Posted by david927 2 days ago
Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
It started when my ex and I were having trouble in our marriage (divorce will be finalised soon), probably after watching too many a YouTube DIY channels, and here I am a year and a half later :D
I moved in when it became livable 6 months ago (I had to shower at the gym for a month), and it should be finished sometime next year. I don't work that much on it though, as I am busy with my job and kids. Some rooms are nearly finished, others are barely started. I've got used to the concrete slab as a flooring and no doors.
Would I recommend it? Ummmm... probably not. But it's been an interesting experience, and I've learned a lot. I don't want to diminish professional contractors, as some of them are really skilled, but I feel you can get most of the way to "standard home finish" by watching a few YouTube videos on the topic. You will be slower of course and might need to repeat/fix your work, but then to push it to "luxury-ish finish" you mainly just need a good eye for detail.
An important lesson I learnt is the phrase "paint covers a multitude of sins" is wrong, as paint does not cover it, your mistakes will still be visible just in a different colour. Joint compound/plaster does though :D
In order to make it work, I had to re-implement some math, so I avoided floating-point altogether (IEEE754 is a personal pet peeve) and went with mantissa and exponent fixed-point decimal. Or should I say binary, because the "decimal place" is the number of bits, not the number of base-10 decimal places.
Apparently this is the only deterministic, cross-platform, cryptographically-secure procedural RNG that has many types of distributions (uniform (default), normal (Box-Muller), exponential, Poisson, log-normal, beta... all with configurable inputs AND which will plot the distribution for you in the terminal!) AND is guaranteed to give you the same values... Everywhere. (Because how the fuck has this not existed yet??) Implemented in both LuaJIT and Zig with C FFI. So there you go. MIT license. Enjoy your deterministic but still very random numbers, on every OS, identically.
(It sources the best-in-class recommended source per OS if you want true random. It will do that too.)
At digicred, we were managing these in google drive and jira, but with 500+ enterprise customers, and their annual vendor reviews, this practice became unmanagable.
CAOS is a dedicated workspace that helps us manage these assessments like projects, additionally, CAOS turns the questionnaires into a system of record. Questionnaires become structured, answerable work. Finished answers and your compliance documents become a searchable, citable corpus. The next questionnaire starts from what you already said, with every claim traceable to the document or prior answer it came from.
It is self-hosted. Your policies, your answers, and your customers' questionnaires stay on your infrastructure.
Recently open-sourced - https://github.com/DigiCred-OSS/caos-os
- Canvas for Agents
- LLMs for learning.
| Idea: Don't use LLMs for summarisation. | Proof of concept - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oF9M5hAazw | Repo - https://github.com/veris-pr/bwaiz