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

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

#781

Post by siiitschiii »

foxandmouse wrote: post #213

I’m working on a real-time tracker for the Canadian Parliament. While the official data is technically public, it's practically inaccessible (buried in XML feeds and legacy sites). Phase 1 was building a modern ingestion engine and freeing the information to make it more accessible. The goal is to make legislative data as accessible as sports stats. I'm almost ready to launch the MVP; I'm just doing some bugfixes and…

We're doing something similar for Zürich's city council at https://github.com/SiiiTschiii/zuerichratsinfo, transforming buried legislative data into accessible formats and auto-posting votes to social media. Would love to compare approaches, especially on the data ingestion and LLM insights side!

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

#782

Post by siiitschiii »

coinfused wrote: post #584
foxandmouse wrote: post #213

I’m working on a real-time tracker for the Canadian Parliament. While the official data is technically public, it's practically inaccessible (buried in XML feeds and legacy sites). Phase 1 was building a modern ingestion engine and freeing the information to make it more accessible. The goal is to make legislative data as accessible as sports stats. I'm almost ready to launch the MVP; I'm just doing some bugfixes and…

Interesting! I’ve been working on a tracker for the Belgian parliament [0]. Similar story: very old site + data mostly gets published as a weekly pdf report (including votes and discussions). I have 1. A scraper/parser that ingests the data daily and transforms it into .parquet files. 2. A LLM summarizer to summarize larger discussions. 3. A static site that gets automatically generated (based on the .parquet files)…

Similar setup here with Zürich's city council (https://github.com/SiiiTschiii/zuerichratsinfo), we scrape daily, parse votes and auto-generate social media posts. Your Belgian tracker looks great, we should definitely exchange notes on the LLM summarization approach!

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

#783

Post by [deleted] »

osigurdson wrote: post #460
foxandmouse wrote: post #213

I’m working on a real-time tracker for the Canadian Parliament. While the official data is technically public, it's practically inaccessible (buried in XML feeds and legacy sites). Phase 1 was building a modern ingestion engine and freeing the information to make it more accessible. The goal is to make legislative data as accessible as sports stats. I'm almost ready to launch the MVP; I'm just doing some bugfixes and…

This is a really cool idea! I remember once looking at all of the actual concrete actions taken and being surprised at what was actually done (not very much at the time!). Maybe it is better now.

[deleted]

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

#787

Post by fc417fc802 »

Hammerhead12321 wrote: post #233
koeng wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really need to do a write-up. I kinda just whip up the easiest path and do it. For example for the grape, I needed to knock out some tryptophan synthesis genes so I could redirect the bioflux. Problem is that in bakers yeast they have a whole buncha copies of their chromosomes, so I had to knock out one of the genes and replace it with a different gene from grapes. Did that with a quick lil CRISPR switch. Had to el…

Starting from nothing, how much time (and money) might it take an individual to learn how to be able to do these things?

If you can find a nearby community college offering a molecular biology class that includes a practical lab then I'd say a couple quarters of time and tuition.

DIY that will depend on your level of ability. You can do this stuff in your kitchen but learning it from a textbook will be daunting for many (most?) people.

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

#788

Post by dhbradshaw »

I've been working on a task tracking app called Checkipe (https://checkipe.com but right now it's invite only for me and family members).

It's been fun to use it as I bring it to life.

A Django backend and flutter front end makes for a pretty powerful and adaptable pair.

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

#789

Post by daringrain32781 »

I dove into a new area recently: hardware. I have a bit of a sim racing hobby, but I only have a Bluetooth game controller. I found a project to make your own force feedback wheel base, called FFbeast. But before that, I've taken up designing and building my own shifter and (3) pedals.

I printed the main pedal frame and base with PETG, and I found some M5 hardware on amazon for pretty cheap. The pedals use a hall effect sensor to measure the proximity of the pedal to the frame base. They're wired to an esp32 ADC ports and I wrote a simple USB HID device with tinyusb and esp-idf which mounts as a generic game controller - good enough for my case. I saw some designs for a load cell brake pedal, but I wanted to do it as cheaply as possible first, so I found a stiff spring. Big inspiration was cncdan's design.

They feel great - I borrowed some old logitech pedals to compare the feel and these are much better! I think all in I spent ~$40 USD for the raw materials (spring, hardware, filament, hall sensors + wire, esp32) and a weekend of time.

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

#790

Post by stfurkan »

I've been experimenting with AI Agents to see how far I can push them across different types of complexity (from dashboards to client-side video encoding).

Trip Replay (https://tripreplay.app) - A client-side travel map animator where I successfully got the AI to implement complex D3 projections and WebCodecs logic.

Krypto Markets (https://krypto.markets) – A crypto dashboard built purely in "Agent Mode" to test how fast I could ship a data-heavy UI.

Gez.la (https://gez.la) – My old COVID-era open source virtual tour database project that I used agents to fully refactor and modernize from a legacy stack.

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