Posted by david927 17 hours ago
Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)
We are building this because we such library it in our core business, and a lot of other engineers seem to need it too. We have contributors showing up with bug reports and fixes, and real interest from people building apps around .docx docs.
My previous show hn post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46947229) got a lot of skepticism because we're developing heavily with AI, but with active community feedback and proper ai oversight (mostly me), I'm super proud of what we have now.
Currently I'm building scrapers for all relevant provider, then I want to connect the data for multi-city trips recommendation. Plus some connection to the day trains so that the trips are built more easily.
Some existing trip recommendations:
Prague <-> Amsterdam https://trainbot.eu/?from=prague&to=amsterdam&type=return
Berlin <-> Paris https://trainbot.eu/?from=berlin&to=paris&type=return
Zurich <-> Budapest https://trainbot.eu/?from=zurich&to=budapest&type=return
But yes, in most cases this journey will be more expensive that an alternative flight, which is a shame. However, there are routes where it's comparable, e.g. the Prague - Amsterdam route.
DAGraph is a local-first reactive DAG for analytical SQL (OLAP), running entirely in the browser (there is also a native version in the works).
Some tech details: written in Rust, targeting WASM (and native). The SQL engine is Apache DataFusion[1]. The UI uses Egui[2]. Workspace data is persisted in browser using OPFS[3] via OpenDAL[4]. The graph is functional and handles dependencies for you (via parsing the SQL).
Building this to be accessible for beginners while remaining powerful for advanced users. Still very early, lots more features to add, but now usable.
Hope you find it interesting!
[1] https://datafusion.apache.org
[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...
I've been making a DSL for writing sheet music specifically for drums as raw text, inspired by ABC Notation (but of course just for drums).
Now writing this I noticed that it's kind of complicated to explain and having a landing page would make my life so much easier.
But the gist of it is, you write notation that looks like this: https://gist.github.com/Luigi123/945af7e5cc8dfbfd186f0a99754... and it renders sheet music in PDF, and also allows you to play the same music as a game (DrumMania / DTXMania style).
Now the language / compiler itself has been working quite well and I've been dogfooding it for like six months now. The next thing is an IDE-style editor where you can import a song and write the notation following it. Making THAT has been quite the journey. Here's a screenshot for good measure: https://i.imgur.com/EmlqlrM.png
I don't know if you can write drum sheet music with it.
I really like your editor with the transcription view. Maybe a spectrogram would be more helpful than a simple waveform display.
Like most people in the space I'm using ABC for LLM generation (e.g. generating sightreading exercises and etudes) but MusicXML for processing and rendering the output. Would be nice to have something somewhere in between the over-simplified ABC and overly verbose MusicXML.
Hard agree.
Early on I actually tried to write my drum charts directly in ABC Notation but it wasn’t a great fit. Then I made a simple parser for my language that outputs ABC because I thought it would be simpler but I found it to be very limiting, so now I use Vexflow’s low level API for rendering. I found it to be more customizable than ABC with a nice JS / TS API. It’s good for my use case (rendering) but ofc it doesn’t work as a save format.
Good luck with Trebella :)
is this intended for drummers, or electronic music composers?
But the main use case I'm going for is my own: making sheet music for drum practice.
aiming for more extensions to The New Breed than just Syncopation that you could auto-generate for funny practice/things you wouldnt think of to play?
People writing sheet music with pencil on paper don't need any of that so I'd say this software would be pointless for them. I'd say this leans heavily on hobbyists or beginners, like I said the main use case is my own, and I'm no professional drummer.
This is not a sales pitch, it's just a small project I've been having fun building for myself :)
A directory of European software and general alternatives to popular products.
Think cloud storage, email, VPN, browsers, smartphones, bikes,... About 175 products across 30+ categories right now.
Next categories will be: personal health, commercial e-mail and newsletter management.
If you have a product that's missing here, please feel free to suggest it via the suggestion form on the site.
The existing ones were quite expensive, especially when I started out. A friend had the idea to get a cheap/non-functioning lawnmower second hand, and tear out the circuit board. We're in the process of coding up a new ROS2 based stack that will roam the lawn on GPS with RTK in the charging station. My friend does most of the electronics stuff, and I focus on the software.
I'm at the point where I will start testing a simple bounding box soon and just have it drive around until it "hits the edge" and then randomly pick a new direction.
It's fun so see the software I build "in real life" instead of as a web-site, as is the case for my my daily job.
We integrate with macOS spaces to switch out a project-specific dock on each space, containing only the resources you need for that project. We made it possible to add granular resources instead of full apps to the dock (think specific slack channels instead of the whole slack app), to keep the dock hyper focused on what you need.
We built this to stay focused while working on the computer, and we thought that the native interface mixed all our projects together, causing us to get distracted.
Looking for beta testers! Free download from https://drawers.computer
For example, I have Codex running doing two things at once, and I wish I could have two windows in two spaces (two projects.) Slack has multiple channels.
Both these aren't native macOS apps but I wonder if you can use the macOS tabbing support to at least get this for well-coded native apps?
One additional level I see appearing are the worktress when having multiple AI agents run in paralell. So while they belong to the same project, each worktree has theire own ide + browser etc.
Does it have project context within apps (like default folders and settings)?
Would love to hear what you think we should add next!
Forbes just wrote an article about it which was a fun surprise! [1]
It recently turned 6 months old which is wild to me. My wife and I have made a new puzzle every day for half a year! I wrote a blog post about this [2]
I recently released user logins. That went well and a lot of people are using them. I also let you filter the backlog by completed puzzles based on player feedback.
This week I’m going to start releasing player submitted puzzles and release my puzzle building tools. You can watch a video for a sneak peek of those tools. [3]
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2026/05/02/bored-o...
2. https://paulmakeswebsites.com/writing/six-months-of-tiled-wo...
While you're here if I could make a small suggestion - the wording of the 'type of' questions was confusing to me until I got used to it; 'stop' is not really a type of 'watch' for example, so maybe you could find a different way to phrase those? Maybe there isn't a neater way to encapsulate the idea of 'is a prefix or suffix to', I don't know, but I found it difficult. Anyway kudos to you and your wife, it's a great game!
I saw someone on here recently say they like to do the puzzle without looking at the clues, and I've started doing that on and off too, it changes the game in an interesting way.
Great feedback on the “type of” clues. I’ll need to noodle on that and see if there’s a clearer way to express it. Maybe I should just be doing blanks… e.g. for “sun” it could be “___ dress, ___day, or ___ flower”
I have, however, rejected making a user login. I recognise you're putting in time and energy to make something I'm just taking without payment, and it's your right to try to leverage it into something more - I wish you all the best in doing so - but asking for a user login as a gate to a feature you clearly don't need a user login for is enshittification.
I'm guessing you're referring to the ability to filter out completed puzzles from the archive? I added it for logged-in users first because it was simpler but I can extend that feature so it's available for everyone. (I'll need to add some alternate logic to pass your indexeddb levels to the server endpoint when fetching the archive. It's not complex. I just haven't prioritized it yet.)
I'll add this to my backlog and try to get to it after the player puzzles release.
Beyond that everything is available regardless of user account right now. I do plan to require an account to submit custom puzzles when that's released. (Mostly to make moderation easier. I may relax this down the line.)
EDIT: On further thought I realized it's also required to have an account to view and share your profile stats, though that could also work without an account with some changes.
A consequence of me being a freeloader too is that you don't have to change your plans to please me :-)
If you enjoy it there’s a new puzzle every day and a backlog of over 200 puzzles free to play ;)
The key functionality is to be able to easily see the changes made for each comment, rather than each file.
