Posted by david927 1 day ago
Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
Primarily to use in conjunction with OpenVPN. Like secretive or /usr/lib/ssh-keychain.dylib[2], but not just for SSH.
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.
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...
- 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
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."
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
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.
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.