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

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141–150 of 804 posts

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

#141
I've been working on a voxel game engine called Bonsai for ~10 years.

Probably the most interesting thing about it at the moment is the editor. The world, and most things in it, are represented as collections of SDFs. More accurately, they're density fields, but, potato-tomato.

Bonsai has undergone a large rewrite over the last couple years that's nearing completion. A world edit is defined as a bunch of SDF parameters which get projected/rasterized into the voxel grid by a shader on the GPU. One neat thing about SDFs is they've been thoroughly researched and documented by a guy named Inigo Quilez, and they have a lot of nice mathematical properties. For example, you can do a smooth union of arbitrary SDFs to get nice rounded contours where shapes join.

I've written every system from scratch, all the way from the memory allocators and font rasterizer to the collision detector and simulation loop. I even wrote a metaprogramming language as a replacement for C++ templates, which is a whole other story. IIRC the only external dependency is the C runtime library for starting the process and my very occasional use of variadic functions arguments.

For a long time, an explicit non-goal of the project was to ship a game. It sounded insane to me to write an entire 3D engine and then ship a game. As it turns out, I've gotten it to the point where I can actually make a game. I've got a start on the game systems in a closed-source repo, and hope to have a steam page for it by the end of the year.

I'll do some shameless self-promotion and leave some links here for anyone interested in looking at the engine, language code, or some pretty pictures.

https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai

https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

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

#144
I've been working on a cross-platform GUI system called Affiche.

The basic idea is to separate an application's UI semantics from the toolkit that actually renders it. The same application can currently be presented using native Win32, Cocoa/AppKit, Qt6, GTK3, GTK4, Swing, or a web browser. The UI can run locally or be rendered remotely by a client, without the application itself being rewritten for that environment.

I've also been working on a declarative layout format and, lately, a visual designer.

It started as a rewrite of an architecture I worked on many years ago, mostly because I wanted to see how far the idea could be pushed with modern systems. It has turned into a considerably larger project than I expected.

Still private and very much under development, but I'm curious whether other people have run into the same problem: maintaining applications that need to survive changes in GUI toolkits, operating systems, deployment models, or client environments.

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

#146

Started a few different things: 1. A robotics information and news website. Any feedback is appreciated. https://robotica.dev/ 2. Applied DBSP theory to Postgres https://github.com/getravi/pg_dbsp and DuckDB https://github.com/getravi/duckDBSP . The idea is to have incrementally maintained materialized views.

Whats your stack, workflow for the news site?

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

#147
Still working on my traffic simulator. Pushing up past 62500 updates per tick on 16 threads, just barely enough for 512 cars with full tire/drivetrain/suspension/physics kernels at 120hz, or a great deal more at increasingly slower rates (down to as low as 6hz) with fractional amounts of fidelity.

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

#148
I've been building Ballad – an inbound marketing engine that runs itself. I'm building it for other founders like myself who don't have a marketing person and aren't going to hire one.

https://www.balladlabs.com

My last company (Courier, YC S19) had great inbound but we never were able to scale it. Ballad plans what I should write, drafts in my voice, publishes to my accounts, and handles attribution so it can feed that into what it writes next.

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

#149
A few side projects!

- an open source AES67 hardware receiver/decoder - based on my friend Jessie's work [0]. I want speakers to have ethernet ports and to use an open/inexpensive stack. it's hard because physics/timing are brutal (1ms sync is ~not enough), but that's what makes it a great problem.

- an open source embroidery machine - based on my friend Owen's work [1]. Owen found Brother PE-150 machines which are readily available on eBay for ~$100 as they only work with proprietary 90s-era CF cards which nobody has (or sell for more than the machine). he designed a replacement motherboard (!!) and is running a fully open stack. it's wild.

- a ~$20 tiny cute display you can have on the side of your monitor, and display things on - realtime airport view from flightaware? a mini terminal? you can grab a display today [2], all that's missing is a 3d case (email me for firmware/OS code! I'll share it, just haven't had time). friends Frank and Sophie are working on a similar GUD-compatible display as well! [3]

- my friend Antoine has been working on Python bindings to Canonical's dqlite, a distributed sqlite-variant with raft-based failover and transactions (only C and Go clients existed) [4] - this will soon be a structural ("load-bearing"! haha!) part of Disco, a project we've been working on for a few years which lets you run your own PaaS. we're growing and get nice love letters [5] which for an open source project is obviously deeply rewarding

[0] https://jessie.grosen.systems/projects/aes67-receiver

[1] https://owentrueblood.com/blog/2024/12/10/reverse-engineerin...

[2] https://www.waveshare.com/rp2040-touch-lcd-1.69.htm

[3] https://bsky.app/profile/sophie.engineering/post/3muxysxhpck...

[4] https://pypi.org/project/dqlite-client/

[5] https://infinitedigits.co/disco/

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

#150
Hey everyone!

Last year, Mozilla released Orbit, an AI-powered browser summarizer hosted on a GCP server. After people started digging into the extension, they discovered things like backend endpoints such as store_result. Eventually, Mozilla discontinued the project. For the past month, I’ve been trying to rebuild Orbit from scratch, but with one major difference: Apogee is fully local and privacy-focused. Apogee doesn’t send or store your data. It can directly connect to your local Ollama instance for inference. I’ve also added WebGPU integration for Chrome and Transformers.js for Firefox to provide faster, local responses.

It can summarize: Articles and websites, YouTube and Billie videos, Wikipedia articles, Hacker News and Reddit threads.

You can check out the source code here: https://github.com/darshi1337/apogee

Install Apogee:

Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/apogee/pgemlpomhkdc...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/apogeeext/

Obviously it is far from complete. Would love to hear your feedback and suggestions!

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