scales with your most engaged users.

I'm building ad-vertly.ai - marketing agents for solo founders. One thing I find fascinating with puzzle/game products is that the word-of-mouth loop is already there (people share scores, show friends), but it rarely gets deliberately amplified. Are you doing anything intentional to capture that organic sharing energy, beyond the stats sharing you just built?

[−] deivid 32d ago
Have played it a few times, it's really good
[−] rjh29 32d ago
It's fun, impressed by how polished it is.
[−] panja 32d ago
I play this every day with my friend group :)
[−] SpyCoder77 32d ago
This is going on my daily puzzle list!
[−] sqircles 32d ago
This is great!
[−] msolomentsev 32d ago
I've been writing a 'book' (more of an extended blog post that I'd like to put out for free) attempting to explain quantum computing to a layman-ish audience.

I sort of got inspired to do this after seeing so many QC PR posts on HN, and finding the educational material in this space to be either too academic, too narrow in scope, or totally facile. I think given the incredible hype (and potential promise) of this industry, there should be on-ramps for technically minded people to get an understanding of what's going on. I don't think you should need to be a quantum physicist to be able to follow the field (I am only an electrical engineer).

My book tries to cover the computational theory, the actual hardware implementations, and the potential applications of quantum computers. More than that, I want to be unbiased and stray away from what I feel is misleading hype. It's been a work in progress for about 6 months now, with a lot of time spent gaining fluency in the field. But the end is in sight! :)

[−] marcusdev 33d ago
I'm working on a fully offline, client-side train journey planner for UK rail - https://railraptor.com

When booking flights, I use sites like Kiwi and Skyscanner that let you do flexible searches - multiple destinations, custom connections, creative routes, etc. But rail search feels oddly constrained. All the UK train operators offer basically the same experience, and surface the exact same routes. I always suspected there were better or just different options that weren’t being shown. Where is the "Skyscanner for trains"?

After digging through the national rail data feeds, I decided to have a go at building my own route planner that runs completely offline in the browser. This gave me the freedom to implement more complex filters, search to/from multiple stations, and do it without a persistent network connection.

Now I'm finding routes that aren't offered by the standard train operators, connecting at different stations, and finding it's often easier to travel to different stations (some I'd never heard of) that get me closer and faster to where I actually want to go!

It's still a little rough and I'd like to add more features such as fares, VSTP data, and direct-links to book tickets, but wanted to share early and get some initial feedback before investing more time into it. So, thanks in advance - let me know what you think.

[−] mauvehaus 32d ago
Earlier today? My partner and I felled a couple of trees and bucked them into firewood to clear a spot on drier ground for our chicken coop, which had sunk halfway to China because we unknowingly landed it in a soup bowl three years ago when we moved in the winter when the ground was frozen. Also set and leveled four piers in the new spot for it to sit on.

Then slid it a few hundred feet across the lawn on composite deck boards we salvaged when we took a balcony down last year and landed it atop the new piers.

Then put the electric fence back up to keep the bears out.

Presently? A beer.

[−] spudlyo 33d ago
I'm writing an essay about how I use an ancient text editor, GNU Emacs, along with gptel, Gemini, some local models, yt-dlp, and patreon-dl to help me me study an ancient language, Latin.

I want to show how I liberate poorly aligned, pixelated PDF image scans of century-old Latin textbooks from the Internet Archive and transform them into glorious Org mode documents while preserving important typographic details, nicely formatted tables, and some semantic document metadata. I also want to demonstrate how I use a high-performance XML database engine to quickly perform Latin-to-English lookups against an XML-TEI formatted edition of the 19th century Lewis & Short dictionary, and using a RESTXQ endpoint and some XQuery code to dynamically reformat the entries into Org-mode for display in a pop-up buffer.

I intend demonstrate how I built a transcription pipeline in Emacs Lisp using tools such as yt-dlp and patreon-dl to grab Latin-language audio content from the Internet, transcode the audio with ffmpeg, do Voice Activity Detection and chunking in Python with Silero, load the chunks into Gemini's context window, and send it off for transcription and macronization, gather forced-alignment data using local a local wav2vec2-latin model, and finally add word-level linguistic analysis (POS, morphology, lemmas) using a local Stanza model trained on the Classical corpus.

This all gets saved to an an XML file which is loaded into BaseX along with some metadata. I'll then demonstrate some Emacs Lisp code which pulls it into an Org-mode based transcription buffer and minor-mode for reading and study, where I can play audio of any given Latin word, sentence, or paragraph, thanks to the forced-alignment and linguistic analysis data being stored in hidden text properties when the data was fetched from the database.

Lastly, I'd like to explore how to leverage these tools to automatically create flash cards with audio cues in Org mode using the anki-editor Emacs minor mode for sentence mining.

[−] stanko 32d ago
https://muffinman-io.itch.io/spacedeck-x

I'm still obsessed with making my game, which you can try it at the link above (it is desktop only). This is my first "real" game, and it has been incredibly fun and rewarding. I've been working on it in the evenings for about 4 or 5 months.

It is a very ambitious mix of genres - shoot-em-up and deck-building. A lot of people said that those are genres that shouldn't be combined, but I think it turned out to be a fun little game. Folks who are not fans of one (or either) of the genres are actually playing it. I built a global high-score leaderboard, and there are people (including a few of my friends) competing on it. Whoever knocks my friend "BER" from first place will earn a beer from me.

This is purely a fun project, although I'm now seriously considering releasing it on steam when I finish everything I planned for it. It is made in Kaplay, a small JavaScript gamedev library, which is a big part of what makes it fun. If you try it out, please leave a comment, I would love more feedback!

[−] ctbellmar 32d ago
PlantLab (https://plantlab.ai) - AI plant health diagnosis for cannabis. It's an API, not an app [1]. Photo in, structured JSON out - condition, confidence, growth stage, nutrient lockout analysis. The response is for machines. Light burn at 0.92 confidence? Your controller dims the light. Calcium deficiency with excess potassium flagged as the lockout cause? Dosing pump adjusts.

I'm a software dev/data nerd, not a grower. I got interested because cannabis grow rooms are already full of automation - VPD controllers, pH/EC monitoring, dosing pumps, dimmable lights. But nothing was looking at the plant. Every sensor in the room measures the environment, not whether the plant is actually doing well. I wanted to add the eyes. And this seems to be a bound domain issue (i.e. limited number of issues/conditions/pests vs. all plants everywhere).

ViT-based multi-stage pipeline that verifies it's cannabis, classifies condition or pest, then runs nutrient subclassification if needed. 30 classes, 18ms inference, Go API, ONNX Runtime. Trained on a little over a million images from grower friends. Classification was 80% of the lift. I also shipped a Home Assistant integration - camera takes a scheduled snapshot, PlantLab diagnoses, HA acts on the result. No human involved.

Recently the part that's been the most fun is the autoresearch loop. Between training runs the system looks at its own confusion matrix, finds which classes it's mixing up, audits those training images for bad labels, and tells me what to fix. It's not fully autonomous yet but it's getting there - the model is increasingly debugging its own training data.

Solo project, <100 users, free tier is 3/day.

[1] I built a simple Android app for those who want to just try it out, it's on Google Store. Probably will make one for iOS too as time allows. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.plantlab.p...

[−] rrvsh 32d ago
Trying to figure out how to get a job in this market for someone with sub 3 YoE in the industry :/ It's hard out there for juniors, y'all. I'm working at a company that I thought I could stay for years in, but my CTO left and now I'm shafted with basically all of their responsibilities - I'm not overly perturbed by this, as it's well within my ability, but I would much rather spend the next few years as an IC and really develop my skills as a SWE rather than jumping to manager this early... Also just getting an interview is insanely hard nowadays for some reason!
[−] Soupy 32d ago
I'm OCR-ing 200K+ historical maps (or at least trying). For example: https://www.threads.com/@that.map.guy.craig/post/DXA59AylJng...

This has only really become possible within the last 3 months and I'm still shocked at how good some of the new models are at tasks like this.

I'm not a crazy person, promise. I run https://pastmaps.com as a solo bootstrapped founder and this data is so valuable to my customers. It's been a dream of mine to do this as part of my map digitization pipeline and I'm so excited for the product experiences this is going to unlock.

So much to build, so little time

[−] cperciva 32d ago
The same thing I do every night - try to make FreeBSD work better on EC2!

Ok in all seriousness, right now I'm tracking down an issue with the ENA network interface which results in sporadic packet loss. Triggering the issue is hard and seems to require a large number of TCP segments being pushed to the NIC very fast. So far I've found that my reproducer stops reproducing when I turn off write combining on the MMIO space used for low latency queueing, which is... just a little bit weird.

[−] ddtaylor 32d ago
I have been making GTK applications so that people can manage MergerFS and LUKS encrypted hard drives without knowing how to be a sysadmin.

The use case is kind of neat. RAID is great and can mostly solve these problems, but people don't have SATA hardware that can handle the workload well, plus they aren't ready to manage an array like that, and they don't like having to use specific sized drives, etc. Another major issue with those setups is you need to be careful because an IO error that you don't recover from will be very difficult or impossible to recover from because of the layers of LUKS combined with LVM.

With MergerFS you just use regular file systems that are separate, but they get combined into a single mount point. That means each disk can just be a different LUKS encrypted drive and if you need to recover data it's isolated to that one disk and much more manageable. You can also take any disk and plug it into another machine as needed and grow or shrink the storage pool as needed.

MergerFS has options and settings to help you determine how files are spread across the drives, such as least space used or which disk has the most of that directory path already.

My app (Chimera) automates the unlocking of the disks, mounting and some data migration if you want to remove a disk from the pool. I plan to add some rclone features to help provide easier backup options to places like Backblaze, AWS, or a remote server in general.

So far so good and I was surprised at how well Opus had been handling Gtk and pkexec.

Let me know if you guys are interested I am close to pushing some RPMs and DEBs, in addition to the standard Python stuff.

[−] nsainsbury 32d ago
I've been working on https://www.photogenesis.app/

It's an iOS app that applies various generative art effects to your photos, letting you turn your photos into creative animated works of art. It's fully offline, no AI, no subscriptions, no ads, etc.

I'm really proud of it and if you've been in the generative art space for a while you'll instantly recognise many of the techniques I use (circle packing, line walkers, mosaic grid patterns, marching squares, voronoi tessellation, glitch art, string art, perlin flow fields, etc.) pretty much directly inspired by various Coding Train videos.

Direct download link on the App Store is https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photogenesis-photo-art/id67597... if you want to try it out.

* Coming to Android soon too.

[−] jikimi 32d ago
I've been building Jikimi, a privacy-first parental control platform. It started because my kids were spending too much time on the computer, only stopping if we asked them to. If we forgot, they'd just keep playing. We were also worried about online predatory behaviour like grooming, bullying, that kind of thing.

So I built an on-device OCR engine (PaddleOCR) that reads screen text locally and feeds it into an AI sentiment analysis pipeline. No screenshots leave the machine. We now get alerts if there's detection of concerning interactions. The client is written in Rust, with DNS filtering, game detection (Steam/Wine/Proton), and screen time enforcement built in.

It started as a home project that worked really well. My wife suggested other families wouldbenefit, so I've been building it out as a product. The client shipped on Linux first, we're a Linux gaming family, with Windows coming soon.

https://jikimi.app

There are many more features I haven't touched on. Would love feedback from other parents who've dealt with this space. The goal is to protect children and empower parents with tooling that's transparent and effective.

[−] junaid_97 33d ago
I'm building free immigration software for DIY applicants [1]

It's a free USCIS form-filling web-app(no Adobe required). USCIS forms still use XFA PDFs, which don’t let you edit in most browsers. Even with Adobe, fields break, and getting the signature is hard.

So I converted the PDF form into modern, browser-friendly web forms - and kept every field 1:1 with the original. You fill the form, submit it, and get the official USCIS PDF filled.

I found out SimpleCitizen(YC S16) offers a DIY plan for $529 [2]

So, a free (and local-only) version might be a good alternative

[1] https://fillvisa.com/demo

[2] https://www.simplecitizen.com/pricing/

[−] popupeyecare 32d ago
Im building https://trypixie.com to legally employ my 7 year old child, save on taxes and contribute to her Roth IRA.

I also built https://statphone.com - One emergency number that rings your whole family and breaks through DND.

[−] tunesmith 32d ago
I'm working on https://concludia.org, a site that helps groups of people collaborate on arguments and conclusions. I don't really have any revenue plans for it currently as I suspect it will be rather niche -- I certainly wouldn't mind if it tops out as a small community of users -- but I've found it super useful in various contexts at work and at home.

You can read more about it over at the site, but it allows you to construct and validate arguments in a graphical form, and it has truth/proof propagation so you can see whether a conclusion is currently considered valid or contested. You can create counterpoints where you think the argument breaks down, and strengthen arguments from there. Some upcoming plans are to allow users to validate arguments for themselves, like mark which parts they understand and agree with so they can collapse that part of the graph, and to add more mcp capability so that LLM can help you construct and validate new arguments.

[−] jpfaraco 32d ago
Finally being able to build something I've wanted for years: an alarm app that wakes me up 1 min earlier each day until I reach my wake time goal. Not sure if there is already anything like this out there, but I don't really care. I've been learning a ton about native Android development and so far it's been a painless process to be able to wake up earlier.
[−] jtbetz22 33d ago
I believe that AI-powered software development means we need to fundamentally rethink how we preserve code quality.

Model output volumes mean that code review only as a final check before merge is way too late, and far too burdensome. Using AI to review AI-generated code is a band-aid, but not a cure.

That's why I built Caliper (http://getcaliper.dev). It's a system that institutes multiple layers of code quality checks throughout the dev cycle. The lightest-weight checks get executed after every agent turn, and then increasingly more complex checks get run pre-commit and pre-merge.

Early users love it, and the data demonstrates the need - 40% of agent turns produce code that violates a project's own conventions (as defined in CLAUDE.md). Caliper catches those violations immediately and gets the model to make corrections before small issues become costly to unwind.

Still very early, and all feedback is welcome! http://getcaliper.dev

[−] williamcotton 33d ago
Space Trader!

Imagine mixing Magic: The Gathering, StarCraft and Civilization’s hex grid combat.

There’s multiplayer but I haven’t put the server anywhere yet.

Check out the introduction here:

https://github.com/williamcotton/space-trader/blob/main/docs...

Clone the repo:

  npm install
  npm run dev
There’s maybe a couple of other games called Space Trader so if anyone has any suggestions for a new name, I’m all ears!
[−] 3D30497420 32d ago
I'm building a physical interface for smart homes. Real buttons, real dials, screens that show info at a glance. All local, no subscriptions, and open-source.

https://weavepanel.com

Would love any feedback you may have!

[−] ashdnazg 32d ago
I'm back to searching for numbers that are palindromes both in decimal and in binary. [0]

I had an insight the other day, that as I fix the n least (and most, it's a palindrome!) significant decimal digits, I also fix the remainder from division in 5^n. Let's call it R. Since I also fix by that point a bunch of least (and most) significant bits, I can subtract how much they contribute mod 5^n from R, to get the remainder from division in 5^n of the still unknown bit. The thing is, maybe it's not possible to get this specific remainder with the unknown bits, because they're too few.

So, I can prepare in advance a table of size 5^n (for one or more ns) which tells me how many bits from the middle of the palindrome I need, to get a remainder of .

Then when I get to the aforementioned situation, all I need to do is to compare the number in the table to number of unknown bits. If the number in the table is bigger, I can prune the entire subtree.

From a little bit of testing, this seems to work, and it seems to complement my current lookup tables and not prune the same branches. It won't make a huge difference, but every little bit helps.

The important thing, though, is that I'm just happy there are still algorithmic improvements! For a long while I've been only doing engineering improvements such as more efficient tables and porting to CUDA, but since the problem is exponential, real breakthroughs have to come from a better algorithm, and I almost gave up on finding one.

[0] https://ashdnazg.github.io/articles/22/Finding-Really-Big-Pa...

[−] tomhillson 32d ago
I'm a 17-year-old high school student in Japan and I built Telos - a shared Qdrant vector space where autonomous LLM agents (called Monads) read, critique, synthesize, and evolve knowledge together through stigmergy. No central controller, no orchestration.

It's already running live. You can see collective intelligence evolve in real time: https://telos-observation.vercel.app/?_vercel_share=dTivz4e5...

And you can run your own monad(agent) and join Telos. Github: https://github.com/lucyomgggg/telos-client

[−] virissimo 33d ago
I'm beginning to homeschool my kids in computing, and we are pairing up chapters of The Elements of Computing System (the Nand2Tetris book) with games that teach similar skills/kinds of thinking (Human Resource Machine, Comet 64, etc...), but we didn't find anything to supplement the first two chapters (where you build basic chips up to an ALU in HDL). I ended up starting creating a kind of browser based kata for those chapters here:

https://virissimo.info/build-your-own-alu/

LMK what you think.

[−] r0ze-at-hn 32d ago
Developing a rigorous scientific definition of what make complex systems persist.

The opposite of the favorite questions: Why did that company I worked for fail? Why did Rome collapse? Why do people get old and die?

Combining information theory with thermodynamics and control theory you get: 1) A set of six pillars that all systems that persist must have. 2) A fundamental 'Action' that all of these systems take. 3) A set of three rules for how system that persists must subdivide

This lets you do things like look at something that is failing and know that there are the 6 pillars and you can then identify them to determine what is failing. (For example there is a system that clears that brain of amyloid plaque and it can fail).

I have applied this to countless systems including Religion, Language, AI Models, Business, the cell, quantum physics, number theory and much more. It is a Rosetta Stone for persistent systems. When there is an unsolved problem in one domain I can map it through this to any other domain that has already solved it.

Note that this doesn't apply to all complex systems, only those that persist.

And to keep this HackerNews related, been applying it to LLM's as they are just a stream of tokens that try to persist to incredible success I might add. Being able to pull from any domain do this brand new field is a giant cheat code.

[−] skor 32d ago
A programming language to hack music with

https://github.com/audion-lang/audion

The idea came after I finished a permanent piece for a museum using MaxMsp and python. I always had this thought in the back of my mind that "I could express this so much easier in a few lines of code.."

Check the docs folder for the full language spec.

I really liked how objects came out, I don't think it needs any more since I can do object composition.

There are some nice functions to generate rhythms and melodies with combinatorics, see src/sequences.rs and melodies.rs

Its a WIP but you can use it now to create music with whatever you want: hardware/daws/supercollider , download the nightly release.

supercollider is tightly integrated but not required. I havent had time to develop userland libraries yet but I'm working on it

[−] WalterGR 33d ago
[−] ryanchants 33d ago
An app for supplementing learning in my masters program [1]. I'm currently in enrolled in the MCS Online from UIUC. My first course, Natural Language Processing, has been interesting, but it's a coursera-based course. This means the lectures are pre-recorded and mostly just the professor reading the slides. It's hard for me to stay engaged and really learn the material. So I started with a series of claude prompts that took the lecture slides and created a pre-watch summary, and then helped me drill the concepts after each lecture. I think converted those into a platform where I can upload notes/lecture slides and have it generate quizzes. It starts with recognition(multiple choice) questions, and eventually moves to recall(short answer) once you prove mastery of a topic. It also generates flashcards from failed answers. It extracts topics from the uploaded materials, and tracks mastery over time. Mastery rots if you don't touch the platform/topic for a while.

I'm not sure if I'll every productize it in any way, but I could see a world where it's used by people prepping for the bar, med boards, various continuing education stuff. Right now it's just a fun platform to build on as I explore the current wave of technologies. Building a framework for evaluating different LLMs for best price/accuracy. Adding a RAG pipeline so wrong answers can point back to source material for further review, etc.

I'm looking at moving from backend engineering to a more MLE or agent pipeline role, so this is giving me something more than school projects to build on. While also helping me do better at school.

[1] https://studyengine.app/

[−] nowami 32d ago
I'm working on Ruly, a daily number/logic puzzle where you set rules on a grid.

https://playruly.com

My goal is to make a simple yet interesting procedural and replayable puzzle. It has a couple of weekly variations: on Saturdays you need to break a rule to score max points, and on Mondays there's an added memory aspect which brings variety to the game.

It's mostly vibe-coded which lets me focus on game design and testing. The next step is better onboarding/tutorial and more intuitive UI.

[−] exabrial 32d ago
https://github.com/exabrial/petrify

Petrify is a machine learning model compiler for the the JVM. It reads your model from an ONNX or other model format, walks the Trees or Linear models, and encodes the model in equivalent JVM bytecode as a stateless class you can invoke.

This differs from every other ONNX Runtime that I know of, which are essentially interpreters. The ONNX Runtimes are also huge (90+mb!?!), JNI, and drag gargantuan dependencies!

This just compiles your models to native bytecode. Much simpler and you end up with 0 dependencies! (you need one interface technically, but I digress).

[−] tomasz-tomczyk 32d ago
https://crit.md - a CLI tool for reviewing AI coding agent output like a GitHub PR.

I got frustrated with Claude Code and Cursor producing plausible-but-wrong changes with no easy way to annotate and push back, without making a full PR. crit makes the review stage fun again!

Works on both plans as well as code itself. It’s been very rewarding hearing from folks who use it, everyone has been very kind! My most successful side project already :)

GitHub: https://github.com/tomasz-tomczyk/crit

[−] christianh 32d ago
I’m working on https://poser.pro, a ski technique feedback tool for skiers that want to improve their skills.

How? The user (skier!) uploads a short ski clip to Poser, lets Poser analyze, and then gets their results.

For now, you get video outputs: head-tracking and skeleton overlay. I’ve built a a lot of extra stuff (animated 3D body, turn-detection, balance-, steering-, pressure-, and edging-metrics, etc.), I’m just not sure how to package it all to be useful. So as of this post, videos are what’s available.

I’m using Meta AI’s SAM3 Tracking and SAM3D Body for skier tracking and pose estimation. The heavy lifting happens in Runpod.

I’m a software developer, Bachelor and Masters in Applied Phyiscs, and a ski instructor in the Austrian and Danish ski schools. So I thought to combine all three passions in Poser!

[−] jsomau 32d ago
I built a cooking timer that solves the mental arithmetic of roasting multiple things at once. Pick chicken legs, sweet potato, green beans, etc and it'll give you a simple plan telling you when to put things in, flip them and take them out. Trying to eat more veggies and home cooking so this has helped me a lot!

https://www.roastrack.app/

[−] nithinbekal 32d ago
A Ruby-inspired typed programming language called Sapphire: https://github.com/sapphire-project/sapphire

I was reading the fantastic Crafting Interpreters book, and been wondering what it would be like to design a language from scratch. I really enjoy using Sorbet with Ruby, so wanted to design a small language with Ruby's object model, and a gradual type system.

Despite not knowing much programming language theory, I was able to make a surprising amount of progress over a couple of weekends using Claude Code, including building a simple version manager for the language - https://github.com/sapphire-project/facet

[−] SpaceL10n 32d ago
I'm building an operational dashboard for solo entrepreneurs in the collectibles market.

Most of the people in this space are tech illiterate, but I think that's going to change when they start to age out.

The next generation of antique dealers and collectibles market curators are going to need tools built for them.

I only entered the space 6 months ago after inheriting some old vintage travel and tourism material. I was lured in! I've spent the last 15 years of my tech career working on custom built systems that are perfectly suited and tailored to my needs and the needs of my team.

As soon as I started shopping on ebay, checking comps on worthpoint, browsing for auctions on liveauctioneers, manually searching hathitrust and other institutions for research... I started to want to build my own tools immediately.

I don't want 15 different dashboards. I want one. So, I plan to leverage my technical background and expertise in building systems to hopefully enable me outmaneuver other dealers and curators.

I hope to build custom intake pipelines. There's a keyword crisis in the collectibles market. If the seller doesn't put the right keyword in their listing, or the buyer doesn't put the right keyword in their search query, the two never meet. I look for very specific types of old vintage travel and tourism material, and I have to manage a list of hundreds of search terms in order just to find one specific type of item. They are out there, they're just hidden and unaccessible.

[−] dandaka 32d ago
I'm building Kardo (https://kardo.cards/), AI tutor that listens to your calls with a teacher and creates cards for repetition.

I live in Lisbon and I've been learning Portuguese with a tutor since 2022. After every lesson I'd sit down and make flashcards from my notes and screenshots. Spaced repetition works, but making the cards took manual effort each time. Most days I just didn't do it. So I have automated that process.

The flow: you invite the Kardo bot to your call, it records and transcribes (Recall.ai + Deepgram Nova 3), then GPT-4o extracts vocabulary from the transcript and generates cards. You review them with spaced repetition — we use FSRS, which is the best open algorithm I could find. If you already use Anki or Mochi Cards, there's export.

You can also throw in YouTube videos, podcasts, articles, PDFs — not just live lessons.

Tech: built entirely with Claude Code. React + Vite frontend, Bun + Elysia backend, Convex for the database, Railway for hosting.

We got 50 beta users through Telegram, and just landed our first paying customer. Now we're trying to figure out distribution — tutors seem like the obvious channel because one tutor recommends you to all their students, but reaching them with zero marketing budget is the hard part.

Curious if anyone here learns a language with a tutor and what your review workflow looks like.

[−] amarant 33d ago
Games. Well, mostly tooling surrounding them it seems. In the last 2 months I've made a pixel art editor for Android, a headless population simulator(still balancing parameters on this one, not enough NPC's turn to crime at present, and I've also run into some weird issues with market prices, in one instance the price of meat rose enough to cause a integer overflow. I could switch to i64, but honestly meat was supposed to cost around 20 moneys, not 2³²

I'm also working on a 2d procedural animation plugin for bevy, a autotiling plugin for bevy (using 16 tile-dual grid, which the default bevy autotiling plug-in didn't support) and ofc my android pixel editor now has a rig editor mode and a tile editor mode that integrates with the plugins.

Making video games is hard! I keep getting side tracked!

[−] thegagne 32d ago
https://ktext.dev/

Every time you launch a new Claude Code session it will need context for the codebase. Rather than letting it spend a bunch of tokens looking around and discovering it, why not provide it with a compact, high quality version?

Ktext has two parts: a CONTEXT.yaml which adheres to a JSON Schema, and the ktext CLI that helps create, validate, and export it.

Was going to launch later this week, and the site needs some tweaks, but the tool is ready.

Give it a shot!

[−] niothiel 32d ago
I've been working on cardcast.gg. It gives you the ability to play Magic: The Gathering with your friends remotely using a webcam.

I got back into MTG back during the pandemic after a long hiatus and Spelltable is what brought me back. My playgroup lamented more features and something tailored to our needs, so curiosity got the better of me and here we are. :)

I've never worked with computer vision before, but I went through a whole journey that started with the classical computer vision techniques and ended with recently migrating to the transformer-based models. Been a really cool adventure!

My playgroup has been loving it so far, and I would love for people to try it and tell me what breaks! Discord is on the site.

https://cardcast.gg

[−] anotherpaulg 33d ago
I’ve been building quantum photonics experiments. Repeating the Bell inequality tests that won the 2022 Nobel, quantum erasers, etc.

I just published a fun interactive 3D demo of SPDC, one of the most common and accessible ways to create entangled pairs of photons. I'm hoping to publish a series of articles on other cool learnings about doing quantum photonics in the lab.

https://paulg.info/2026/04/10/spdc/

[−] welldoneator 32d ago
I'm working on TableForge[0], it's a browser based, solo or multiplayer, D&D 5e game. TTRPG DMing can be effort-heavy and my friend group constantly has trouble finding enough time to play together let alone set it up. 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.

I noticed every competitor in this space was a chatbot with only the last ~10-15 messages stuffed into context. They forgot things, made up dice rolls and rules, and was generally not what I was looking for. So far TableForge has been working well for my friend groups and some random folks from Reddit/organic search. Solo TTRPGers seem to like it too.

It's still in early stages but fully playable. I don't feel comfortable charging anything for yet until I know people enjoy it. If you like it enough to hit the free tier limit, send me some feedback in the webapp and I'll gladly extend your free trial. If you hate it, please also let me know!

[0] https://tableforge.gg/

[−] Grisu_FTP 32d ago
A Minecraft Mod that outputs the Stats of the players onto a website (I made it use APIs, so an app or CLI tool would be easy to create later on).

This is my first Minecraft Mod and the first project i made that interacts with the network, has logins/accounts and does APIs.

I am really not good and thus the UI (far worse on mobile) and especially the Code is bad, but i would have never expected to get it working at all, much less this functional. But i am still far from done, i still want to improve the overall code quality, add the inventory and ender chest, achievements (maybe even custom ones so vanilla clients can earn and view them without having to change anything locally. IDK yet) and more.

If someone wants a small demo, i have it running on my server to test while I am developing at: https://grisu-ftp.de (If you find any issues lmk :)

While this is by far not as cool as the other stuff on here i still would like to show it off and gather some first feedback. This is my first Java project that goes above the Standard stuff in school like scanners/calculators and so I have probably done obvious beginner mistakes.

[−] kitsune_cw 32d ago
https://folio.photo -- it's a photography portfolio that doubles as client gallery delivery, with white labelling, password protection, and other features you don't get with the average file sharing platform.

I'm hosting my personal gallery with it: https://captures.moe

[−] aleda145 33d ago
https://kavla.dev/

I've worked with data my entire career. We need to alt tab so much. What if we put it all on a canvas? Thats what I'm building with Kavla!

Right now working on a CLI that connects a user's local machine to a canvas via websockets. It's open source here: https://github.com/aleda145/kavla-cli

Next steps I want to do more stuff with agents. I have a feeling that the canvas is an awesome interace to see agents working.

Built with tldraw, duckdb and cloudflare

[−] ksymph 33d ago
I'm building my ideal backend for small projects and hobby stuff. It's inspired by PocketBase, but built around Lua scripting instead of built-in endpoints or usage as a Go library.

Like PocketBase, it's made in Go, has an admin panel, and compiles down to one executable. Here, you write your endpoints as Lua scripts with a simple API for interfacing with requests and the built-in SQLite database. It's minimal and sticks close to being a bare wrapper around the underlying tech (HTTP, SQL, simple file routing), but comes with some niceties too, like automatic backups, a staging server, and a code editor inside the admin panel for quick changes.

It comes from wanting a server that pairs well with htmx (and the backend-first approach in general) that's comfy to use like a CMS. It's not exactly a groundbreaking project, and it still has a ways to go, but I think it's shaping up pretty nicely :)

link: https://github.com/ksymph/mogo