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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)

#171

Post by testfrequency »

Uncorrelated wrote: post #9

I've been working on an iOS camera app to take natural-looking photos with reduced post-processing. The goal is take photos that look like what you see. I just updated the RAW pipeline and I'm really happy with how the resulting photos look, plus there's this cool "RAW+ProRAW" capture mode I introduced recently. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unpro-camera/id6535677796 I initially released it early last year and have b…

Curious what motivated you to create this camera app when there are a handful of well established apps that already do unprocessed imaging. What does Unpro do differently?

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

#172

Post by saadn92 »

azdle wrote: post #84

My meta side project for building other side projects: https://bodge.app/ I've always had a bunch of small side projects that I want to do that aren't worth the overhead required to actually put them together & keep them maintained. So, I built a small Lua-based FaaS platform to make each individual project less work whenever inspiration strikes. So far I've built: * A current-time API for some hacked-together IoT de…

Love this, especially the commute idea

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

#173

Post by vunderba »

halftheopposite wrote: post #20

Working on two topics that I like : browser multiplayer games and experiences, and tools for developers (mostly used in my side projects). First game is https://geocentric.top where users can sculpt a planet collaboratively and place trees or houses (for now very limited). I plan on making it an idle sim where players will be able to interact by dropping some food/events for the creatures on it to evolve through time…

If you enjoy virtual terraforming - Flowscape is a really polished landscape painter that I highly recommend.

https://pixelforest.itch.io/flowscape

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

#174

Post by dewey »

adityaathalye wrote: post #155
dewey wrote: post #122

Over the holidays I was building a wooden birdhouse with a Unifi Protect camera and a small web interface that automatically identifies the birds and shows me a simple overview over which type of bird visited how many times. Birdhouse: https://img.notmyhostna.me/cRQ1gJfZCHjQKwFrgKQj UI: - https://img.notmyhostna.me/Hnw4qcvbg1ZQCrFxzGMn - https://img.notmyhostna.me/62TFwSXSRRbCfxDz297h - https://img.notmyhostna.me/40q…

"birdhomie" 10/10 naming skilz :)

Thanks, it's named after a similar commercial project called Birdbuddy but I didn't want to pay for a subscription and potentially have some e-waste on my hands in a few years. I also wanted to have it integrated in my existing Unifi setup.

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

#175

Post by adityaathalye »

bambax wrote: post #123
adityaathalye wrote: post #32

Just got started again on my "Poor Man's Bitemporal Data System" (discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118585 ). Holidays nuked all the hot-cached context in my head. I spent a few days just spinning wheels until it repopulated. But the basic idea works now! Much testing and benchmarking work remains to make sure it's not going to lose data, and that it won't denial-of-service itself (because object…

Love the idea! Read only the beginning of the first "giant blog post" so maybe it's discussed there, but in Sqlite doesn't WAL mode give you a kind of super simple, super basic temporal data system? If you somehow kept all WAL entries 'as is', it should be possible to reconstruct the state of the db at any point in the past?

Thanks!

> but in Sqlite doesn't WAL mode give you a kind of super simple, super basic temporal data system

Yes-ish.

For one, it is unitemporal. For another, it is for SQLites own transactions, not of the individual datums. Litestream is the way to replicate WAL into an object store / elsewhere. litestream-vfs is also looking good!

https://litestream.io/ , https://litestream.io/reference/vfs/ (announced here: https://fly.io/blog/litestream-vfs/ )

I'm trying to emulate the data assert/redact properties of append-only bitemporal-by-design data stores like XTDB. The giant blog post builds up the intuition from scratch. Or at least tries to.

So my system is going to be: bitemporal data, enforced by SQLite schema and application checks, along with WAL replication for point-in-time transaction backup/restore. Both are entirely distinct, and unaware of each other.

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

#176

Post by anotherpaulg »

I’m building a quantum photonics experiment that is a variation of the quantum eraser.

One aspect that HN may find interesting is my use of Bayesian optimization to control and perfect key experimental settings. About a dozen of the wave plates and other optical components are motorized and under computer control.

Given a goal metric like "maximally entangle the photon pairs" the optimizer will run the experiment 50-100 times, tweaking the angles of various optics and collecting data. Ultimately it will learn to maximize the given cost function.

This sort of thing is commonly done with tools like Optuna during NN/LLM training to optimize hyper-parameters, but seems less common in physics especially quantum photonics. I'm using a great tool called M-loop to drive the optimization, which was originally developed for creating Bose-Einstein condensates.

https://github.com/michaelhush/M-LOOP

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

#177

Post by azdle »

saadn92 wrote: post #172
azdle wrote: post #84

My meta side project for building other side projects: https://bodge.app/ I've always had a bunch of small side projects that I want to do that aren't worth the overhead required to actually put them together & keep them maintained. So, I built a small Lua-based FaaS platform to make each individual project less work whenever inspiration strikes. So far I've built: * A current-time API for some hacked-together IoT de…

Love this, especially the commute idea

Thanks!

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

#179

Post by luiscosio »

I’m working on Security Level 5 (SL5), which is basically “nation state grade security” for frontier AI systems. The core idea is that if a model’s weights or training artifacts could enable catastrophic harm, you should treat them like top-tier secrets and secure them accordingly.

One piece I helped with is SenL, a “sensitivity level” framework for AI labs. It’s like a practical clearance system for AI assets. Not everything in a lab is equally dangerous, so you label assets by sensitivity (weights, training data, eval sets, agent tooling, deployment configs, etc.), then tie that label to concrete controls like who can access it, where it can run, what logging is required, and what monitoring / two-person rules apply.

If anyone’s curious, SL5 is here: http://sl5.org/ and the SenL framework is part of the published artifacts.

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

#180

Post by Cyph0n »

An eBPF-based Wireguard mesh VPN in Rust using Aya.

The idea is to rely on kernel Wireguard, and process packets in kernel space (via eBPF) for maximum performance and minimal CPU overhead. I plan to use egress and ingress TC to “apply” the policy at both sides. XDP is faster, but only works on ingress, which is not sufficient for a mesh VPN imo.

Netbird already exists in this space, so this is mostly a learning exercise, and maybe a reference implementation for those learning eBPF in Rust.

Goals and constraints:

1. Single digit CPU overhead for multi Gbps bandwidth (probably a bit too ambitious, but we’ll see)

2. Linux only

3. No hole punching or complex NAT handling

4. Basic policy language for L3 and L4 traffic (L7 requires punting packets to a userspace proxy)

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