Posted by david927 4 days ago
Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
Tech details: I found that used, small form-factor Dell Optiplexes are great for product protoytyping. I'm in Medellin Colombia, and found that you can buy these for about $200 USD - they are often former Point of Sale (POS) or office computers, from about 10 years ago. They have SSDs, run quiet, and are very reliable.
For project Affirmator, I installed Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). Using Cron and Mpv to shuffle-play activity-specific folders of MP3s at the same time each day. For example, for the chill jazz music - I've got a folder of 40+ song MP3s. Cron plays those at 06:30. So it's like a calm, upbeat alarm clock. I'm not a morning person, so this is a "friendly" way for me to wake myself up!
For the vocal affirmation part - I built a Python tool that reads 200+ text affirmations from a markdown/text file. It then uses AWS Polly text-to-speech API to vocalize the affirmations into MP3s. Next, I use `ffmpeg` to add a variable silent spacer gap to the ends of all the MP3s. This allows your to hear a voice affirmation ("I am fit, athletic, and strong!", "I am a confident piano player."), and then there is silent space for you to say it out loud, or repeat in your head.
This project incorporates ideas & routines from: The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale, Tony Robbins Personal Power II, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, and Atomic Habits by James Clear
https://codeberg.org/jro/Affirmator-app
(2) PROJECT "LINGOFREQ" - Language learning tool. Uses language-specific high-frequency word lists. Generates example sentences according to a theme/topic. Translates the word & example phrases to English / Spanish / Chinese. Uses Text-to-speech to vocalize the phrases into each language. These phrases are ordered by frequency. When you want to improve your language skills, you set a "window" range of frequency you want to practice, and Lingofreq will play audio files in this range. You can learn Chinese & Spanish while doing the dishes, at the gym, or before going to bed!
Code: https://codeberg.org/jro/LingoFreq-app/src/branch/main/apps
(3) Medellin COMMUNITY MAKER-SPACE / CREATIVE ENTREPRENEUR LAB I'm at Medellin Colombia - my mission is to create the best maker-space. I was a member of ASMBLY Maker-space in Austin Texas (great space!) and worked at Pivotal Labs (agile product prototyping / software lab) - so I'm aiming to combine the best ideas from those.
BACK-BURNER projects:
Documenting my Knowledge as "Public Knowledge Base" - https://codeberg.org/jro/Knowledge - Here are my notes on Python, Git - I'm bouncing between Obsidian Sync / Publish / Markdown (currently easiest way), and some sort of open-source knowledge base website (VSCodium + Markdown + FOAM + MkDocs + RClone). I haven't found a solution I'm happy with yet...
Open-source CNC router tech stack: - I have a CNC router (robotic drill which can carve 3D shapes into wood). Last year I challenged myself to operate it completely through an open-source tech stack. This took me on a journey of learning Inkscape (2d vector design tool, SVG), FreeCAD (3D product design / CAD / CAM tool), G-code (format of text instructions which tell CNC tools where to move and what to do), Universal G-Code Sender (a tool which imports CAM - computer aided manufacturing - designs, connects to the CNC router tool, and actually operates machine. It's quite exciting to play with! Used Kiri-moto (web-based CAD / CAM tool) to convert 2D/SVG designs into 3D shapes). Used OBS (screen recording/streaming tool) and a bunch of web-cams to live-stream tool usage to PeerTube Live (similar to YouTube).
Being "principled" about using open-source tools can be so challenging, but its quite rewarding on the long run.
LEARNING SPANISH - What's working for me... trying to read spanish books before bed. Handwriting a few paragraphs from a book into journal. Highlighting words I don't know. Looking them up later. Reading a book while listening to its audio book at the same time.
If anyone's interesting in contributing to these projects, I would warmly welcome that. Design, product, sales, project management, engineering/coding, marketing - need tons of help in all these areas.
Gracias! // JRO
Been a project I was using for a few years now. Initially started off as express middleware with a few tools chained together to automate as much typing as possible which can run anywhere (similar to hono).
Around a year ago I decided to change the approach and write a layer to statically analyze the typescript code ontop of tsc and pull out as much meta as possible.
After that I went a little crazy and ultimately added wires to everything. HTTP, Websockets, Queues, Scheduled Jobs, etc. All totally agnostic (the core runtime is pretty tiny). So can run scheduled tasks on lambas / a cron job / pgadmin, deploy websockets serverless or local, run your queues again most queue provides, etc.
I then saw Vercels workflow runner and figured, well, I could try do better . Looked at other libraries out there and decided to include addons, which are pikku typescript packages that declare functions which can be automatically imported into your app and are responsible for their own service initialization. If your used to writing n8n plugins be awesome to hear what you think about this approach!
That sort of required me to create a console to view workflows (otherwise what's the point right?). And since everything is statically extracted during runtime we can pretty much just visualise the entire codebase. So all your functions, what permissions each have, etc etc. The idea behind the console is that it doesn't have an actual backend. You install an addon into your own codebase, permission it as you see fit and you point the console towards it. That means you have a unified permissions/auth system as everything else.
Figured the last part was creating an AI agent to wrap it all together. Which is almost there. Subagent flows, tools, approvals, ai middleware that can turn input and output into voices, its does a bit.
Ultimately the idea is you write a function once, and it can be consumed as an AI tool, a workflow step, by a http route, a cron job, a gateway (like whatsapp) (I liked openclaw approach so figured.. why not ).
A function is the source of truth, so is permissioned / authenticated. Been alot of heavy development since I'm building a 'BuildYourAgent' portal ontop that pretty much takes an openapi doc and turns it into an MCP server / hooks it up to an agent / gives you a CLI around it so it can integrate with all the crazy wild west approaches, while you know, still allowing us to maintain sanity and build servers that don't hallucinate and burn forests down.
Curious on thoughts! Bit of a rambling explanation. I hope the website does a better job! Lots of content helped with AI (I prefer speaking tech, but doesn't always transition well).
Also, looking for a potential cofounder to help balance that out! If your interested in potentially working together / adopting pikku feel free to leave a comment / ping me an email