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Posted by david927 9 hours ago

Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
146 points | 521 commentspage 3
ynac 5 hours ago|
3 hours trying to remove an oil filter from tractor. Chain clamp mishaped it, I ended up shredding it, ripped out the innards, all the tin down to the intake rim (yes, shredded metal everywhere) until finally used needle nose spread open in two of the intake holes and a plummers wrench for torque finally loosened it.

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!

MarkMarine 5 hours ago||
My go to for these (was a tractor mechanic early in life) is to start with a big flat blade screwdriver and knock it completely through the side of the filter to the other side with a hammer, then use that to break the filter loose. I’ve near had one go sideways with that method, you get it through both outside sheet metal and the inner perforated metal that is usually stronger and welded to the threads
ynac 2 hours ago||
Absolutely tried that. The tin gave up faster than Khalid at Zanzibar. It looked like Popeye used his pipe on it. It was a cheap 1384, so single wall and cardboard were the only resistance.

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.

winrid 3 hours ago||
Oil filter tool that grabs the filter with teeth should work better than a chain clamp
aaronbrethorst 3 hours ago||
I’m still building OneBusAway Cloud, which you can think of as being Heroku for public transit.

https://onebusawaycloud.com/

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...

properbrew 4 hours ago||
I fell down the rabbit hole of voice transcription about a year ago, always had a love for utilising fine tuned LLMs so have put two and two together and built https://whistle-enterprise.com. The biggest challenge being it all running on CPU with the target device being your low to mid spec office laptop that's a few years old (I5, 8gb RAM). All nicely packaged together in a single completely offline selfcontained app that you just install and run (no environment setups, packages to download, models to download etc).

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.

abdullahkhalids 31 minutes ago||
Do you think this can just be used as is to create subtitles for a multi-person video?

How good is it at foreign languages?

I am looking for a nice solution to subtitle some old movies.

watchlight 3 hours ago||
Are we the same person?? Haha, this is super close to the scope of work I've been doing and just released. Different objectives though. It sounds like yours prioritizes legacy hardware and is more enterprise focused (good for you!). Mine is focused more on long-term project tracking and program management for solo developers or solo builders.

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?

vitally3643 6 hours ago||
I'm finally fulfilling a childhood dream of restoring a Heathkit oscilloscope. I managed to nab a functioning IO-12 at the thrift store for $75!

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.

RagnarD 6 hours ago|
$275 to restore a long-held childhood dream is cheap, I hope your husband wouldn't complain about that.
auto 6 hours ago||
Two months ago I went full time on my indie game after just under a year and a half of part time work. I’ve been prototyping in Godot for about 6 years now, and finally had a game that my business partner and I were really interested in and felt matched the current market desires. It’s cozy world builder, drawing inspiration for Sim City, Rollercoaster Tycoon, The Sims, with an aesthetic influence of Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, and the like.

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

phaser 6 hours ago|
Loving the art style! I'm also bullish on the simulation games that can be created with newer architectures.
auto 6 hours ago||
It’s such an untapped domain, and despite the consoles being more tightly integrated this generation, we’re still mostly using the horsepower for traditional AAA realism-focused graphics, as opposed to this whole new world of computation available.

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.

alphaBetaGamma 7 hours ago||
My wife and I are working on a math/science/CS-inspired jewelry business.

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/

kmoser 21 minutes ago||
Cool! Reminds me of these: https://store.madewithmolecules.com/
robofanatic 3 hours ago||
would love to see some Fibonacci ear rings
atlasunshrugged 2 hours ago||
I'm working on a mobile game that is something of a homage to the Forest Brother movement in the Baltic states post Soviet occupation where tens of thousands of men, women, and children fled to the woods and then waged guerrilla warfare for years (most were systematically killed, captured, or lured out with offers of amnesty within a few decades). The mechanics are going to be similar to Rebel Inc but I try to mix in historic details in the events that happen!
loganboyd 6 hours ago||
I’m working on a tensor computing language/compiler called i with a simple explicit scheduling model (loop splitting, loop ordering, input “staging”). These mechanisms alone are enough to express complex algorithms like FlashAttention, generating target code with techniques like loop fusion, minimized intermediate allocations, and “online” reductions.

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!

repo: https://github.com/ilang-dev/i

amterp 2 hours ago||
I'm working on two main projects at the moment.

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]

https://github.com/amterp/kan https://amterp.dev/kan

jsomau 7 hours ago|
A small thing I've been building as an antidote to doomscrolling. Open a new tab and see a public domain artwork from a real museum: https://toregard.art

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.

a-arbabian 6 hours ago|
good stuff, thanks for sharing
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