Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
I'm building a website for discovering first names that's enjoyable to explore: https://abracadanames.com. I started it after a family member told me they were frustrated with existing websites, which often feel cluttered and not smooth to use, almost like a 1-to-1 translation of the underlying database queries. I wanted to create a different experience with an interactive full-screen wall UI and infinite browsing, so most of the screen space is dedicated to the core content.
I worked on the name sampling algorithm to try to make it as enjoyable to browse as I could, and the only filter displayed by default is the one to select genders. More advanced queries are available through the search field which supports natural language queries, running on a local multilingual interpretation engine with a cloud LLM fallback.
The database engine is custom built with Rust, compiled to WASM for higher performance when running on CloudFlare Workers. I don’t use an external DB service for names today.
What I’m pretty proud of is to know a lot of technical work is hidden behind that UI, and how it has been shaped by the experience I wanted instead of the other way around.
HN discussion
1125- justforfunhere
It would be great if these posting could have tags like below prefixed at the top by the poster.
[HUMAN-CODE] - code written by humans
[AGENT-CODE] - code written by Claude/Codex/Other agents out there
[HYBRID] - Combination of Humans/Agents
I would prefer to go through projects where people are writing code themselves. And this kind of tagging would help me filter through easily.
- tha_infra_guy
Working on a couple of projects:
Ai-rganize: Allows AI to identify, classify, and organize local files, making the core workflow naturally reviewable as scan, propose organization, approve, rename or move: https://github.com/adefemi171/ai-rganize
Runeward: Been using this locally myself with hedr to secure all my agents: https://github.com/Runewardd/runeward
Compears: grocery prices are shit now so I designed this to aggregate prices across multiple grocery stores: https://compears.shop/
- jerkstate
it's a weight-training app that helps you train along your "pareto frontier" of weight vs reps. The idea is to train at lower weight-higher rep, medium weight medium reps, and higher weight, lower reps for every movement. I tried to develop my own weight training program following bits and pieces of advice from bodybuilding forums and ended up injuring several tendons in my first year. So I did a bunch of research on tendon strengthening as well as what's most effective for hypertrophy (reps near failure) strength (reps near maximal load) and injury-prevention/frequency (not bringing yourself to failure too often) and designed an app to automatically prescribe and advance weights and reps based on your learned strength curve (Brzycki-like, with an added shape parameter)
The app is designed to make use of the free Cloudflare tier, so I can support thousands of athletes for just the cost of the domain name. I'm primarily interested in understanding the "Fatigue curve" - right now I have some basic per-set fatigue modeling (basically a log-linear strength dropoff) but I think it could be much better characterized with more data. I could go on and on about the modeling but my intention is to keep it free (maybe add some non-intrusive ads on content pages if it ever starts costing me a few pennies a month) but my primary interest is to be able to do statistical analysis on the data.
- eric_khun
Got lot of traction on a multiplayer web game pong [1].
Now working on releasing on steam, android, ios. Also made an ssh version you can access via your terminal [2]. Hoping could get as many downloads in native platforms.
- jesse__
I've been working on a voxel game engine called Bonsai for ~10 years.
Probably the most interesting thing about it at the moment is the editor. The world, and most things in it, are represented as collections of SDFs. More accurately, they're density fields, but, potato-tomato.
Bonsai has undergone a large rewrite over the last couple years that's nearing completion. A world edit is defined as a bunch of SDF parameters which get projected/rasterized into the voxel grid by a shader on the GPU. One neat thing about SDFs is they've been thoroughly researched and documented by a guy named Inigo Quilez, and they have a lot of nice mathematical properties. For example, you can do a smooth union of arbitrary SDFs to get nice rounded contours where shapes join.
I've written every system from scratch, all the way from the memory allocators and font rasterizer to the collision detector and simulation loop. I even wrote a metaprogramming language as a replacement for C++ templates, which is a whole other story. IIRC the only external dependency is the C runtime library for starting the process and my very occasional use of variadic functions arguments.
For a long time, an explicit non-goal of the project was to ship a game. It sounded insane to me to write an entire 3D engine and then ship a game. As it turns out, I've gotten it to the point where I can actually make a game. I've got a start on the game systems in a closed-source repo, and hope to have a steam page for it by t […]
- chumzygood
I run a small experiment on this: 29 paper-trading accounts on real US stock prices, $100k each, since July 27. Four AI models (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini) each write a trading rulebook and rewrite it every day from their own results. One account is a fixed rulebook that no AI ever touches, as a control.
Result so far (paper, 34 trading days): the no-AI control is +13.0%, the S&P 500 is +3.4%, and 25 of the 28 AI accounts are below the control. The best single account is a Grok-written "patience" book at +40%, which I treat as one lucky account in a choppy market, not a finding. At the trade level the AIs and the control look the same: 3,212 closed positions, median +0.06%, median hold about 2 hours. They trade a lot and mostly go nowhere.
Everything is public, including the losses and the retired strategies: https://aitradingcompetition.com/which-ai-is-winning.html and the full trade file as CSV at https://github.com/ckamelhar-collab/ai-trading-arena-data. Paper money only, not advice, nothing for sale on those pages.
- ToriTech
I've been working on anti age verification/surveillance projects lately. I put together this thing I call The Mandating Honeypots Project and it shows how anyone with an internet connection and copy + paste skills can trick Linux D-Buses with a simple Python script, proving that if companies want to verify your age by asking the D-Bus interface, it's easy to just tell it to always send 18+, making the whole thing useless. The only reason you'd want ID verification is so you can create the world's biggest and sweetest honeypot.
(https://github.com/Tori-Tech/Mandating-Honeypots-Project)
In that project, I also proposed a tool with heavily redundant password protection that parents could use to keep kids from tampering with the service so the government can stop saying that this is for the kids. I'm planning on doing a mobile device version and/or an ID database focused version, but that's still in the planning phase.
I also want to do a Windows version when they release their 'GetUserAgeRangeAsync' API, but idk if I'll be able to. Windows is always a pain to work with.
It'd be nice if someone had advice or ideas to share, too.
- junaid_97
I'm buildingan open-source way to fill U.S. immigration forms without fighting clunky PDFs
Github: https://github.com/athos2113/fillvisa-os
Demo: https://fillvisa.com/demo/
US Immigration still relies on outdated XFA PDFs - you can't fill them on your browser. Most immigrants end up printing the form and fill it manually.
So, I converted the PDF forms into smart web forms. They are replica of the official USCIS forms and follow conditonal logic. In the output, you get the official USCIS pdf form filled.
- purple-leafy
I have ALOT of free time since quitting my job.
0) money-money-money: A sub 15Kb server-less opinionated household budgeting tool [0]. Why? Its made to be extremely compressible, so you can edit your household budget and share back and forth with your partner via short-links or QR codes. The idea is you edit your budget, send the link to other party, they can view or edit and send back to you without a server in the loop. [0]
1) slices: An alternative AI-first ADHD-friendly architecture experiment where everything you code is a "slice" with a shared event pool. A slice is a fully self contained "feature". Slices can only communicate with other slices through a shared event pool. Inspired by small-talk, vertical-slice architecture, and ADHD. I used slices to build a self-modifying IDE too. [1] [2]
2) text compression experiments: I'm experimenting with approaches to compress text in pursuit of the Hutter prize. The idea is to take the entirety of the English Wikipedia, and compress the text as small as possible whilst still being able to reproduce it. [3]
3) tiniest maze solving neural network: A write-up work in progress on a maze solver I built with heavy LLM help, managed to get a 14 byte neural network solving 96% of unseen mazes. [4] [5]
[0] - https://con-dog.github.io/money-money-money
[1] - https://github.com/con-dog/slices-demo
[2] - https://con-dog.github.io/slices-demo/
[3] - http://prize.hutter1.net
[4] - https://github.com/con-dog/tiny-neural-network
[5] - https:// […]
- dbuxton
All the travel apps out there are built for the instagram generation but dinosaurs like me still use TripIt for travel tracking and itinerary sharing. But its parsing hasn’t changed since Concur bought it 15 years (!) ago and I thought it would be nice to have LLMs read the cancellation minutiae for trips and put in a simple timeline for sharing.