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

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

#861

Post by jesse__ »

epiccoleman wrote: post #854
jesse__ wrote: post #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 paramete…

Definitely interested in where you take things with the actual game - the engine looks really cool. It seems like we're in the midst of a bit of a cambrian explosion around "survival games descended from Minecraft" (Hytale is top of mind, but there's also Vintage Story and iirc there's a few others of note either in early access or development). Not that a voxel engine can only do a Minecraft-like - but there's defin…

Yeah, it seems enough people have done enough work on voxel engines now that we're actually starting to see games proliferate. I'm stoked about it!

I'm a lot less interested in minecraft-style survival games than I am in exploring .. other .. types of games that push the medium further. Most voxel games that make it to release basically boil down to 'hack-n-slash RPG with a lego world'. As you mentioned, it's obviously a successful recipe, but I feel like it's barely scratching the surface in terms of how far the underlying tech has come.

I've got a game in-flight where the primary mechanic is modifying the environment to achieve a goal. Teardown is really the only other game that's made it to market and done this. The mechanics are going to be intentionally simplistic .. it's more of an existence proof that a deeper game could exist and people are interested in it.

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

#862

Post by stelabouras »

efromvt wrote: post #805
stelabouras wrote: post #701

Noraneko - https://noraneko.cat Lots of strays where I live, so I wanted an app to photograph and identify street cats and help get them adopted. Written mostly with Claude. The recognition runs on device: Apple Vision detects the cat, DINOv2-Small decides whether it's one already in your library, SigLIP2 names the coat. No accounts and no backend. There's a trading mechanic on top where you can trade cards via Wi-Fi…

Love the ID/adoption - what's the gamification angle here? What does trading the cards mean in this context and how do you expect people to use that?

I took inspiration from Pokémon Go, Monster Hunter Now, and even Fatal Frame (lol).

For example: You need five distinct photos of a cat before the app will guess its age, which is also just what the model needs, since age settles at about five samples. You get XP for finding new cats, and also for shooting from a distance: the score rises with how far back you stood, so using the 3× is the legitimate way to earn it and walking up to the animal isn't.

Card designs unlock per cat, as your relationship with it deepens and there are five card designs across five cat levels.

Trading exchanges cards, not cats as the animals never leave your collection. Because a card carries the fingerprint of the photo on it, it doubles as a treasure map: find that cat in the wild yourself and the app tells you it's the one from the person you traded with.

Didn't want to overcomplicate it (it's a side-project), so there's no server and no global fingerprint registry which means no race to find a cat first. It's built around building a relationship with the cats, and hopefully finding them a forever home.

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

#863

Post by Jemaclus »

epiccoleman wrote: post #856
Jemaclus wrote: post #824

I'm working on a real-life social app called Holler ( https://justhollerapp.com ). I'm an introvert and socially anxious, but I do enjoy hanging out with my friends. I just HATE the invitation-and-coordination game. If someone invites me and I don't want to go, I hate having to come up with a socially acceptable excuse. Inviting someone and waiting for them to make a socially acceptable excuse is equally awful to me.…

That seems like the kind of "social app" that might actually work for me. I like the idea of sort of passively declaring "i am doing something, feel free to show up." I guess the potential failure mode is ... no one ever showing up. I've got a standing slot (during work hours) at my current company where it's just "AI Jam" - just come in, eat lunch, and we'll hack on something, ramble about the news, etc. It's been m…

Yeah, I get that. My thinking is that I'd rather go do something fun by myself than sit at home because I couldn't coordinate something or because someone else didn't want to do my thing.

This weekend, for example, another couple invited my partner and me to go do an activity. They sent the text at 11. We finished giving our kid lunch, walked the dog, and loaded up the car. They texted and said their kid wasn't ready yet, and maybe they'd leave by 2. They didn't leave home til 2:30, so we didn't start our activity until noon, almost three hours later. The activity lasted about an hour, then we suggested going to a brewery to get some drinks, but for one reason or another, we wound up going our separate ways.

My partner looked at me and said "This would've been a better Holler use-case. We could've just gone for a hike ourselves and not had to coordinate with someone else who can't show up on time."

Sure, it might've just been us, but we spent a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth coordinating with people that we ultimately barely spent any time with, and instead lost half our day.

Holler, to me, represents a form of social freedom. I'm freed from the constraints of other peoples' calendars. If they really want to hang out with me, they'll come to the events I holler. If they don't, then that's fine, we can still be friends, but if they can't be willing to attend things on my schedule, why should I adjust my schedule to conform with theirs?

So I'm going to do what I want to do, and if anyone wants to join, fantastic.

Better than sitting at home twiddling my thumbs wishing I was doing something fun.

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

#864

Post by epiccoleman »

foxtrot8672 wrote: post #850

Pendragon. AI staffed financial advisory firm. It uses AI to measure activity across your entire financial life and help you achieve your goals. https://pendragon.foxtrotcommunications.net/

interesting idea. I just was having Codex do some "financial advising" over the weekend, and I got some reasonable recommendations.

In the case of codex, at least, I felt some friction about just how much of my data I was willing to share, and my level of comfort meant that most of the advice was fairly generic and based on rough numbers rather than true analysis of statements, transactions, etc.

If you can find a way to tell a good story around data privacy I think that might be a good method to stand apart from the pack (both in terms of competing products and in terms of "just a guy who puts his tax return into Codex").

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

#865

Post by BorisMelnik »

R1shy wrote: post #847

I'm building Buffalo, a text based social media with no UI, and no algorithm meaning you can view posts how ever you want and filter them by tags, if you want to view it through a website you can make one, if you want to view it through a TUI you can make one. you can join the waitlist at https://waitlist.buffalo.sh

you are definitely thinking ahead. I really think the way things are going now users are going to demand to be able to consume their data the way they want to.

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

#866

Post by SebRollen »

epiccoleman wrote: post #860
SebRollen wrote: post #757

I'm building https://uscodex.org . In a nutshell, the goal is to collect all US federal law in version control, and cross-link any references between different sections. Currently I have the US Code, CFR, ~30 years of public laws and congressional bills and 25 years of executive orders. Actually using raw git repos as the main data store which has worked out great since the US Code changes very little between new rel…

Hoo boy. It's an awesome idea, don't get me wrong - and it's work that should definitely be done. But I've worked professionally in this space and it is wildly complicated. I've never seen how things are done on the federal side, but US states have various modes of "electronic filing" for rules and codes - and there's a ton of complexity. It's the kind of thing that sounds insanely boring on the surface, but there's…

Thanks! Super interested in hearing more about some of the battle-scars you've acquired from working in the space if you're open to sharing? Very early in the journey here, so still have a ton to learn!

So far, it seems like the federal space is relatively well-behaved compared to your experience with states. Most agencies standardized on the USLM schema[^1][^2] in 2013. Before that, it's a hodge-podge of XML and plain-text sources.

Also, FWIW, my interactions with federal agencies so far have been insanely positive. When I reported the error I found in the US code at 9pm, a staffer from the OLRC verified the issue and got back to me by 7am the next day, more efficient than most private sector organization's I've interacted with!

[^1]: https://github.com/usgpo/uslm.

[^2]: Meta: The USLM itself was created by federal law https://uscodex.org/usc/2/181

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

#868

Post by hobo123 »

drgo wrote: post #822
chumzygood wrote: post #250

I run a small experiment on this: 29 paper-trading accounts on real US stock prices, $100k each, since July 27. Four AI models (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini) each write a trading rulebook and rewrite it every day from their own results. One account is a fixed rulebook that no AI ever touches, as a control. Result so far (paper, 34 trading days): the no-AI control is +13.0%, the S&P 500 is +3.4%, and 25 of the 28 AI…

Famously Norwegian cows “picking” stocks by shitting in marked grid did as well as professional stock brokers and much better than astrologers!

Love this. Stay hungry, stay bullish. :D

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

#869

Post by yboris »

junaid_97 wrote: post #435
yboris wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was stuck unable to fill out a PDF I-864 for immigration because the required fields were non-editable. And opening the PDF in a PDF editor or Photoshop would require a password that was not available. So I had to create a PDF-to-JPG-to-PDF pipeline: https://github.com/whyboris/PDF-to-JPG-to-PDF

Interesting approach. How would turning the PDF into JPG allow you to edit/write inside?

Resort to Photoshop / editor at that point. I still prefer that over printing, writing, and then scanning.

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

#870

Post by fiv0 »

I have been working on a Datalog engine on top of object storage. The system is called https://triplox.xyz/. I am using SlateDB at the storage layer. The system is very much inspired by Datomic. in its final version the only source of the truth and primitive used should be object storage.

The most interesting and experimental part of Triplox, are incremental queries (https://triplox.xyz/incremental-queries/overview/). You get the full power of Datalog with incremental query support. Views or other kind of streaming solutions can be built on top of them.

I have also been experimenting with Worst-case optimal joins for the standard engine.

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