Posted by david927 9 hours ago
Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
Reading Brand's quick little life changer kept me going with surprisingly few cuss fits:
The Maintenance of Everything: https://search.worldcat.org/title/1511798465
Thanks, Stew!
Since posting, I got it running, PTO and deck line up great, fuel filter is clean and clear, it runs better than it has in years.
It’s a project of the non-profit Open Transit Software Foundation that we’re using to fund our other initiatives, like bringing real-time transit information to billions of people around the world.
Since last month, I've added a layer of polish to the product, added support for deploying a SMS and phone gateway to realtime transit information, and built out the marketing website to include solutions pages for higher education, SMS, and more.
All of this depends on a bunch of really cool open source projects we’re building, like Maglev, a Golang server that can power realtime transit apps. Maglev is already being used in production, and you can set up a local install in about 15 minutes: https://opentransitsoftwarefoundation.org/2026/04/setting-up...
The other OSS projects we have include: building data products, iOS and Android apps, web apps, a Pebble watch app(!), and too many others to list. See them all here: https://github.com/onebusaway/
We’re always looking for volunteers, especially people outside of the engineering disciplines: https://ossvolunteers.com/organizations/open-transit-softwar...
One of the hardest parts I've found is the diarisation (who said what) side of things. Trying to tune this and have it working in a way that doesn't absolutely grind the laptop to a halt or take forever to complete has been _hard_ but also extremely rewarding.
Another part has been the fine tuning side of the Phi-4 model, I'm on version 10 now, getting that pipeline down was a journey in itself, but I've got some great results. I wrote a bit about it in a comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48385906#48389625
I absolutely love working on this, I still wake up and the first thing I think about is voice transcription pipelines (sad I know), but I'm excited to see how much further performance and utility I can squeeze out.
How good is it at foreign languages?
I am looking for a nice solution to subtitle some old movies.
I also got hammered when it came to diarization... I found that the biggest pain was creating an appropriate environment for cross-compatibility of the different backends required for whisper/faster-whisper/pyannote. It's especially challenging on older systems, so major kudos for giving it a shot.
Have you gotten any traction yet from the community?
Don't tell my husband that I spent more than $200 on parts and supplies for it.
I've wanted a Heathkit since I learned about them as a teenager, and this is the first one I've ever seen in the wild. The original owner left the date he assembled it and his callsign written on the inside! I looked him up and he died in 2013, but by sheer happenstance I'm restoring it 58 years to the day that he initially built it. I got super lucky with this unit because as far as I can tell, it's only been run a few hours in its entire life. I really only have to replace aged components because they're physically breaking down, I expect the thing will outlive me once I'm done with it. Can't wait to hand it off to a bewildered young EE in another half century.
This was very much a passion project and an idea I’ve wanted to see alive for decades, and also let me explore some tech I wanted to get deeper on. I’m bullish on the the tighter integration of CPUs, GPU style cores, and shared memory. Our game, LocoMo, relies heavily of GPU processing of entities under the hood.
You can see me do a walkthrough of the current state of the game here: https://youtu.be/NbB0DCX8Pis?is=vGEw5oTMu_W9f-zT
Edit: Also, thank you! The game has evolved a ton over the last year and is really coming into its own stylistically, bit by bit.
We try to create pieces that stand on their own aesthetically but have a hidden meaning. We currently have two styles: lambda calculus based pieces (we depict the lambda/Tromp diagram) where we have Y-Combinator earrings (well, strictly speaking they are one beta reduction away from Y-combinator. Aesthetic oblige) and a pendant depicting a lambda expression computing Graham's number. The other style is quantum computing circuits, based on quantum computing research my brother (a physics professor) is doing: a pendant that is actually a non-local controlled-NOT gate.
I wrote a tiny DSL to describe the jewelry pieces, and an interpreter to produce CAD files. We then either 3D print them or have them produced by lost-wax.
We are 200% out of our comfort zone (and love it): I know nothing of front end dev, payments, or anything like that. The diamond district in New York is a neighborhood we normally actively avoid, but if you are forced to go there it is fascinating (people examining diamonds on the corner of the street, others in fur coats in summer straight out of a mafia movie...), and especial marketing. Jewelry is a completely saturated business (luckily we are not doing this to pay the rent); we think we have a unique angle, but we are still figuring out the target audience (if there is one).
Store: https://studio-galois.com/
Right now there is a runtime and compiler targeting C, written in dependency-free Rust, and a minimal Python frontend. The project is very much proof-of-concept stage so not yet fast. Working on a CUDA backend now.
The goal is to enable automatic discovery of FlashAttention-style optimizations which is not feasible with current compilers.
Very open to feedback/discussion from anybody interested in or knowledgeable about tensor compilers!
One is Rad [0], a programming language tailored for writing CLI scripts and tools (mainly an alternative to Bash), taking a declarative approach to things like script arguments. Latest push has been largely on static type analysis, since making that really good is the sort of thing that helps both people and AI agents write good Rad.
Second project is Kan [2], a Kanban board which operates on text files on your machine, and is designed to be Git friendly so you can check it into your repo.
[1]
https://github.com/amterp/rad https://amterp.dev/rad
[2]
Mostly I wanted more art and colour in my workday - something to look at, learn through and draw inspiration from in the moments between meetings and code. You can create an account to save your favourites and curate your own gallery. Just released collections that you can make public.
Art from: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Art Institute of Chicago. Rijksmuseum. Cleveland Museum of Art.