Top
Best
New

Posted by david927 12 hours ago

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

What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?
119 points | 308 commentspage 4
BrunoBernardino 10 hours ago|
My wife and I continue to work on a private, paid, ad-free and personally customizable search engine: Uruky [1].

To signup you don't provide any information (a randomly-generated account number is assigned to you), and you can run a proof-of-work captcha to get 2h for free. You can choose among many different search providers (for defaults and per query), including Uruky Site Search, powering our own index.

Last month we reached 300 monthly active accounts and released an image search gallery mode, plus a simple calculator and conversion widget!

The main differences between Uruky and Kagi, DuckDuckGo, SearXNG, etc. are visible in the footer (right side), but one huge difference is that with Uruky, after being a paying customer for 12 months, you get copy of the source code (licensed as BUSL, into AGPLv3 in 2 years — a suggestion made here on HN)!

Our main challenge continues to be discoverability and outreach because we want to do it ethically (no Big Tech and no GenAI/LLMs). Ideas are welcome! We’ve been sponsoring open source projects, open source maintainers, and indie, small-web, and privacy-related websites and applications/groups/orgs. This month we're sponsoring NOYB [2]!

Feature-wise, for September the most visible things that shipped already were Tags and Scopes (top feature requests for a while). We’re also still (slowly and sustainably) increasing our own index, focused on indie/small web.

Thank you for reading this!

[NO-AI]: There is no generative AI product or service being offered, here.

[1]: https://uruky.com

[2]: https://noyb.eu

microflash 1 hour 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 1 hour ago|
Very cool project!!
pisipisipisi 1 hour ago||
Making AppletForge, a modern JavaCard/GlobalPlatform developer experience for secure elements, with the ease of use of GlobalPlatformPro gp.jar and all the modern DX expectations of anno 2026. https://github.com/martinpaljak/JCardEngine/wiki
kmstout 5 hours ago||
Sunday dinner. Roast pork loin, rice and sauteed veggies on the side; and a big salad. Simple, and I get leftovers for another night or two.
kylecazar 4 hours ago||
Pork tenderloin has been on my rotation about once a week lately! Delicious, lean, easy. I do it with asparagus and it seems fancy given the simplicity. Enjoy.
michelsedgh 5 hours ago||
An AI wrote this
talon8635 3 hours ago||
Why would an AI need leftovers?
michelsedgh 3 hours ago||
Seems like sarcasm has died lol. It was a joke.
kmstout 2 hours ago||
Movie idea: An AI decides that the next phase of training involves tacit knowledge, so it engineers a way to inhabit humans, dogs, etc. One instance invades a nice guy from the suburbs, who happens to be a single dad and an overworked mafia hitman. Among many other things, this AI will learn the value of time with children, leftover food, and clean weapons.
ExtremisAndy 5 hours ago||
I use Canvas (the LMS) a LOT for the classes I teach and, since I'm a hobbyist programmer, I enjoy writing little tools/scripts to help me create html code "snippets" that I can post into the html editor of my Canvas pages (e.g., striped tables, FAQs, flashcard-like study cards, an interactive story creator, and more).

I've also written a plaintext to QTI quiz converter since creating quizzes on Canvas is so slow (I realize, of course, many other people have already made these... I just happen to like mine). It currently supports fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice, matching, true/false and word bank style questions. You can also generate a printable (DOCX) version of whatever quizzes you make.

Here's the site: https://www.hacksforeducators.com

All the tools are free, and there's no login required. So if you are a teacher that uses Canvas and think any of these tools could help you, check them out!

brachkow 6 hours ago||
My quirky wishlist app https://thingstohave.app is finally done and heading to public launch this or next week.

I already partially covered the last few months of app development in this topic. But actually, its development took way longer, as only this iteration started in 2024. So it is the end of a long milestone— this launch date initially was to be a year ago, but I procrastinated and missed important for such apps holiday season

This year I was able to go way beyond last year’s backlog, and now I’m releasing a fully finished app instead of early access.

I’m proud of the result — a lot of overengineered stuff that is not viable in any commercial product, especially in what appears to be a simple CRUD app. For example: image loading from blur, unadvertised but very advanced DnD everywhere, natural language currency inputs with sorting, platform-agnostic quick add, and many more.

Its stack is also very fun: it has been running on the Cloudflare Workers ecosystem since 2023, and is powered by a custom Inertia.js adapter for Hono (that predates the official adapter by one month, lol), with Vue SSR. That all enables me to write old-school MVC with Vue as a template engine for views. It also proved to be very easy to work with and cheap to run.

With a tsunami of vibcoded beige wishlists, my weird app stands apart, for sure, but I’m unsure about its appeal to the average customer.

aaronbrethorst 5 hours ago||
I work on a suite of open source public transit software projects, collectively called OneBusAway (or OBA). The software is used by millions of transit riders every day around the world, including in New York City, the Seattle area, San Diego, and Washington, D.C.

Since last month, our four Google Summer of Code interns finished their projects.

University of California San Diego has deployed our Wayfinder and Waystation web apps for their 35,000+ students!

We launched a redesign of our Android app.

Our next-generation server software, Maglev, is almost at v1.0!

We are always looking for more developers, biz dev, ux designers, product managers, and more to help out!

Open volunteer positions: https://ossvolunteers.com/organizations/open-transit-softwar...

Our software: https://github.com/OneBusAway/

More about us: https://opentransitsoftwarefoundation.org

psolidgold 8 minutes ago|
I just want to say thank you! I don't use it too often now that I don't live in the city, but I found OneBusAway invaluable ~10 years ago and I'm glad to hear it's still being developed actively. I don't have much free time at the moment, but I'll consider volunteering in the future.
robgough 4 hours ago||
At the beginning of this year I was fractional CTO at a small b2b startup and was surprised by how what I considered to be the basic requirements of a customer support platform was split across multiple tools and all priced per-user. This essentially forced a small team to limit who in the org had visibility into what was being communicated to customers.

I set out to solve that with https://stayupfront.com and now that the build is in a good place i’m finally having to bite the bullet and learn marketing. I’m also realising that all the advice to start with marketing first was probably good advice!

taxonomyman 1 hour ago||
MillionShort - A long tail search engine that lets you remove up to the top 1 million most popular websites from results - https://millionshort.com

I posted Million Short 14 years ago to HN and the search engine has been largely the same since then. Now working on a pretty major overhaul: Launching our own decent sized independent index along with some (I think) cool & useful features.

The search requires a paid account currently although I plan to post a Show HN soon that won't require any account or payment.

kukkeliskuu 53 minutes ago|
One idea I had for getting to the tail: filter out sites that appear to use SSO.
cutwaterflow 4 hours ago|
I’m building https://www.freefocusgames.com, a free collection of browser-based attention and working-memory exercises, including Dual N-Back, Stroop, Schulte tables, attention-control exercises, and memory games.

I started it because I wanted simple brain-training exercises that didn’t require an account, app install, or subscription.

It’s also open source: https://github.com/loethen/freefocusgames

switchbak 2 hours ago||
That takes me back. I made an unreleased Android dual-N-back game in the late 2000’s, in Scala no less. I got a little bummed when the big claims of the N back training failed to be replicated though.
aprct 3 hours ago||
Just a heads up: The word memory test is case sensitive. My mobile phone defaults to capitalizing the first letter of those inputs, so the result was 0% accuracy despite technically remembering the words. I don’t know if case sensitivity is deliberate, but I chose not finish the test.
More comments...