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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)

#2

Post by PopFlamingo »

I’m building a website for discovering first names that’s enjoyable to explore: https://abracadanames.com

It started with a family member telling me they were frustrated with existing websites. What I noticed is that in many cases they feel cluttered and not smooth to use, almost like a 1-to-1 translation of the underlying database queries, where they have you choose filters and sorting options upfront then browse the paginated results.

I wanted to avoid all of that by creating a different experience; I built an interactive full-screen wall UI with infinite browsing so that most of the screen space is dedicated to the core content. I worked on the name sampling algorithm to try to make it as enjoyable to browse as I could, and the only filter displayed by default is the one to select genders.

More advanced queries are available through the search field which supports natural language queries, running on a local multilingual interpretation engine with a cloud LLM fallback. The database engine is custom built with Rust, compiled to WASM for higher performance when running on CloudFlare Workers. I don’t use an external DB service for names today.

What I’m pretty proud of is to know a lot of technical work is hidden behind that UI, and how it has been shaped by the experience I wanted instead of the other way around.

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

#3

Post by MomohNobert »

I've been working on https://pronto.stream/, I wanted to mess around with MCP and building a world news system to power the decision making and surveillance of other systems I would likely curate.

I was curious about formats more efficient for agent communication than JSON and also proving if the framework I curated could handle the load and traffic.

It's been really fun to observe.

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

#9

Post by piazz »

I’ve been hacking on a single Anki extension for… the last three years now:

https://smart-notes.xyz

The idea is to make an extension that allows you to flexibly fill out fields on your cards with AI generated text, speech, and images. Think generating example sentences for your entire deck, or adding furigana to kanji (small phonetic characters with a very delicate syntax). It works just as well for language learners as it does for medical students, etc.

The secondary goal has been to make this the most well designed, intuitive, and stable Anki extension in the world. I don’t think it’s there yet, but it’s on its way. It’s been very interesting to try to work out a design that affords the flexibility to generate anything for whatever you’re studying but remains approachable and discoverable to your marginal Anki user, many of whom are younger and have varying levels of English ability. Many interesting technical challenges as well.

Slowly building towards the Show HN post, but need a few more features. Connecting with and chatting with dedicated users in countries around the world over the last few years has made this the most gratifying thing I’ve ever built! It’s still at the scale that receiving support emails is fun and I can build relationships with power users and long term subscribers.

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