Over the hollidays I was working on Steve Balmers interview puzzle.
https://rahne.si/optimisation/2026/01/07/steve-ballmer-inter...
What I am most proud of is that I got the solution in the corse of apporx 1 week working on this!
Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
741–750 of 914 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
#742Building TypeQuicker: https://typequicker.com
Started as a side project but has become my full time focus since leaving a FAANG job ~6months ago
So far we've added:
- Code typing practice with any language: https://typequicker.com/code-typing-practice - SmartPractice: analyzes your history stats to find weak areas and generates exercises for them: https://typequicker.com/app/text - TargetPractice: lets you interact with any of your stats; for example, clicking on a certain bigram that you typed slowly will create a natural practice text that targets that two character sequence - TypeAnything: let you create a typing exercise about anything; AI for typing pretty much - Advanced stas: we measure every character, 2,3 charcter sequences (delay to click in ms), every word, and even breakdown speed/accuracy per finger - Real-time hand/finger indicators: show you exactly where to place your fingers to type based on standard touch typing practices - Keyboards supported: QWERTY, QWERTZ (German keyboard) ISO, British ISO (adding Dvorak and Colemak soo).
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
#743Feather, a fresh implementation of TCL: https://www.feather-lang.dev
Command languages are underrated, and being able to add a Bash-like REPL for agents and users alike is something I want to see more of.
Feather solves the "rest of the Owl" problem: agents/users get loops, conditionals, online help for free from Feather, as the embedder you only need to add application-specific commands.
Feather itself has no GC (uses the host's), no own data structures (uses the host's, e.g. JavaScript arrays for lists in the js version), and no I/O.
The core is implemented in stdlib-less C
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
#744A session recording and product analytics tool: https://scryspell.com/
I built it because I thought session recording was such a cool feature, and wanted to know how to make one.
I have a version 1.0, and now working on how to sell and market in a crowded product space!
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
#745I am working on Mojibake, a small C library to handle Unicode data. I don't like the other libraries, so I’m building one myself. https://github.com/zaerl/mojibake
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
#746I bought a 300 litre aquarium about 6 weeks ago for the living room. Added soil, plants and water. Have spent the last 6 weeks watching plants grow, and snails that smuggled in on plants, multiply. I over fertilised it and left the light on accidentally for a couple of days whilst I was away and experienced an algae bloom, which was interesting. Added some cardinal tetras and amano shrimp yesterday and have spent a l…
That's amazing. I've been looking at getting my first fish tank lately with my kids. Seems like a lot to learn. Any tips for a newbie?
If your first fish tank is just going to be something small with a goldfish or two in it, I'm not sure how you go about doing that as I've not done that before. Maybe you just fill the tank from the tap and chuck the fish in? I decided to go for a large planted heated freshwater tank with interesting fish and shrimps and snails, so I had to be careful to monitor the water and find out what species could co-exist, what pH and temp they like, etc. It took 6 weeks before I could put anything in it safely, so one tip would be to patient. Another would be, go and speak to the people in the pet shop / aquatics center about what you're doing as they can tell you everything you need to know. I got most of my advice from ChatGPT, but double checked it with the kind people at the aquatics center as I was setting things up.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
#747Trying to create a moon jar in pottery class
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
#748I work as a freelancer, but I have been wanting to start something of my own. A couple of months ago, I started working on VideoZero.ai with the vision of generating videos that feature text, formulas, and graph elements without breaking after 10 seconds or weird artifacts. Instead of generating raw pixel values, we leverage Motion Canvas to create the video elements. Some results are quite cool, but some videos are quite crappy. We have a whole list of animations to explore here: https://videozero.ai/gallery
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
#749I've created a toy coding agent called "caducode". More of a thought experiment that materialized into a little something.
The philosophy behind it is: instead of providing a bunch of tools to the LLM, you simply provide a single tool: run_python(). The Agent just generates code to do whatever it needs, to inspect local files, to carry edits, to run commands.
https://github.com/flipbit03/caducode
It worked surprisingly well, even with a very small 30b local model.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
#750A locally running (macOS) iOS build size analysis tool. Been tinkering with Apple Intelligence, trying to implement an on-device size optimization engineer for my users. The small context window for Apple Intelligence has been tricky to get right.