Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 1001 posts

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

#41

Post by dataviz1000 »

I'm using TimescaleDB to manage 450GB of stocks and options data from Massive (what used to be polygon.io), and I've been getting LLM agents to iterate over academic research to see if anything works to improve trading with backtesting.

It's an addictive slot machine where I pull the lever and the dials spin as I hope for the sound of a jackpot. 999 out of 1000 winning models do so because of look-ahead bias, which makes them look great but are actually bad models. For example, one didn't convert the time zone from UTC to EST, so five hours of future knowledge got baked into the model. Another used `SELECT DISTINCT`, which chose a value at random during a 0–5 hour window — meaning 0–5 hours of future knowledge got baked in. That one was somehow related to Timescale hypertables.

Now I'm applying the VIX formula to TSLA options trades to see if I can take research papers about trading with VIX and apply them to TSLA.

Whatever the case, I've learned a lot about working with LLM agents and time-series data, and very little about actually trading equities and derivatives.

(I did 100% beat SPY with a train/out-of-sample test, though not by much. I'll likely share it here in a couple weeks. It automates trading on Robinhood, which is pretty cool.)

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

#42

Post by elisiariocouto »

I’ve been working on the last months on Leggen (https://github.com/elisiariocouto/leggen), a self hosted personal banking account management system. It started out as a CLI that syncs your bank account transactions and balances, saves them in a sqlite database and can alert you via Telegram or Discord if a transaction matches a filter. It is now a PWA and uses Enable Banking to connect to the bank accounts (it is free for personal use AFAIK). Started hand-made, it is now mostly vibe coded with supervision.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

#43

Post by mohsen1 »

Wanted to see if AI could figure out how to compress executable binaries better than existing generic tools without me actually knowing much about compression engineering or ELF internals.

The result is an experiment called fesh. It works strictly as a deterministic pre-processor pipeline wrapping LZMA (xz). The AI kept identifying "structural entropy boundaries" and instructed me to extract near-branches, normalize jump tables, rewrite .eh_frame DWARF pointers to absolute image bases, delta-encode ELF .rela structs with ZigZag mappings, and force column transpositions before compressing them in separated LZMA channels.

Surprisingly, it actually works. The CI strictly verifies that compression is perfectly reversible (bit-for-bit identity match) across 103 Alpine Linux x86_64 packages. According to the benchmarks, it consistently produces smaller payloads than xz -9e --x86 (XZ BCJ), ZSTD, and Brotli across the board—averaging around 6% smaller than maximum XZ BCJ limits.

I honestly have no idea how much of this is genuinely novel versus standard practices in extreme binary packing (like Crinkler/UPX).

Repo: https://github.com/mohsen1/fesh

For those who know this stuff:

Does this architecture have any actual merits for standard distribution formats, or is this just overfitting the LZMA dictionary to Alpine's compiler outputs? I'd love to hear from people who actually understand compression math.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

#44

Post by spudlyo »

I'm writing an essay where I get into how I use GNU Emacs along with gptel (a simple LLM client for Emacs) and Google's Gemini-3 family of models to turn a 1970s-vintage text editor into a futuristic language-learning platform to help me study Latin. I want to show how I liberate poorly aligned, pixelated PDF image scans of century-old Latin textbooks from the Internet Archive and transform them into glorious Org mode documents while preserving important typographic details, nicely formatted tables, and some semantic document metadata. I also want to outline how to integrate a local lemmatizer and dictionary to quickly perform Latin-to-English lookups, and how to send whole sentences to Gemini for a detailed morphological and grammatical breakdown.

I also intend to dig into how to integrate Emacs with tools such as yt-dlp and patreon-dl to grab Latin-language audio content from the Internet, transcode the audio with ffmpeg, load it into the LLM's context window, and send it off for transcription. If the essay isn't already too long, I'll demonstrate how to gather forced-alignment data using local models such as wav2vec2-latin so I can play audio snippets of Latin texts directly from a transcription buffer in Emacs. Lastly, I want show how to leverage Gemini to automatically create multimedia flash cards in Org mode using the anki-editor Emacs minor mode for sentence mining.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

#45

Post by mkprc »

Hosting and nicely typesetting some of the essays/speeches of Alfred North Whitehead on education and the role of Universities, now in the public domain. Most are from Project Gutenberg, but I've been manually transcribing a couple others.

https://mkprc.xyz/public-domain/whitehead/

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

#46

Post by ajayvk »

Have been building a project https://github.com/openrundev/openrun/ which aims to make it easy for teams to easily deploy internal tools/webapps. While creating new apps has gotten easier, securely deploying them across teams remains a challenge. OpenRun runs as a proxy which adds SAML/OAuth based auth with RBAC. OpenRun deploys containerized apps to a single machine with Docker or onto Kubernetes.

Currently adding support for exposing Postgres schemas for each app to use. The goal is that with a shared Postgres instance, each app should be able to either get a dedicated schema or get limited/full access to another app's schema, with row level security rules being supported.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

#48

Post by mtejo »

Ive been running with this little ongoing project of making little nintendo ds games with rust.

I put together a pretty basic portal clone. I think its pretty cool to see it come together, animations, level creation, portal jumps.

The basic hardware on the ds makes 3d pretty approachable. Ive found opengl overwhelming in the past. It seems like a fun platform to make games on, but idk if there is any active ds homebrew communities. Anyway sharing because i thought it was cool, hard to find anyone that seems to be to interested. I thought about getting a 3ds but they are surprisingly expensive now

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

#49

Post by theturtletalks »

miguelmichelson wrote: post #5

I'm working on Rauversion https://github.com/rauversion/rauversion , an open platform for independent music communities that combines music publishing, events, and marketplace tools in a single place. Artists can upload tracks, albums, and playlists with metadata, audio processing (waveforms, analysis), and embeddable players with chunk-range loading to save bandwidth. It also includes ticketing for events (QR valida…

Looks really interesting, would you say it’s an opensource Bandcamp alternative?
Post reply on HN