Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026) • Hacker News Board

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

#471

Post by happiness0067 » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 12:52 AM UTC

I ended up making a side project for my side project and built MeasureToCut: https://measuretocut.com

I moved last year and started a bunch of DIY projects, and each one turned into a bunch of drawings on napkins and backs of receipts to figure out how much wood/material I needed to buy to avoid "one more trip to store". It tells you how much of a stock material you need, and shows you how to cut it, to minimize waste or minimize cost.

A few details

1D: works for boards, pipes, bars, etc. You enter lengths and quantities; it details the cuts onto the stock material.

2D (coming soon): will work for plywood and sheet goods and lets you see how your parts tile onto sheets.

Apparently the software engineer to woodworking pipeline is actually just a circle

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

#472

Post by michaelbuckbee » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 12:56 AM UTC

I kept making a hacky eval tool to try and compare the outputs of different models, model configs, prompt versions, etc and finally rolled it up into a web app + downloadable app (kind of like Postman or Insomnia, but for AI).

Free, holds your keys in localstorage and makes direct calls to the APIs (unless there's a CORS issue), at https://evvl.ai if you want to try.

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

#473

Post by alpn » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 12:58 AM UTC

I'm working on https://wireplug.org: A simple, free, and open source connectivity coordinator for WireGuard. Basically a way to keep WireGuard tunnels connected while moving between different access points. It handles (basic) NAT traversal and works with the in-kernel WireGuard driver on Linux and OpenBSD. You can find the technical details at https://wireplug.org

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

#474

Post by lenova » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 1:00 AM UTC

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…

Interested Canadian here! Don't see your email on your profile, mind sharing a link as a reply here? Thanks!

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

#475

Post by mnurzia » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 1:01 AM UTC

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #459

I've spent the past ~year compiling a US nationwide land parcel dataset. I posted it to kaggle a few days ago: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/landrecordsus/us-parcel-laye... . I'm around 99% coverage of the US. Learned a lot about land records and GIS along the way.

This is really cool. What do you think the remaining ~1% is?

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

#476

Post by cpburns2009 » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 1:05 AM UTC

I finally decided to promote my gitignore pattern Python library, pathspec, from v0.x to v1 after 12 years or so.

I'm thinking of reviving my Python SQL parser prototype I have half done. Or maybe resume my Mako template plugin for PyCharm.

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

#477

Post by jesse__ » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 1:09 AM UTC

jdshaffer wrote: post #453

jesse__ wrote: post #181

I've been working on a voxel engine in my spare time for 10 years, this year. I wrote everything from scratch, from the memory allocators, font rasterizer and a programing language all the way to collision detection, renderer and gameplay code. It's been a journey! https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

Hey! I've seen bonsai before. Amazing work!

Hey, thanks for the kind words! Yeah it was on the front page not too long ago, which felt great

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

#478

Post by jesse__ » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 1:10 AM UTC

luiscosio wrote: post #376

jesse__ wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. My read here is that you're implying that if an attacker has access to, for example, weight data, they can invariably find a way to exploit it. If that's a correct assumption, I think you're playing an unwinnable game, since attackers always have i…

Thanks for the insight! I think this is exactly why some of the work is moving away from “assume unrestricted API inference forever.” For example, we’re prototyping ideas like air-gapped or very low-bandwidth inference gateways, where interaction happens over narrow channels (serial, optical, audio, etc.), with explicit threat models and monitoring. The point isn’t that this’s practical for today’s models, but to rea…

Great, thanks for adding some nuance!

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

#479

Post by Uncorrelated » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 1:15 AM UTC

testfrequency wrote: post #391

Uncorrelated wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the time I created it there weren't any that did the end-to-end process with ProRAW in a way that I liked. And I got really tired of manually editing every photo I took, so I built the app for me. Plus, having full control over the way photos look, I've customized the output to match my taste; I don't think there's any other camera apps that produce photos quite like mine.

Makes sense! I figured that may have been the case. My default camera app is Leica LUX, but I’ve been curious about unprocessed photography and can’t stomach the cost for Halide. Just installed :)

Thank you! I just released the new update on a slow rollout, and you can get it ahead of schedule by updating manually. I recommend trying out RAW photography with the Extended Dynamic Range setting set to on :)

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

#480

Post by dryark » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 1:16 AM UTC

I've been working on two projects recently. A video game titled TentFires, and letterpress book remastering.

TentFires is a variant of the puzzle game Camping / Tents-and-Trees, but with a huge overworld.

Creating the overworld led to some advancements in topology, which led to realizing those advancements can be used to accurately reconstruct a theoretical "metal die shape" that was used for a glyph to creation impressions in old letterpress books.

As a result, my current first application of that is to remaster and re-release the first book of the "Hardy Boys" series from 1927, "The Tower Treasure".

To do that, I've constructed a "macrogrammetry rig", which is essentially a 2d x y panning machine using 3d printer parts and stuff from my local hardware store, and a camera with a macro lens, in order to "scan" the pages of the book at the highest possible resolution I can reasonably do so at, which is currently around 6000dpi.