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

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I have been porting over my favorite Erlang library "Bitcask" to Rust.

https://git.sr.ht/~tombert/feocask

Called "feocask" cuz feo means "ugly" in Spanish and FeO to mean Iron Oxide for Rust. I thought it was funny.

I will admit that I had help from Codex, but I did write most of it myself, and I think the design is coming out kind of neat. I have a very strict "no lock" policy [1], including lockfiles, and this should still be safe to use across any number of threads, at the cost of N^2 reconciliation to the number of threads and a lot more drive space.

I like my design; I have an excuse to use Vector Clocks and Hybrid Logical Clocks and I think it might actually be useful for something some day. I'd like to eventually write something that goes a bit beyond getting parity with bitcask and optionally have the ability to automatically distribute across multiple nodes, but I'm still trying to think of a good design for that, because my current design depends heavily the atomicity of POSIX filesystem commands, and introducing the network introduces latency that would likely greatly degrade performance.

[1] At least no explicit locks. I am using Tokio channels and they are probably using locks in some spots behind the scenes.

After years of wondering what the post-UNIX paradigm of computing could look like, these past few months I've been prototyping a software platform built around capabilities and message passing, targeting Linux and bare-metal RISC-V. The big ideas I'm pursuing is a stackless design running on a flat address space with lightweight processes to minimize message-passing latency, and all the benefits of capabilities so every process is sandboxed and has only access to capabilities they have been explicitly passed via message passing.

I've also built a RISC-V emulator to integrate with this platform, so eventually it'll be able to run native binaries written in any language, completely sandboxed, completely built around message-passing. Basically a native, low-level BEAM-like platform to build an entire operating system and user-space.

While my day job is writing boring applications, this is the stuff that keeps me awake at night, and I would love so much to talk and write more about this, about the trial-and-errors I'm facing, but it's still so much in flux every week I'm exploring a new approach. Most of my work has been around the stackless scheduler, and I have a plan to achieve preemption for long-running or misbehaved tasks without having to compromise on memory usage (i.e. without giving each process its own stack and allocate memory for context switching).

Eventually I'd like to layer on top either Cap'n Proto or another high-performance serialisation system to create a distributed, introspectable environment of object-capabilities that are sending typed messages between each other, achieving the ultimate goal of creating an unholy hybrid between Smalltalk and the Erlang VM.

God, how I wish I was paid to work on this type of problems :-)

If this sounds close to your area of interests, please send me an email and I’d love to chat.

Trying to visualise magnetic fields of a floppy disk.

So far I can see magnetic fields on a magstripe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8nM4Z-hkTw with two polarisers (one of which I rotate in the video, which is contained in a 3D printed holder with gears I made).

I'm awaiting some different polariser film, to see if I can get it to work with a floppy disk.

I am working on version 6 of the Nutrisense. A device to keep track of what you eat (calories/protein, etc.) without the need to type it in, in some app.

https://marcelv-net.translate.goog/index.php?w=apparaat&id=3...