Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2026) (Non AI)
Tell me about your latest non-AI project and I'll check it out I'm building free immigration software for DIY applicants [1] It's a free USCIS form-filling web-app(no Adobe required). USCIS forms still use XFA PDFs, which don’t let you edit in most browsers. Even with Adobe, fields break, and getting the signature is hard. So I converted the PDF form into modern, browser-friendly web forms - and kept every field 1:1 with the original. You fill the form, submit it, and get the official USCIS PDF filled. I found out SimpleCitizen(YC S16) offers a DIY plan for $529 [2] So, a free (and local-only) version might be a good alternative Wow! I'm not in the target audience, but this is exactly what I love to see :-) Thanks for doing this! :) Just finished building a side project that utilizes Android's captive portals, The main idea was an offline space for strangers who would randomly connect to an open wifi network. From there their device would open the captive portal webview in full screen, and from there they can explore the platform. I used a unique modern matrix and polished everything with another project I built which's a deterministic picture generator used to let people interact with something interesting, already using it to produce their default profile picture using their id as the seed. It meant to run on raspberry pi and I already built an img for the first release. https://github.com/remohexa/rematrix-gallery And there's also a demo: https://rematrix.remohexa.com/ I'm glad you got it working as you intended! Thanks! I would really appreciate it if you can give me some feedback about the website visuals. I would recommend dropping the blinking or flashing part of the logo. The website has a retro sort of demo scene (not sure if that is exactly the right term) feel to it, The scan lines over the artwork are cool, but could be distracting at times. The black and green colors attract a specific audience I think, but, I think it's the target market for your website so I would keep the black and green. The fonts work well for me. I found your GitHub which helped me understand your project a bit better. Maybe make some YouTube videos of it too showing your hardware rpi and a phone connecting to it. I actually like your remohexa.com website how it seems to change colors and the dropping emojis and colors are appealing. I did get the fuschia version at first and it was eye-catching I liked it a lot. I got the green version a second time and was like oh what is the dev actively changing it right now. Then I realized keep hitting refresh for different colors. I really appreciate your comments about both websites! You might be right about the blinking logo, but did you feel like the other blinking parts of the website are overwhelming too? I'll definitely either slow it enough and not going all the way down to a brightness of zero or just adding support for disabling each entity animation from the rpi config. I felt like it might be overwhelming but after spending a lot of time on the platform I just couldn't notice any type of animations anymore and I thought it might be not that overwhelming overall. I genuinely don't really know how to make videos that might catch the viewer eye, and overall I don't really have a "good enough" equipment or a place to make videos. But I feel like your suggestion for yt was the missing piece that I didn't think of. Which I'll definitely take into consideration. Thanks for your feedback about remohexa.com too, I'm glad you liked it. The changing colors idea was just a totally random thought while I was making that page, but it might be also a good idea to implement some kind of accent color that changes with each visit (not each refresh) for the real website too. Don't you think? I’m building DataJelly.com — a visibility layer for AI-built and JS-heavy sites. A lot of tools like Lovable and Bolt generate apps that look great but don’t expose content well to search or AI crawlers. The impact is lower search ranking, fewer AI citations, and broken social links. We fix all of that by returning fully rendered HTML to SEO bots and clean Markdown to AI crawlers so they can actually understand the content. We also fix the Social Sharing broken links with custom HTML generated just for sharing your links on social. Quick setup, no code required. Free: visibility test: https://datajelly.com/#visibility-test
Our Edge Product: https://datajelly.com/products/edge Happy to answer questions. This is actually solving a real pain — I'm building on
Lovable too and the SEO situation for vibe-coded apps is
genuinely rough out of the box. Never occurred to me the
issue was at the crawler rendering layer. Going to check
this out, appreciate you building it. I built ProtoWall (https://protowall.app), an auth and NDA wall that sits in front of your prototype. You invite someone by email, they log in via magic link, sign a versioned NDA, and get reverse proxied through to your app. No SDK, no middleware, no code changes on your end. Built it because I was tired of the "just password protect it" workaround when sharing early stage work. Passwords get forwarded, and wiring up auth on something you'll throw away is wasted effort. I wanted a paper trail. Who saw what, when they signed, and a way to revoke access instantly. Free tier gets you 1 project, 5 invites, default NDA template, and a 7 day audit log. I am building Sensonym (https://sensonym.com), a vocabulary learning app that uses phone sensors (gyroscope, camera, mic, accelerometer) to tie physical interactions to words. For example, you tilt your phone like a glass to learn "drink", shake your phone to learn "earthquake", charge it to learn "eat". The idea is that these associations help improve recall. I've just launched it on iOS and Android in Germany with support for 10 languages. Happy to receive any feedback https://www.salaryconfidential.com which allows you to run private small-size peer compensation surveys without leaking identity (anonymous forms aren't that anonymous when you pick up any context. You can get incredibly niche, as long as a survey peer group is at least 4 people. And hopefully, this sets you up to negotiate hard based in real-life evidence, not broad ranges from Glassdoor We use data models and release rules borrowed from k-anonymity techniques, batched releases and privacy pass cryptographic tokens to create super safe surveys, and everyone who participates as an invite peer gains access to the same full-fat report. Our form supports specific benefits extension by geography, an extended equity compensation set of questions for packages where equity is significant; and performance pay questions for groups (like sales, execs) where performance pay is also a significant part of the package Also, we make it easy to explore pay gaps (gender, ethnicity, gender identity, whatever it is) because you can run several peer groups under one poll. no person gets tagged but you do know which respondent was in which peer group - so you can keep context in view (but size needs to be at least 4) but also have a broader view by rolling up results. Knowledge is power, and all that My friend and I are building Rover, a search engine for petabytes of raw logs in Azure: https://roverhq.io/
The core idea is to strip away the "indexing tax" that usually makes large-scale logging so expensive. Instead of moving massive amounts of data to heavy compute nodes, we’ve designed the engine to surgically fetch only the specific bytes needed to answer a query directly from storage. We’ve spent a lot of time squeezing every bit of efficiency out of the hardware. By shifting the heavy lifting from memory-hungry string parsing to hardware-accelerated bitwise math, we can scan 1TB of data in about 1.2s for roughly $0.01. It’s been a fun challenge to see how far we can push the physics of the network and CPU to make searching massive amounts of raw data feel instantaneous. If you’re dealing with similar scaling headaches and want to chat about it, my email is dhruv [at] roverhq.io or you can find more at https://roverhq.io/. I’ve been working on an open-source tool to help visualize JavaScript/TypeScript codebases (React, Next.js, Node.js).
The core idea is building a dependency graph at the function/component level and exploring relationships across the codebase. One feature that turned out to be particularly useful is what I think of as “blast radius”, If you change a function or component, what other parts of the system are affected? This has been especially helpful when thinking about PR reviews, not just what changed, but what the change might impact indirectly. It’s still early, and I am working on the cloud version which will include LLM interface to interact with graph and other team collaboration feature and github connection but I’d really appreciate feedback from others who might find this tool useful, and I invite anyone and everyone to contribute to the open source github repo. Github: https://github.com/devlensio/devlensOSS
Landing page: https://devlens.io/ I'm building a desktop writing app for novelists, built with Tauri 2. I started it because existing writing tools didn't handle Japanese-specific needs well. It's fully local-first no account or internet needed. Building Peerscope - competitive intelligence for B2B SaaS teams who cannot justify Crayon's $1,500/month. The problem: sub-$2M ARR founders track competitors in a Notion doc that is always 3 weeks out of date. Everyone knows it is broken. Nobody fixes it until a deal falls through. Peerscope monitors competitor pricing pages, feature pages, and messaging - sends plain-English alerts when something actually changes. No dashboard to check. No data dumps. Just what you need to act on. Still validating demand before building. Waitlist at https://peerscope-waitlist.pages.dev I have been building on 3 tools lately all opensource-: 1) Etch-Detect API changes automatically using real traffic (no tests required) https://github.com/ojuschugh1/etch 2) GhostDep-Detect phantom and unused dependencies across multiple languages using a fast Rust-based CLI https://github.com/ojuschugh1/ghostdep 3) a local CLI that verifies whether AI coding agents actually did what they claimed VERDURE is still a creative plant-generation sandbox where you grow and sculpt stylized trees. Building a global postal code API (240+ countries). Just shipped per-country landing pages with format references and regex patterns. $0.000028/query with no tiers, sub-5ms. Bootstrapped, solo. I'm building this site to display behavioral therapy data better for parents / caregivers. The site itself is just Next.js but the essence is ETL and data visualizations using the Observable Framework[1]. There is an opportunity to apply AI for Q&A. We're building a repairable, connected and fireproof e-bike battery at https://infinite-battery.com :) I keep on chipping away and curating the HN Arcade :) https://hnarcade.com Check out the newsletter for weekly updates! Still OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com/) - I've been working on adding more and more configurability to the browser checks feature. More recently, I've made it so you can drop your existing playwright test suites into the code editor, and it'll Just Work. A whole bunch more work to do around that, but I think letting folks drop code in makes more sense than continuously updating the UI. gardening, raking leaves, composting things, burning branches and woods, chopping trees, weeding, manuring, and planting flowers. that's the april project I’m working on [Sparkposter](https://sparkposter.com), a small tool that helps people turn quotes, affirmations, and short text into polished shareable images. The main thing I’m trying to improve right now is speed: fewer steps, better defaults, and outputs that don’t feel templated. I'm still working on it. bulk create quote image featrue will coming soon. I've also worked on this. Manage Cloudflare, Anywhere https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cloudflare-remote/id6743181258 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emrekeles.... Something like Windows Task Manager but it also works in Linux, monitors Docker containers, provides logging, and spins up web servers. It’s web servers serve http and web sockets from the same port and includes streaming proxies. I am working on https://spatialsheets.com Think geodata formulas + excel. Mostly for my own use just to quickly debug geodata. Used to heavily use geojson.io for it but it is not very good at handling large datasets and couldn't enrich data so I started working on this thing. I've spent several years developing an ad-free website with a few dozen solitaire/puzzle games: I am currently rewriting+testing the engine and about to add ~400 games to my platform in a few weeks. I'm building this mostly to scratch my own itch https://findsubstack.com A newsfeed for Substack posts from the past 24h. Its helping me discover writers other than just what the algorithm gives me. I'm working on https://suggestionboard.io, a simple live polling and Q&A webapp that doesn't require an account. Just launched the first version and trying to figure out if there's a market. The hardest question to answer honestly. Have you tried
talking to people who run live events or team standups?
That feels like your most obvious early use case — they
already have the pain and no account requirement is a
genuine advantage there. Good luck with it. Thanks for your comment, just saw it. Yes, what you're saying is clearly the right next step, but contacting people out of the blue is so scary. I guess I should force myself to. Nice. Feedback board or feature board are the terms, and there's a plethora of SaaS options, from tiny to large. I recently searched for one, but they were either over budget, required extra user accounts, weren't GDPR compliant, or too complex. In the end, I coded a custom solution for my site. Yours would have fit if I had found it earlier. This is good to hear. If I may ask, what was your use case? Wanted to test another way to capture feedback for a bunch of apps and stuff on the same site. Registered users can add new posts to the feedback board, and all can comment and vote on them. And I can set a status on a post, so they see if something was implemented; simple done state. I liked nolt.io from the design and stuff. But it does too much, and the monthly price didn't fit for a simple test. The others in that league were the same. The indehacker's are mostly not GDPR-compliant and have this doom-laden smell of neglect. I built a zero-backend CDN for hotlinking SVGs. Unlimited bandwidth. I was tired of copying and pasting SVGs over and over again for my projects and social links. So I built that. Tell me if you need any other SVGs. https://ShipmentPlanner.com - optimizing shipments to Amazon and 3PL. Got some clients and now I'm on to marketing (mostly emailing and LinkedIn outreach). It's tough. I am working on Voiden - A markdown based offline API client.
Take a look here : https://voiden.md/ My wife and I continue to work on Uruky, a EU-based Kagi and Google Search alternative [1]. Since last month we finally got our production API Key for EUSP/STAAN (it was certainly the slowest and most complicated search provider to adopt, so far), and that brought us to 5 search providers you can choose from and sort as you prefer. We already have got over 40 paying customers (excluding family and friends, we’re guessing these paying customers came from some privacy listings and HN comments) and have exited beta last month! Customers seem to really enjoy the simple UI (search can be used without JS) and search personalization (from choosing the providers to the domain boosting and exclusion). We also have hashbangs (like "!g", "!d", or “!e”) when something doesn’t quite give you what you’d expect, though. You can see the main differences between Kagi and Uruky in the linked page, but one huge difference is that with Uruky, after being a paying customer for 12 months, you get a copy of the source code! One thing we’re struggling with is outreach because we want to do it ethically, and it’s hard to find communities or places to sponsor which are privacy-focused and don’t require €5k+ deals. Ideas are welcome! Because of bots there isn’t a free trial easily available, but if you’re a human and you’d like to try it for a couple of days for free, reach out with your account number and we’ll set that up! Thanks. P.S.: Because people have asked before, our tech stack is intentionally very "boring" (as in, it generates and serves the HTML + bits of JS to enhance settings and such), using Deno in the backend (for easier TypeScript), PostgreSQL for the DB, and Docker for easier deploying. P.P.S.: Because this has been also brought up before, the name has no special meaning but we read it like "Euro-key" in English. Names are hard, and we’re aware it can remind people of Uruk and Uruk-hai. That’s OK. P.P.P.S.: Another frequent question here is “how does it work?” When you search, we query the first search provider on your list, and if it yields less than X results (only Mojeek really gives us a total count, we have to try + estimate for the others), we try the second, and so on. We then merge the results in a round-robin fashion (first of first, first of second, second of first, second of second, and so on). There’s a bit of more nuanced logic to also properly rank the results with the pin/exclude/raise/lower preferences, because it works differently across providers and not all of them support that, for example. Understand an entire codebase instantly : www.ix-infra.com I've been building something similar to visualize the codebase. https://github.com/devlensio/devlensOSS It's a CLI tool. It plays well with AI but it works great without it. another thread about the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700460 First skills matrix software on the market that actually helps you build a process that supports people growth and allows managers to manage without heavy, and expensive HR tools. Main page: https://matricsy.com and just started working on PL version: https://matryca-kompetencji.pl/ Not me but good friend of mine is building https://onepilotapp.com , genuinely looking for it going live.. me I m testing SEO, unsuccessfuly so far ^^ Mobile first IDE! I would love to use it, it will certainly help me when I am not able to use my laptop. Mhm. Great! Btw. Nice to meet you. So what did you learn in SEO?
I generally don't have much knowledge about it. Litteraly started 2 days ago ahaha, I spent a lot of time building things but never making them visible, so far I got nice results on the news aggregators feeds. I ll not try so hard in it, I still think bringing genuine interest about a topic is a more respectful way of doing I got it. Are you a developer?
Have GitHub? X or something? I just created an X account @elmlabs1 we can catch up!