Top
Best
New

Posted by david927 11 hours ago

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

What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?
112 points | 285 commentspage 3
LamGC 1 hour ago|
I am currently developing a great encryption tool for long-term highly confidential files in the post quantum era, but I am still concerned about any issues with it, so I am personally using it for a period of time to prove that this tool can be released as open source! (I plan to personally use it to encrypt and backup some of my GPG keys offline, then burn them onto M-DISC discs and store them in a bank safe)
stackghost 1 hour ago|
> I plan to personally use it to encrypt and backup some of my GPG keys offline, then burn them onto M-DISC discs and store them in a bank safe

Won’t that make it difficult to rotate your keys?

Keys should be something you don’t hesitate to throw away and rotate at the first hint of a compromise.

LamGC 1 hour ago|||
My GPG key is renewed expire date every 2 years, and the main key and sub key are separated (the main key is stored offline, and the sub key is on YubiKey). The private key does not need to be updated regularly, so it can be directly encrypted and saved in the backup.

I think this is a good balance point, and I estimate that if we want to rotate the keys completely in the future, we should start using new key algorithms. (I estimate it will take another 5-8 years)

LamGC 1 hour ago|||
> Keys should be something you don’t hesitate to throw away and rotate at the first hint of a compromise.

Yes, when certain situations arise, it is necessary to rotate the keys as soon as possible, but in the absence of such situations, losing key backups can be catastrophic.

sponno 58 minutes ago||
https://tiny.help

I got so fed up with my support system, and after years of using tools like Intercom, I built my own platform with everything I've ever wanted in a support desk. The biggest upgrade for me was the MCP connection. I can pull down a ticket with a bug and solve it with Claude (or Codex) and get the agent to fix and then draft a reply in my own voice. It also allows customers to connect their agent to my support desk and ask questions. This would be agent to agent with a human in the loop. But the normal day to day stuff is mainly live support or AI enabled support.

NetOpWibby 58 minutes ago||
I made a database[1] a few months ago and now I'm beginning work on a Github replacement (for me). Here's what I'm thinking for the UI[2]. I'm not trying to have feature-parity out the gate, I just want something that doesn't give me the ick. I self-host public repos with cgit but that's too basic and there's no built-in support for private repos.

The existing Github alternatives...look like someone drawing Github from memory.

   [1]: https://disc.sh / https://disc.md
   [2]: https://social.coop/@netopwibby/117227113793136781
greybox555 2 hours ago||
Recently worked on https://sleepsignal.app

It's an app to get sleepy without meds. Simply close your eyes and imagine the micro-scenarios you hear. Like if you hear "moonlight on a white flower", imagine that scenario until you hear the next one. Session duration is also not too long (10 minutes default, you may change the session duration too).

It's like a digital melatonin pill - but without chemical side effects. Try it!

iamjackg 1 hour ago||
It's a very interesting idea. Sometimes I do let my brain go wild imagining crazy things when I'm trying to fall asleep. A couple suggestions:

- the TTS voice sounds way too excited for something meant to be relaxing

- the sudden speaking after 10 seconds of silence is very jarring -- I wonder if something like a reverse-reverb effect would be enough to "warn" the brain that a new sentence is incoming. There's an example of how to do it in Ableton on YouTube[0] but the basic concept is: take a short slice of audio from the beginning of the sentence, reverse it, apply a long reverb, reverse it again, trim the end a little. You get a sort of ghostly aspirated sound that leads perfectly into the original sample.

0: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QuknZMUa7Rs

unsungNovelty 2 hours ago||
Gonna try it. And also share it with my friend if it helps me. Interesting idea. Thanks.
greybox555 2 hours ago||
Try it... I almost always get heavy eyes feeling (kinda soft burning like) on the 10 minutes one. Also would love some feedback!
unsungNovelty 42 minutes ago||
I did a quick try. And would've liked a human saying the voice over than AI. Thought it broke the organic flow this app is trying to create. But it's morning here, so.. That is the only feedback I have as of now.
eru 3 hours ago||
I'm working on making bcachefs useful when you mix both SSD and HDD in one filesystem.

At the moment, even if you set up SSD for foreground operations and HDD only for background, more often then not, your write latencies are those of the HDD. We can do better.

See https://paquari.com/posts/bcachefs-ssd-hdd-progress/ for a progress report. (Disclosure: the write-up is an AI summary of my notes, so don't expect any brilliant prose.)

I'm also working on resurrecting stabilizer (https://github.com/matthiasgoergens/stabilizer). Stabilizer is a way to make program performance less dependent on the linker and layout lottery. But it has sadly fallen victim to bitrot.

I'm doing some minor contributions to other parts of Linux like ZFS and ext4, mostly as a byproduct of experiments I'm running for my bcachefs work. Another somewhat ambitions project is to make swapfiles on ZFS and bcachefs work (or work better), at the moment the problem is that writing swap on them might need to allocate memory exactly when you are out of memory.

prbs23 4 hours ago||
I'm working on building open source control firmware that runs on the Masterbuilt Gravity series electronically controlled charcoal smokers.

https://gitlab.com/prbs23/freefall_800

The smoker hardware itself is pretty good, but like most IoT devices, the firmware and app sucked. So I reverse engineered the whole control PCB, and have been rebuilding new open source firmware from scratch. All the basic functionality is working now with a fully local control web app. Plus an Andoid app, and Home Assistant integration.

Currently working on interface refinements, and some more advanced control sequencing features.

I wrote up all the reverse engineering details in a blog post here: https://www.prbs23.com/blog/posts/reverse-engineering-gravit...

microflash 54 minutes ago||
My grandfather and uncles have left me a vast pile of Urdu magazines and books, many of which are withering away due to old age. I’m working on digitizing them so I can enjoy them on modern devices. Very much in initial stages.

https://nashist.naiyerasif.com

totemandtoken 32 minutes ago|
Very cool project!!
eigenblake 3 hours ago||
I'm working on a new independent LaTeX engine written in Rust and no C dependencies at all. You can see it working at https://telox.dev/app/scratchpad/

There's currently not a way to invert LaTeX engine output for bidirectional editing. So you can't easily drag objects around or interact with the page on LaTeX. That's what I'm setting out to change in the name of mathematical exposition.

I have more details on my plans here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49689856

I've experimented with a few ways of making the editing realtime and I'm getting in the 10 millisecond ballpark on some edits, but I want to work backwards from the light speed path to see what it takes (besides a lot of time).

ddahlen 4 hours ago||
This is very niche, only for people who do astrophotography or astronomers, mostly because of the required specialized file format.

I have slowly built out a set of tools for asteroid orbits and photometry (measuring how bright stars/asteroids are).

It is very rough still (Desktop only), and it only supports the FITs file standard.

https://www.astrometry.space/

Basically it is a full professional grade telescope processing pipeline in your browser. It does 2 queries to some custom databases to identify known asteroids and stars, but all image processing and calculations are done in the browser. This means the backend is pretty tiny. That said it is running on an old box in my closet, so queries may take a while if it gets hammered.

I built it since I have worked with quite a few astronomers over the past 4 years and I keep watching them do the same steps, purely built to make my friends lives easier. I wrote it all in rust and managed to compile it into wasm. With some help from fable as I am not a frontend guy at all, I built it into a small website.

Some of the code is public, the orbital mechanics code I wrote while I worked at Caltech. Which is being used on SphereX, NEO Surveyor, and the Roman telescopes to identify known asteroids. https://github.com/dahlend/kete

nemwiz 1 hour ago|
I've built Flexito, a website/mobile app (it's PWA) for daily stretching and mobility exercises.

As many of us here, I sit too much in my chair during the day and I'm trying to stretch more often and strengthen my back/core muscles.

There are a lot of "free" apps out there e.g. Bend that are helpful but I was annoyed with ads and limitations so I built one for myself. Now I use it daily.

The app is simple, you have about 100 routines to pick from and you can even build your own from existing exercises. Each routine comes with simple images, a link to a Youtube video and a timer. There are a lot of 5 minute routines that are perfect for a short break during work.

There are no accounts and I don't plan on adding any more features unless highly requested by users. I've built this for myself but I'm sharing it here as others might find it useful. Any feedback is appreciated!

https://flexito.fit/

More comments...