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

https://porchweather.com/ - free app for notifying you when the weather is right for opening your windows. The idea is to save you a few bucks on using air conditioning as well as simply enjoying some fresh air.

Tracks temp, humidity, wind speed, and precip chance and you set the parameters.

Notifications are currently email and web push. SMS is too expensive to run as a free service. I think the next direction is probably an app, as web push support in iOS is not great.

I would like to play this demo when it comes out.

3D model construction of climbing gym. There is so much detail a normal climbing video can't show. Wall angle, hip position. I'm hoping to overlay human model, taken from climbing video, onto the 3D wall to make climbing visualization easier.

the impact of this would be significant. You should check out Issey Miyake's "A Piece of Cloth" (Issey Miyake: A-POC and 132 5) collection, which was clothing based on a single piece of fabric. It's old, like 1999 era, but the concept has come up a few times since.

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/100361 is a start, but there are other examples. Rei Kawakubo also did a collection called Square based on a similar concept. Yoji Yamamoto did a couple as well, there were a few moments in Japanese fashion that would work extremely well with a full garment knitter.

These pictures are the top level concepts, but the rest of the collections if you can still find them have more examples.

Flying drones with natural language input instead of remote controllers. Instead of having a human on the control sticks the entire time, what if they could describe the goal they are trying to achieve, and then the drone goes and flies according to the agreed intent? I know traditional drones already have autopilots, but they seem to be static pre-planned routes and could benefit from advancing the capability to be more dynamic and flexible. Eventually I want to combine a live camera stream to run a local vision model that would identify and notify images of interest the drone sees while flying. From there the operator can decide if they want to re-task the mission or adjust as needed. That is the general technology direction, but I hope to expand this into the wildland firefighting vertical. Instead of putting humans up in helicopters and fixed wing aircraft, I hope we can leverage drones instead. I understand not every use case will be able to replace with a drone, but enough of them could be to make it worthwhile in my opinion. Still early days of research and development, but super excited about the tech and combining AI + robots for the common good. Currently a huge fan of the startup Seneca, and hope to help expand the industry or join them.

1) I recently published my latest milestone here: jakedecamp.com