Ask HN: What Are You Working On?

A simple “what are you working on?” post somehow turned into a full-on show-and-tell battle for the internet’s most charming side project. The original poster kicked things off with a delightfully nerdy homemade analog computer: little plug-in circuit boards, lots of wires, and an old-school science-lab vibe, except with an ESP32 chip and LCD screen doing the job of bulky meters. Translation for normal people: it’s a DIY machine for experimenting with math and physical signals, and yes, the demo even simulates predator-versus-prey population swings like a tiny digital terrarium gone academic. The mood? Equal parts impressed, curious, and “wait, you built what?”

But the real fun is in the replies, where the community instantly revealed its personality: practical builders, productivity obsessives, and playful weirdos all fighting for main-character energy. One person is replacing a crusty Microsoft Access office tool with a handwritten local web app — a comment with huge “I alone must save this workplace” energy. Another calmly drops Organizer, an open-source personal organizer that also works as a photo album and private journal, with the understated flex of “it is complete and does what I wanted it to.” That line practically screams hacker mic drop.

Then came the modern office drama: Prism, built to survive notification overload from code reviews, with a side quest to make giant AI-written pull requests less painful. If there was a hot-button topic here, that was it: the quiet dread of machines creating giant piles of work for humans to review. And for comic relief? Motion-controlled web games using your webcam “in the vein of eye toys for ps2” and a stone-simple notes app that’s been worked on for four years. In other words, the thread became a beautiful mess of ambition, burnout, nostalgia, and low-key bragging — the exact energy the internet was built for.