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

A few days back, a book on FreeBSD Driver Development was posted here [0], and everyone assumed a) it's LLM slop and b) a terrible introduction to the topics covered.

I scanned a couple of chapters and realised it likely wasn't LLM generated, it just needed an edit. The intro to C is a hard and weird intro, but then driver development in FreeBSD is hard and weird and people who aren't prepared to get through such intros probably aren't going to get through the rest of it.

Being the contrarian, I've started going through it. I was involved on the periphery of the FreeBSD project ~25 years ago, went to conferences, ran a BSDUG in my hometown, and so on. And I realised I've missed systems programming and FreeBSD itself a little, and in recent years became a little sentimental.

What I've discovered so far in the first few chapters:

1. I miss FreeBSD. And it's weird my muscle memory kicks in and am surprised in a lovely way to find familiar things like /etc/rc.conf work the way I remember them.

2. This is not AI slop. There are issues that I can blame on him not using the same platforms I am (if you're on Apple Silicon, just use UTM and the aarch64 ISO - don't use the VirtualBox config he suggests, as an early example), but as somebody who sees a lot of AI generated content in my day job - this isn't it

3. I have got excited about coding again for the first time in a while.

So, this is my hobby for a while. Go back to where I started, get into low-level systems programming again, I have some ideas on some hardware I want to help out on... it's different to a lot of what I've been working on for the last decade or so, but that excites me.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47915632

I have been working for some time on a budget body/facial mocap solution with Unity. Mocap is hard, and what exists is locked behind subscriptions or is just very expensive.

With Unity I'm trying to bundle a bunch of different free, cheap or open source solutions together. For facial, that includes a custom converter from the output of Deadface (based on Mediapipe) with ARKit blendshapes, and also eye movement. For body it's a custom hook to SlimeVR that allows you to mocap with cheap-ish IMU-based DIY trackers, and all that on top of a custom made (not free but open source) physics rig solution that gives you accurate rigid body real time collision, saving on cleanup work.

It's being going really nice despite being an unusual workflow. Hope to release it as a plugin for a in-development sandbox game in the near future. Mocap and animation has been my passion long before i started with tech stuff, and finally I'm able to pursue it.

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Hey, I'm from the EU and love to see such a project!

One thing I can recommend right off the bat is Reddit - there's many privacy focused subreddits, and also you can share the whole project in EU related subreddits and e.g. r/SideProject.

Would love to try it for a week, this is my account number - 9772263817629091

Keep up the great work!

I'm working on GPS tools to help support my current contract. I've found there are no good tools for tracing a route on a map and having a mobile device think it's traveling that route. I'm not just talking GPS coordinates, but speed, direction, motion detection, precise timing between waypoints, being able to play these trips forward and backward, step by step, etc. I'm talking time-travel debugging for GPS applications.

It's early days. I'm not even sure it's possible.