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

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291–300 of 914 posts

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

#291
I am a passionate player of this traditional German card game called "Doppelkopf". It's a fantastic way to spend time away from screens. The game is quite complex which makes it super fun but also hard to pick up.

I'm building a small web app with an interactive tutorial and a browser-based singleplayer game that helps people learn and practice Doppelkopf. I've just released an English version:

https://doppelkopf.club/en

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

#292
Vim-inspired, as in it's minimal and fast, text editor on the web. No modal-editing yet but, once the current natural input mode is decoupled, clients can bring their own modes/controllers via the extension system.

It's meant to be embeddable and hackable, serving as a building block for custom IDEs as opposed to being IDE-like VSCode. I felt the web IDE space was uninspired with apps built around VScode/Monaco effectively being hosted a VSCode instance with a pre-installed extension and config.json. (Aside: perhaps there's a business opportunity for VSCode-as-a-service where client apps simply bring their own config). I'm dogfooding this library in building an algo trading IDE.

Ships 2kb and smoothly handles 50+ million line files. 1 billion lines with the high-capacity extension. Also, it can function as a TUI or terminal on the web because the core implementation concerns efficiently rendering plaintext in a fixed-width grid layout.

https://varrockbank.github.io/buffee/

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

#293
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds fascinating, do you have any documentation on how you modify the yeast?

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…

How much expensive lab equipment do you need to do something like this?

"A quick lil CRISPR switch" sounds like "oh just my homemade fusion reactor hooked up to my kitchen warp drive" to me, yet you make it sound so simple!

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

#295

I built a way to chat with the documents in this post (updates live). https://nthesis.ai/public/702445eb-f0e4-4730-b34f-f34eb06dd6... Or you can do a basic text search: https://nthesis.ai/public/hn-working-on

Nice one.

But the graph view seems broken?

And for the data, it would be nice to have the original URL for each comment as a reference.

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

#298
I am writing a Context Retrieval and Context Minimization program for Rust code. I am trying to automate my own workflow in how I use LLMs.

The program is gonna do, what I am currently doing by hand, opening files and copying function/method signatures usually, from files all over the place.

The key here is to fetch into the context window only what is needed for one-question/one-answer and no more, hence the Context Minimization. Context fetched is gonna be specified by the programmer, for example sig(function) fetches only the signature, while @function captures the whole body. sig(Struct) is gonna fetch the fields and signatures of all of it's methods. sig(Trait) similarly.

In my view, giving the A.I. more information than needed, only confuses it and accuracy degrades. It is also slower and more expensive but that's a side effect.

The project is in early stages, for the moment it calls ast-grep under the hood, but eventually, if it works as it is supposed to, I plan to move to tree-sitter queries.

If there is a similar project somewhere I would appreciate a pointer to it, but I am not interested in implementations of agents. My program does not give the A.I. a whole view of the codebase, only the necessary points specified by the programmer.

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

#299
Doors - A first person, exploration game/experience that I built from scratch.

Doors lets you explore URL addressable 3D rooms that link together seamlessly via portals. The idea is that people would upload rooms to the internet (to github, S3, whatever) and connect them together to form one giant inter-connected space that would be a real trip to explore.

Right now rooms consistent of a: - Manifest JSON file that points to requisite resources and configures portals - An optional skybox - An optional background music track - A .vox file containing voxel terrain data

Here is a video I filmed on my phone of flying through a room that links back to itself: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BCqOYTISS_k

Portals can be arbitrarily sized and everything is prefetched/loaded seamlessly in the background.

I'm nearly done - I just need to add in a very lightweight interface and give the code a bit of a spit shine (I will open source it - so I want it to look pretty)

EDIT: As an aside, I finally decided to give this whole Claude Code thing a go - I purchased a max subscription and I'm trying to write as little code as possible. I certainly wouldn't call what I'm doing "vibe-coding". I discuss a feature in plan mode (incl. how I want to implement it in high level terms) iterate on the plan 2-3 times until I'm satisfied and then let it rip. I'm both very impressed and quite frightened by the productivity boost...

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

#300
post #238

I'm working on Tech Posts ( https://techposts.eu ), a Hacker News for Europe! Since the last time I posted on HN it's gained a decent amount of traffic and users. I'm particularly happy with the jobs section, which is growing into a high signal-noise source for European tech jobs: https://techposts.eu/jobs The reason I started this website is because so much incredible innovation and growth in Europe flies under the…

Bug on home page: "Ask TechPosts.eu: Is there an EU Cloudflare alternative? I'm interested in CDN, DDoS mitigation and basic web security." Links to https://techposts.eu/post/153 "3 comments" below it links to https://techposts.eu/post/154 It looks like the latter is correct. I would have sent feedback direct, but I can't see an about page or anything.

Thanks! Will have a look.
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