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

My grandmother and I have always played word games. In the last three years she has lost most of her memory, and one by one the games stopped working.

Crosswords needs old words, and they don't come. Trivia wants old answers. Sudoku needs her to hold numbers in her head while she checks them, and that's gone too. She really tries hard, but I just can't see her trying so hard and not able to do it.

What she still does, all day, is talk in half sentences. Only the needed words. She will read something and tell me in a few words.

At some point I realised that's what newspaper editors do. They cut a sentence down to the few words that still carry the story and call it a headline. She's been doing it without trying.

So I made that the game. A short sentence about something small and good that really happened, like a pizzeria that got eighteen prank pizzas and drove them to the ER. You cross out words until five are left, and the five have to still hold the story.

Nothing to remember: every word stays on the screen the whole time, she only has to choose. We play side by side. I read the sentence out loud, she points at what stays.

Every day it's an uplifting news article.

If anyone wants to try - https://sheets.works/long-story-short