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Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

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Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

#31
A software for managing BJJ and martial arts academies that it's both easy to use and have everything they need like assistance tracking, payments, communications, etc.

It's called MatGoat[1], and it's going quite well so far. Nowadays I'm working more on the marketing/sales side.

[1] https://matgoat.com/en/

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

#32
I built a MacOS-native app [1] to control Positive Grid Spark amps [2], without needing a phone.

Official app is mobile-only and clunky, and the workflow is awkward if you're sitting at a desk. Hardest part has been maintaining compatibility across amp models. Small protocol changes or optimizations I make for one amp can break another. That means I have to do a lot of manual testing before every release. So I'm trying to think of an emulation layer or test harness I can build to make my life easier. Happy to hear suggestions there.

About ~50 people are using it so far, and main feedback has been that it's much faster and more reliable than the official app.

[1] https://tonepilot.app [2] https://www.positivegrid.com/products/spark-2

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

#33
I'm writing an essay about how I use an ancient text editor, GNU Emacs, along with gptel, Gemini, some local models, yt-dlp, and patreon-dl to help me me study an ancient language, Latin.

I want to show how I liberate poorly aligned, pixelated PDF image scans of century-old Latin textbooks from the Internet Archive and transform them into glorious Org mode documents while preserving important typographic details, nicely formatted tables, and some semantic document metadata. I also want to demonstrate how I use a high-performance XML database engine to quickly perform Latin-to-English lookups against an XML-TEI formatted edition of the 19th century Lewis & Short dictionary, and using a RESTXQ endpoint and some XQuery code to dynamically reformat the entries into Org-mode for display in a pop-up buffer.

I intend demonstrate how I built a transcription pipeline in Emacs Lisp using tools such as yt-dlp and patreon-dl to grab Latin-language audio content from the Internet, transcode the audio with ffmpeg, do Voice Activity Detection and chunking in Python with Silero, load the chunks into Gemini's context window, and send it off for transcription and macronization, gather forced-alignment data using local a local wav2vec2-latin model, and finally add word-level linguistic analysis (POS, morphology, lemmas) using a local Stanza model trained on the Classical corpus.

This all gets saved to an an XML file which is loaded into BaseX along with some metadata. I'll then demonstrate some Emacs Lisp code which pulls it into an Org-mode based transcription buffer and minor-mode for reading and study, where I can play audio of any given Latin word, sentence, or paragraph, thanks to the forced-alignment and linguistic analysis data being stored in hidden text properties when the data was fetched from the database.

Lastly, I'd like to explore how to leverage these tools to automatically create flash cards with audio cues in Org mode using the anki-editor Emacs minor mode for sentence mining.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

#34
An app for supplementing learning in my masters program [1]. I'm currently in enrolled in the MCS Online from UIUC. My first course, Natural Language Processing, has been interesting, but it's a coursera-based course. This means the lectures are pre-recorded and mostly just the professor reading the slides. It's hard for me to stay engaged and really learn the material. So I started with a series of claude prompts that took the lecture slides and created a pre-watch summary, and then helped me drill the concepts after each lecture. I think converted those into a platform where I can upload notes/lecture slides and have it generate quizzes. It starts with recognition(multiple choice) questions, and eventually moves to recall(short answer) once you prove mastery of a topic. It also generates flashcards from failed answers. It extracts topics from the uploaded materials, and tracks mastery over time. Mastery rots if you don't touch the platform/topic for a while.

I'm not sure if I'll every productize it in any way, but I could see a world where it's used by people prepping for the bar, med boards, various continuing education stuff. Right now it's just a fun platform to build on as I explore the current wave of technologies. Building a framework for evaluating different LLMs for best price/accuracy. Adding a RAG pipeline so wrong answers can point back to source material for further review, etc.

I'm looking at moving from backend engineering to a more MLE or agent pipeline role, so this is giving me something more than school projects to build on. While also helping me do better at school.

[1] https://studyengine.app/

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

#35
Space Trader!

Imagine mixing Magic: The Gathering, StarCraft and Civilization’s hex grid combat.

There’s multiplayer but I haven’t put the server anywhere yet.

Check out the introduction here:

https://github.com/williamcotton/space-trader/blob/main/docs...

Clone the repo:

  npm install
  npm run dev
There’s maybe a couple of other games called Space Trader so if anyone has any suggestions for a new name, I’m all ears!

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

#38
I’m working on Flowtelic. A workflow driven note-taking system that aims to get you thinking deeper, but also help you work on the most important thing next if you’re stuck. While not essential, it’ll be enhanced with a local first AI approach.

https://www.flowtelic.com

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

#39
https://fablesandfriends.games

It's still VERY much in development but I'm building a site that allows people to find TTRPG games that are suited to them AND includes a suite of tools for both GMs and players in said games.

Players will be able to showcase characters they're playing or have played and GMs can manage campaigns (scheduling, notes). I'm a D&D player but I'm trying to make it system-agnostic

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