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Posted by david927 1 day ago

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

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
263 points | 973 commentspage 11
thr0w4w4y1337 16 hours ago|
I've built a generic PKCS#11 interface to the Apple's Secure Enclave[1]

Primarily to use in conjunction with OpenVPN. Like secretive or /usr/lib/ssh-keychain.dylib[2], but not just for SSH.

1 - https://github.com/ne-bknn/nailed

2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46025721

happiness0067 23 hours ago||
I'm building out https://measuretocut.com, which started as a tool for myself to help with planning board cuts (and now sheet cuts). It calculates how much material you need for your project and gives you a plan for the materials and shows all the cuts you need to make and where to make them.

First release was in December for 1D cuts. Last month I released sheet cutting for 2D cut calculation. It's been working well for my own projects and it started getting consistent daily users since my last update in February. You can save projects now on the site for you to come back to later.

Any feedback is welcome. I'm always looking for what features to add next.

stuartdev 14 hours ago||
Working on Book Reading Habit: https://bookreadinghabit.com

Built it because I wanted to read more, but most reading apps either feel too passive or turn everything into social noise. What worked better for me was making reading easy to start: short 5–10 min sessions, pick up where you left off, minimal friction.

So the app is basically centered around habit formation, with stuff like notes, progress tracking, session extension, shelves, and simple organization.

I care a lot about keeping it quiet: no ads, no feed, no unnecessary clutter.

Still early. Mostly trying to understand what actually helps people read more consistently.

Currently only available for iOS, but might release an android version in the future.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/book-reading-habit/id674291326...

jahala 12 hours ago||
Have been tinkering with a few different projects:

- Tilth: Smart(er) code reading for humans and AI agents. Reduces LLM token use and cost by ~40% (benchmarked) https://github.com/jahala/tilth

- mrkd: Native macOS .md viewer (+preview in Finder) that imports iTerm2 and VSCode themes https://github.com/jahala/mrkd

- O-O: Self-updating articles concept with polyglot (bash/html) files. No server, no database. https://github.com/jahala/o-o

mkovach 10 hours ago||
This year, I decided to start opening up the tarball of random utilities that's been accumulating on my machine for years: stuff42.tar.gz.

The first thing I cleaned up was TCL-Edit <https://gitlab.com/siddfinch/tcl-editor>, a small Tcl/Tk text editor I wrote a long time ago. After seeing the Rust clone of Microsoft EDIT, I realized the obvious next step was to build a Tcl/Tk clone of the Rust clone of Microsoft Edit. Recursion shouldn't be limited to code.

I also built a tiny URL system in Perl <https://gitlab.com/siddfinch/perl-tiny-url>, meant to run locally. The idea is simple: short URLs for internal/VPN resources per client. I usually spin up a small daemon (or container) per client and get a dashboard of links I use frequently or recently.

Security is intentionally minimal since it's local, which conveniently lets me ignore authentication and other responsible behavior.

Goal for the year: Continue to open stuff42.tar.gz, pick something, clean it up just enough, and release it, and not have it by the end of the year.

Might even choose a language that might even be described as "modern."

continuational 18 hours ago||
I'm working on Firefly, a programming language for full stack webapps:

https://www.firefly-lang.org/

matty22 8 hours ago||
Stained Glass Atlas (https://stainedglassatlas.com/) - working on mapping/documenting as much of the publicly accessible stained glass as possible. No fancy tech (vanilla HTML/CSS/JS). Anyone who knows of great stained glass in their local area is welcome to come add to the data set!
radva42 16 hours ago||
I am working on a HTML-to-PDF converter written from scratch in pure Go. I got tired of using headless browsers for various reasons and decided to give it a try and implement something that I can use internally. However the results have far exceed my expectations and I've decided to open source everything. It's around 10x to 15x faster than wkhtmltopdf, which is by far the fastest headless browser converter. It's 80x-100x faster than a pagedjs. It's even 2x faster than PrinceXML, which is pretty much the most mature and reliable HTML-to-PDF converter on the market. It also produces the smallest PDF size.

I started small as a toy project, but gradually implemented full support for proper block context, flexbox layout, CSS variables, tables, etc. to the point where I have almost full support of all major CSS features (even math functions like calc(), min(), max()).

I'm cleaning up the code right now and will upload it later today or maybe tomorrow here: https://github.com/PureGoPDF

thom 16 hours ago||
Do you intend to one day support all the paged media bits in pagedjs? I assume it works with their polyfill but it’d be great to have a built in more performant option.
radva42 12 hours ago||
Can you give an example? I'm not that familiar with pagedjs, just pulled it for the benchmark.

My library has support for @page rules, but that's actually pretty basic. I needed more advanced headers/footers and added support for in-html headers/footers like this: In your <body> you cna define headers/footers by wrapping content in a <section> tag. For example:

<body> <section> <header>... any HTML here, full CSS support</header>

  <div> Some normal flow content</div>

  <footer>Your footer HTML</footer>
 </section>
</body>

This structure is purely optional, but it's a really convinient way of designing pages with different styles in the same document. An HTML file can have any number of these sections meaning you can generate a PDF with different headers/footers.

Some other bits: It has support for 100% height that match the entire page, it can handle forced page breaks inside flexbox containers (Chrome doesn't even try ... just ignores it) and also follows page-break: avoid correctly - so it doesn't randomly split table rows for example.

thom 10 hours ago||
Things like string-set and string (repeating section headers on each page), counter and target-counter (embedding page number references) etc. Prince and pagedjs support all the CSS3 paged media bits I've found myself needing, just wondering if that was on the roadmap.
radva42 10 hours ago||
I see. Yes, those are on the roadmap.
audessuscest 16 hours ago||
> PureGoPDF doesn't have any public repositories yet.
zufallsheld 16 hours ago||
> I'm cleaning up the code right now and will upload it later today or maybe tomorrow here
hephaes7us 7 hours ago||
I'm making a "Podcast Search Engine", partially as an excuse to play with Elixir and Phoenix/LiveView.

It's basically just a frontend to a semantic search system, and is a tangent while I explore "knowledgebase" concepts.

I'm extremely interested in knowledgebases at the moment.

tndata 9 hours ago|
I'm building a proxy that sits between Claude Code and the model to visualize the full interaction loop. It shows prompts, tool calls, and responses in real time so you can explore how the coding agent is reasoning and operating. Project: https://github.com/tndata/CodingAgentExplorer
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