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

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

#751

Post by z500 »

I've been taking a look at my sound change applier again. I've been trying to add syllable detection to it so that I can match directly on syllable boundaries instead of having to match on them explicitly in my sound change rules.

So I started by adding the ability to define syllable structure in the rules file, then I tried running the syllable rule through the same compiler I used for the regular sound change rules. It ended up being even slower than I was anticipating, so I decided to skip the NFA to DFA conversion step and wrote a backtracking NFA runner. This worked _okay_, but if the syllable rule isn't able to fully match a word it ends up backtracking forever, and I never managed to figure out how to fix that.

Last year I read a post about parser combinators and I decided to rewrite the syllable detector. I finished the rewrite and then ran into an error and gave up. This last weekend I revisited it and it turned out it was just user error again; my syllable definition rule had a mistake, but thankfully the error was a lot easier to fix with the new design. Now it emits a warning, and I'm rewriting my sample sound changes rules to use the new boundary markers and hammering out any issues, which are a lot less than I was afraid of.

I'm thinking about rewriting the sound change rule compiler to use the same combinators I did for the syllable rules, but it would be kind of a shame after all the work I put into the DFA compiler lol

https://github.com/marriola/Transmute

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

#752

Post by kristjan »

I've wanted to read some long-form RSS feeds from the beginning, and friends had use cases for feed filtering, so I built https://sponder.app.

The filtering was easy, but RSS doesn't do "from the beginning" (RFC 5005 exists, but is mostly unused), so scope crept into a webpage-to-RSS tool that lets me convert favorite.site/s/archive - autodetection of the article structure was a fun side quest.

The whole thing is a little function engine (Yahoo Pipes called), so the final goal is `merge(archive, live_feed) | drip(N items per D days)` to have the archive transition seamlessly into current content. I expect I can push that live tomorrow or so.

And of course Podcasts are just RSS, so hey, let's skip reruns. That's doable with filters on the episode description, but with history in place I'll add title similarity checking. I'm trying to think how to recognize cross-promoted episodes too, without having to crawl every podcast.

Importantly, Sponder's _not_ a client. There are enough clients, any many are great. Each implements some subset of features, so Sponder's an intermediary that consumes and publishes pure RSS for us to use anywhere we want.

Project two started over the weekend and is the NYTimes' Pips, but colors. You're building a stained glass window with regional constraints, and the big difference from using dominos is colors can mix. Also, triangles! The engine works, and I'm designing the tutorial and first handful of puzzles now.

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

#753

Post by overtaxed »

I'm working expanding upon one of the first web app projects I had on my resume when initially starting out in Software Engineering, HoopTime. It's an app for pick-up basketball players looking for a good park for games around your city. Right now focused on cities close to me, namely, Sacramento.

For this iteration of the project, I'm using Manus to build it. My first stab at using AI to build a web application, and the results have been interesting. Although I'm not debugging the code as much with this approach, I was surprised to still feel a similar level of 'fatigue' as I'm guiding the LLM along with the build. Check it out, would love your thoughts!

https://hooptime-vbn5prc4.manus.space/

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

#754

Post by matty22 »

Stained Glass Atlas (https://stainedglassatlas.com/) - working on mapping/documenting as much of the publicly accessible stained glass as possible. No fancy tech (vanilla HTML/CSS/JS). Anyone who knows of great stained glass in their local area is welcome to come add to the data set!

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

#755

Post by numbers »

I was using Wisper Flow and had a pretty bad experience with their support related to billing and so I started building my own version of a speech to text app, it's very doable with Parakeet and Whisper models available now. I've got the app working on mac and it's been so much easier to make progress on it with AI available now.

I'm not sure I'll be putting it out there because it feels like there's already 100s of these apps out there so I don't feel strongly about it.

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

#756

Post by pmarreck »

A "universal" format validator whose goal is to validate every byte of as many of the most common file formats as possible (I'm up to about 190, to varying degrees of coverage; turns out many formats don't have checksums, and some formats' parsing won't break on corrupt data)

https://github.com/pmarreck/validate

Written in Zig, it has a C FFI and a CLI for mac/windows/linux.

The purpose of this is to feed into a different project I'm working on that is for-pay.

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

#758

Post by ragle »

xena wrote: post #716

This month I'm recovering from major surgery. I'm okay, it's something I've been waiting to get done for a very long time. I'm just bored in recovery and running out of my science YouTube backlog.

Hope you feel better soon!

What sorts of topics do you enjoy learning about on Youtube?

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

#760

Post by jmole »

YesBox wrote: post #59

I changed gears and moved into the video games industry at the end of 2021. I started developing a city builder called Metropolis 1998 [1], but wanted to take the genre in new directions, building on top of what modern games have to offer: - Watch what's happening inside buildings and design your own (optional) - Change demand to a per-business level - Bring the pixel art 3D render aesthetic back from the dead (e.g R…

Any chance you'll release on macOS/Linux?
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