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Posted by david927 1 day ago

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

What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?
295 points | 1026 commentspage 18
kofta999 21 hours ago|
Currently building Tensou in my free time

https://github.com/kofta999/tensou

I always get frustrated when using local file transfer tools like:

Dukto: was my personal favorite, but is tiring to run cross platform, and most importantly does not support transfer resumes (so if copy got cancelled/disconnected at 99% you either have to copy again or search for the diff and copy it manually)

LocalSend: pretty good cross platform support, but does not work when connecting 2 devices using a LAN cable, and resume support is poorish

So I'm building Tensou to be an alternative that doesn't compromise all these features. Supporting resumes, folder syncing similar to rsync, cross platform (well I don't have a Mac to test on but it should work, and mobile support is planned)

Performance wise it's on par with Dukto and even slightly better with large files (and I'm still working on optimizations for small files too)

Would like to hear HN's feedback or what other features should I add? My goal with Tensou is to be the best, most performant and feature rich local file transfer tool ever.

hackitup7 15 hours ago||
I was only working on this occasionally, but I built an extension to block sites in a more creative way.

Basically I'm finding myself in a bind where:

- I spend too much time doomscrolling (X, reddit, HN etc) - AI is making me lose touch with a lot of basic skills like coding, and I was already losing touch with doing real math

So I built an extension that blocks sites and forces you to actually solve a problem before you can get to a distracting site. The idea is to 1) block the reflex of visiting a site and getting a dopamine hit, and 2) at least get some mild cognitive benefit from it. I use it myself.

https://sphinx.fyi/

clone1018 21 hours ago||
I'm working on Infrastry, a completely hands-off approach to deploying all kinds of (web) apps. You paste in a repo and Infrastry takes it from there, determining what type of software it is, how it should run, what should be configured, and then provisions to the internet and monitors it over time. It works very well for being so early, which is quite exciting!

The control plane is entirely in Elixir, using Jido & Oban to help power tools it gives an agent to get your app deployed. Uses k8s currently for the infra, but I've made the app => spec => build => deploy layers completely agnostic so we could switch out providers & methodologies in the future.

Looking for people who want to throw apps at, it's still early so no guarantees yet. You can find the website at https://infrastry.ai/ (still a brain wreck of ideas, working on it!) and I made a Discord for feedback at https://discord.gg/sBkS5ZMM3t

bob1029 16 hours ago||
Browser automation + LLM agents + human curation.

The naive approach has the LLM interacting with the DOM using raw locators and javascript. If a human curates all logical views of the DOM and exposes tools that are only relevant for each, the search space for each agent iteration is reduced by many dimensions. I have achieved deterministic results over hundreds of actions in complex business workflows. Without the human curated layer we barely make it 10-20 actions before things get weird.

Most of my thoughts are currently occupied with possibility that this works in the general case. I think an LLM exercising a tool like GitHub via properly curated browser automation might be superior to direct API access in some ways.

krekr 22 hours ago||
Helping a friend build a midi controller replica of a legendary vintage synthesizer (Yamaha CS80)

https://www.gijsleijdekkers.nl/gltaudio/

ingvay7 12 hours ago|
Very cool
gcanyon 23 hours ago||
Not sure if this qualifies, but here goes: I wrote a hard science-fiction novella. It's intended to be scientifically accurate to special and general relativity, with just one tweak that permeates throughout.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/19e3HfnK1lNHHBef-5c-KvNdD...

RobotCaleb 14 hours ago|
Cooool! Do you have an epub?
gcanyon 12 hours ago||
See if this works: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HUQV3IRNtTUt7sorTuJ3Wg6fqwQ...
mgerb 1 day ago||
I'm working on Spacecap: https://github.com/mgerb/spacecap

It's a screen recording tool for Linux. The goal is to make it as fast and efficient as possible, while also being simple to use and install. It's just a hobby project that I am having fun working on. Here are some notable things about it:

- Written in Zig

- Uses Vulkan Video for encoding

- UI built with SDL3 and imgui

- Features recording, replay buffer, and screenshots

Evidlo 21 hours ago|
Biggest advice for exposure is to try to get it packaged on Debian. Annoying but worth it.
mgerb 20 hours ago||
Thanks for the suggestion. I plan to explore things like this as it stabilizes and becomes more feature complete.
naiquevin 12 hours ago||
I'm working on my guitar practice app, Captrice[1]. Last week, I added an interactive metronome tutorial[2] in the app to help onboard beginners (quite a challenge). This week I'm planning to implement the long pending "device sync" functionality - currently it's a local-only webapp (it's all static pages; no backend server). So for the past couple of days, I've been learning and evaluating the existing sync solutions.

The app has been my long term side project for more than 2 years now. I've been playing guitar for more than 20 years, mostly as a hobbyist. It started as a personal project and I've got immense value out of it in terms of speed building and consistency of practice. I believe other guitar players can find it useful too.

A few months back I got a burst of inspiration to pursue it more seriously. After my last contract ended, I've been primarily working on it. Eventually I may go back to contract work again but for now I'm excited to spend dedicated time on it! Do give it a try, or share it with guitar players in your circle.

[1]: https://www.captrice.io/

[2]: https://app.captrice.io/metronome-101

simonjgreen 19 hours ago||
I’ve been hacking on an outdoor sound monitor for 24x7 logging of birds and bats around my house the last couple of weeks with a live indoor monitor: https://github.com/simonjgreen/OpenObservatory

And today I knocked out an improved trmnl plugin for Japanese flash cards at my wife’s request as she liked the native one from trmnl but it lacked furigana https://github.com/simonjgreen/trmnl-japanese-vocab

Note: I let AI do the vast bulk of the work on both counts, and I ideated, architected, and bug fixed. I do love AI coding hobby projects though, when you have an idea for a thing and know exactly how to put it together but don’t have the time to raw dog the whole thing.

jakerubo 16 hours ago||
Very interesting!

Do you have a hardware list available? I didn't see it in your repo but adding it would be helpful, thanks!

simonjgreen 9 hours ago||
Oh good point, I’ve added a section to the README. Thanks!

(Assuming you are referring the observatory. Trmnl is off the shelf)

phendrenad2 15 hours ago||
"When I asked the computer to identify it, what I got was European Warbler. You see, sir, the SAPS software was originally written to look for birds. And I think when it gets confused, it kind of runs home to mama."
nbpname 7 hours ago|
Privacy & Security with self-hosted LLMs! You have dreamed of this too?

Today you you can self-host some models, yet this does not mean you can safely browse the web with it, and automate tasks that would interact with your email account, your bank account and your clients.

This is the reason why I left Mozilla, to work full-time on fixing these problems.

Prompt-injection, hallucinations and private information leakage might not be fixable, but they can be identified 100% of the time, deterministically, before any undesirable consequences.

https://cogilibre.com/

Godsend69 4 hours ago|
To identify potential issues with your self-hosted LLMs, consider using The Shield. It allows you to see what your LLMs are sending out and seal your AI models, ensuring a safer browsing experience. https://lightinthedarksolutions.com/shield.html
nbpname 1 hour ago||
Thanks for caring about this topic as well.

However, asking people to pay first without an established brand nor the ability to audit the code requires a lot of trust. Without any additional judgement about the product, I would never recommend anybody to do that by fear of spyware, phishing or worse …

From the same consideration, I intend to open source my solutions. At the very least offer auditing capabilities to people like me, who are too paranoiac about security and privacy.

On the topic, I do not want to ask the user to always vouch for every usage. My goal is to detect ahead of executing any command, and offer options to re-try automatically, strip the leaking context, abstract the information or accept it. Only asking the user when there is a doubt, while not bothering the user when there is no issue.

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