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

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111–120 of 770 posts

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

#112
I want to try again using AI to build an app, and also learn some Rails. I consult at a company that uses ServiceNow for change control and it's absolutely horrible, and they have busted processes atop it. I dream of a change control app that has templates, has better visual indicators of an RFC's stage in the workflow and exactly what needs done to push it along, and just something that doesn't suck as much as SNOW.

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

#113
I'm doing some programs to use the API for my local bus company to show when buses are arriving at stops. Final step is making it output the data to an external display.

https://github.com/slyall/auckland-stop-display-simple

Some other projects doing similar stuff but I found they were hard to understand (and mostly used an old API that no longer exists) so I (well AI) made mine with small scripts and included curl examples.

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

#114
I've been doing a bunch of stuff with using a PUT[1] to simulate an IF (Integrate and Fire) neuron[2]. Right now I'm experimenting with variations of pulse-width and frequency of the input spike train, seeing how that affects when the "neuron" fires. In a future step I'll add a resistor to bleed off some of the charge from the timing capacitor, to make it more of a "Leaky Integrate and Fire" neuron.

And then ... well, we'll see. I'm also reading a lot of books and stuff on neuroscience, neuromorphic computing[3], analog computing, etc. I don't have some "grand unified theory" or anything, just playing around in this space.

There's a lot more I could say about this, but I'll save that for a blog post or something. That said, if anybody wants to see some pictures and read some write-ups of some of this stuff, add me on LinkedIn[4] and you'll see some of that stuff in my activity there.

EDIT:

What the heck, here's a picture for anybody who's interested.

https://fogbeam.com/images/scope_20260913_202613.png

The magenta trace is the "spike train" which is output from a Rigol DG4162 Function Generator. The yellow trace is the voltage at the anode of the PUT, which simulates the "action potential" of the neuron membrane. And the cyan trace is the cathode of the PUT, which simulates the output of the neuron. What we see here are several input pulses hitting, with each bumping the action potential up a little, until it finally hits a threshold and then "fires" and resets. Lather rinse repeat.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_unijunction_trans...

[2]: https://neuronaldynamics.epfl.ch/online/Ch1.S3.html

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromorphic_computing

[4]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philliprhodes/

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

#115
a replacement for Octopus deploy https://rolloutrhino.com/ (marketing page is mostly a placeholder). Octopus is super expensive for our company and scales poorly if you have lots of small projects. I've got pretty much everything working really well, and the main thing I'm working on is improving the UX for all the workflows I do most often. It is mostly built around what I wanted from the tool, but before I release it I'm looking at supporting various other ways people use the tool. It's been a fun project so far.

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

#116
I thought it might be fun to have a “proper” search engine for my laptop, so I wrote a thing (with my fingers! No Claude Code or codex here!) to scan my home directory and put data into OpenSearch so I can search stuff. [1]

For that matter, I also decided to self-host SourceHut because I will no longer be in compliance with their new policy. I have the flakes set up to inject them on my server [2]. This was very AI assisted.

[1] https://git.brucewillis.sexy/~tombert/fs_index I promise it’s safe for work, despite the URL. That’s just my dev URL that I play with. Code is still a mess though, so proceed with caution. I will eventually clean it up.

[2] https://git.brucewillis.sexy/~tombert/sourcehut_flakes

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

#119
I work on a suite of open source public transit software projects, collectively called OneBusAway (or OBA). The software is used by millions of transit riders every day around the world, including in New York City, the Seattle area, San Diego, and Washington, D.C.

Since last month, our four Google Summer of Code interns finished their projects.

University of California San Diego has deployed our Wayfinder and Waystation web apps for their 35,000+ students!

We launched a redesign of our Android app.

Our next-generation server software, Maglev, is almost at v1.0!

We are always looking for more developers, biz dev, ux designers, product managers, and more to help out!

Open volunteer positions: https://ossvolunteers.com/organizations/open-transit-softwar...

Our software: https://github.com/OneBusAway/

More about us: https://opentransitsoftwarefoundation.org

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

#120

I built a simple, stoic and free markdown note app (free) called Beauty. https://www.markdown.beauty/ Why? There's no why. The world doesn't need another Markdown editor. I still made one. Everything is on-device, purposefully human-centric without being anti-AI. I built this because I wanted to work on a project that I could sweat the details unconstrained by deadlines, investors, etc. I was frustrated with other wr…

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