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Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

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Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

#81
I have been making GTK applications so that people can manage MergerFS and LUKS encrypted hard drives without knowing how to be a sysadmin.

The use case is kind of neat. RAID is great and can mostly solve these problems, but people don't have SATA hardware that can handle the workload well, plus they aren't ready to manage an array like that, and they don't like having to use specific sized drives, etc. Another major issue with those setups is you need to be careful because an IO error that you don't recover from will be very difficult or impossible to recover from because of the layers of LUKS combined with LVM.

With MergerFS you just use regular file systems that are separate, but they get combined into a single mount point. That means each disk can just be a different LUKS encrypted drive and if you need to recover data it's isolated to that one disk and much more manageable. You can also take any disk and plug it into another machine as needed and grow or shrink the storage pool as needed.

MergerFS has options and settings to help you determine how files are spread across the drives, such as least space used or which disk has the most of that directory path already.

My app (Chimera) automates the unlocking of the disks, mounting and some data migration if you want to remove a disk from the pool. I plan to add some rclone features to help provide easier backup options to places like Backblaze, AWS, or a remote server in general.

So far so good and I was surprised at how well Opus had been handling Gtk and pkexec.

Let me know if you guys are interested I am close to pushing some RPMs and DEBs, in addition to the standard Python stuff.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

#83
Runway, a CRM. It's looking great, near to its first public release, built on market standards. If anyone's interested just ping me, mail handler on profile, ciao. p.s. still wondering about the licensing to adopt to balance different matters/desires.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

#84
I've revived a project I started around 20 years ago. It is a kind of graph query description/measurement tool for protein 3D data.

The query engine itself is like a DAG of 'operators', similar to a relational DB (or more like a graph one) with scanners, filters, and matchers.

Very fun, although not at all efficient and probably overengineered for what it does :)

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

#89
I've been working on https://www.photogenesis.app/

It's an iOS app that applies various generative art effects to your photos, letting you turn your photos into creative animated works of art. It's fully offline, no AI, no subscriptions, no ads, etc.

I'm really proud of it and if you've been in the generative art space for a while you'll instantly recognise many of the techniques I use (circle packing, line walkers, mosaic grid patterns, marching squares, voronoi tessellation, glitch art, string art, perlin flow fields, etc.) pretty much directly inspired by various Coding Train videos.

Direct download link on the App Store is https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photogenesis-photo-art/id67597... if you want to try it out.

* Coming to Android soon too.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

#90
Open Science Archive: open infrastructure for scientific databases, so that every field gets its own Protein Data Bank in 1-click.

Code: https://github.com/opensciencearchive/server.

Website: https://opensciencearchive.org/

Two demos:

https://pockets.bio

https://lingual.bio

I've got demos up and running (mirroring/extending PDB and GEO). Next I'm working on APIs with good AX, ML-friendly export, and an unified AI-driven UI that works for all scientific data types.

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