Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026) • Hacker News Board

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

#941

Post by jamesyun » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 10:10 PM UTC

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #878

jamesyun wrote: post #845

I'm building Orate, a free public speaking app: • Users are given a prompt and have 2 minutes to answer. • Speeches are reviewed by AI and other users. Speaking eloquently "off the dome" is an incredibly useful skill, improving all your interactions with other people. And like a muscle, you can train it with dedicated practice until it becomes effortless. It has been very fulfilling to listen to other people's speech…

Plans for android?

It's in the works! I developed the app in React Native, so should be fairly straightforward. My test android device is coming in the mail this week, an Android version should be out within the next month or so.

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

#942

Post by rpoisel » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 10:11 PM UTC

davidebaldini wrote: post #802

It's my third year on VPS Price Tracker [1], to my knowledge the largest database of VPSs with current prices and accurate specifications. It has a search form with 25 facets. Its usage has grown steadly each month since its launch, currently has 100-150 sessions per day. [1] https://vpspricetracker.com

That's very helpful. Thanks for sharing this!

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

#943

Post by chobbledotcom » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 10:17 PM UTC

I'm a former Bandcamp dev and current anarchist and have made an open source event ticket sales platform called Chobble Tickets which runs on Deno edge script hosts like Bunny CDN so is very affordable and simple to self host ($1/month ish)

There are lots of open source ticket sales options but none fit the criteria of:

- Full copyleft license - No branding requirements - Connect your own domain - Very easy to host

Chobble Tickets addresses those. Chobble, my business, is a Community Interest Company - a legal structure in the UK which obliges me to adhere to a mission statement and comes with an "asset lock" which means the things Chobble owns cannot be sold, except to another CIC. This, plus AGPLv3, means it is impossible for me to "sell out" and enshittify my products. As a former Bandcamper, I'm somewhat sensitive to this.

I'm about six months into development now, hosting about 50 sites (I charge £5 per month for hosting), with a few thousand bookings processed

https://tickets.chobble.com

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

#944

Post by gabosarmiento » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 10:20 PM UTC

spudlyo wrote: post #47

https://fabulae.orbilii.com - A Latin language audiobook containing both volumes of A.D. Godley's "The Fables of Orbilius" which are entertaining intermediate Latin stories written at the turn of the 20th century for use in British schools. The audio itself is in delivered with the restored classical Latin pronunciation and contains spoken nuances like vowel nasalization, elision, and prodelision. I used a wav2vec2 m…

Thank you for sharing this. Great job.

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

#945

Post by jamesyun » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 10:21 PM UTC

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #854

jamesyun wrote: post #845

I'm building Orate, a free public speaking app: • Users are given a prompt and have 2 minutes to answer. • Speeches are reviewed by AI and other users. Speaking eloquently "off the dome" is an incredibly useful skill, improving all your interactions with other people. And like a muscle, you can train it with dedicated practice until it becomes effortless. It has been very fulfilling to listen to other people's speech…

Cool concept. Small feedback on the first user experience flow. I downloaded the app to listen and write constructive notes for people, but I can’t enter the app until I’ve given microphone access and recorded a 30s clip. I’m on the bus, and can’t provide that audio now, and I’ll almost certainly forget about the app before I get 30 free seconds this evening. I think you’ll drop a lot of first time users here.

Feedback noted! (rly appreciate it btw)

You can just record a short dummy audio to get through the onboarding flow.

Microphone access is pretty central to the app. Even feedback to other speeches is given via audio (no text feedback). Though reading this makes me understand users may want to just listen and write text feedback. Especially if they're warming up to become speakers themselves.

I definitely don't want microphone access to block you from listening to others. Will be updating this. Thanks!

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

#946

Post by basetensucks » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 10:29 PM UTC

I've been working on `ankix` (https://github.com/joshgummersall/ankix), a CLI tool to turn YouTube/podcast transcripts, Kindle highlights, and other text into "glossed" (read: contextually translated) Anki cards using a local `ollama` model.

I've also been working on `summond` (https://github.com/joshgummersall/summond), a developer/agent friendly way to interact with OSX Launch Control. It aims to support all relevant Launch Control triggers using a nice `toml` config format, dynamic environment control, logs, and more. I've found it super useful and it's dotfile friendly.

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

#947

Post by jamesyun » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 10:30 PM UTC

andy_ppp wrote: post #847

jamesyun wrote: post #845

I'm building Orate, a free public speaking app: • Users are given a prompt and have 2 minutes to answer. • Speeches are reviewed by AI and other users. Speaking eloquently "off the dome" is an incredibly useful skill, improving all your interactions with other people. And like a muscle, you can train it with dedicated practice until it becomes effortless. It has been very fulfilling to listen to other people's speech…

You could “Pokémon Go” this and allow people to find performances they find interesting on a random street corner anywhere! Great idea!

Hmm interesting idea, although not sure if my users would want to share their location with strangers. It's more designed to be a thing you do at home or on a walk (my favorite) to keep your communication skills sharp.

Part of the beauty of the app is that it's pseudo-anonymous. Nobody knows it's you (unless they can recognize your voice). I think that helps relieve some of the pressure with public speaking.

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

#948

Post by Klsimek » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 10:31 PM UTC

I’m building a service for capturing, viewing, and sharing 3D spatial data. It currently supports ARKit and Apple LiDAR, enabling users to perform room scans within seconds and allows real-time streaming of 3D video, all viewable on the web using WebRTC and WebGPU.

The plan is to enable any tracked camera to relocalize against the same coordinate frame and share spatially-anchored data with one another, enabling across-ecosystem interoperation of spatial computing systems.

For example, a human with an iPhone can scan their home and use that map to guide their domestic robot (clean _this_ room). Data from iOT sensors can be viewed in a 3D map in their real location. Or someone in an AR headset can view yesterday’s surveillance footage in the same room where the footage took place. Android and iPhone users can share the same AR experience, and a remote viewer can observe and guide them from a birds-eye view, all from their phone’s web browser.

My problem: I’m a software guy (former Apple ARKit/Vision Pro computer vision engineer) and I’m struggling to navigate the business side of things. I’m looking for a business-savvy cofounder to help find the market and then seek funding.

If it sounds interesting, reach out and I’ll share a demo!

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

#949

Post by zopf » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 10:35 PM UTC

Options market-making. I trained a custom volatility model on historical data, built a passive delta hedge MM, render a synthetic underlying price from many market data sources, and a number of other interesting elements. It has been really fun to get back to my trading systems roots after 12 years as a startup CTO selling to enterprise clients and managing teams and managers. Now I just manage a bunch of Fable and Opus claude code sessions and a handful of high-performance servers. Opus makes a lot of ignorant mistakes and then explains them in great detail, but if I spend lots of time in Plan mode and then bash my head against the wall enough, we get there. Fable mostly gets it right and communicates effectively; what a relief! Still need to give Astra a try. I still feel ahead of the models on context, but am getting outpaced in many other ways. It's a very fun collaboration!

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

#950

Post by tniemi » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 10:50 PM UTC

nacnud wrote: post #840

tniemi wrote: post #149

Me and my wife (then my girlfriend) have written "realistic" space sci-fi in Finnish for over 20 years. Now with AI we are finally able to translate our stories to English. The quality starts to be there. There are a lot of small languages in the world, and translation used to be extremely expensive. And there is never too much good space sci-fi. (We don't write space battles or wars. Our style is slower and bit more…

Have you published any of these stories online? I'd love to read some!

Things are kind of under construction... We would like to publish our stories in book-on-demand format.

This is one of our early translation tests. I publish it here for a while for you: https://media.nimbus.fi/tero/for_hackernews/sleeping_childre... Please don't expect it to stay there forever.

It has the same heroine that is in our debut book: https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimbus_ja_t%C3%A4hdet Every short story has the same main characters visiting an another star and an another world.

Here's some of the local space that I generated from Gliese/Hipparcos dataset some 20 years ago. I'm trying to port our original LightWave starmaps to Blender: https://media.nimbus.fi/tero/nimbus/local_space.png

We should probably write a blog (blag) post about the hurdles of translating from a small (and not so well supported language) to English. Luckily my wife is way better in English than I am.