I’ve been working on a synthetic DNA assembly company. Basically, I figured out how to assemble DNA for people at a fraction of what it normally costs, so they give me a sequence, and then I make it in real life for them, then ship it to them.
Most of my customers have been AI protein designers, ironically. Turns out SOMEBODY has to wrangle atoms in the real biological world and that’s me!
After almost a year of work I finally smoothed out all the kinks in the process, so can now go from a design to synthetic DNA in a cell in about a week (not counting oligo pool synthesis time). I can do about 600,000bp per week, which is large enough to synthesize the smallest bacterial genome (each week), tho I only do about 1000bp fragments. I’m also completely bootstrapped and self funded, and only get help from my several opentrons robots
I once met a freelance bespoke industrial adhesive maker. He takes orders from various factories for adhesives with specific properties, then uses his knowledge of chemistry + trial & error to make one that fits the specs provided.
A bespoke freelance industrial adhesive maker sounds like such a niche job, that's awesome. I would love to see a hackernews-type post with details of how he thinks about making a specific adhesive.
I can share a few things! (but definitely not all)
- One is finding different T7 RNA polymerases with unique properties by manipulating the backbone. They can be used for things like in-vitro RNA production for vaccines
- Another is synthesizing a phage that has been sequenced for a specific organism, but that the samples are now lost of. So resynthesizing that genome from scratch
- A different project (personal one) is building a DNA parts toolkit with standardized DNA parts so you can combine em together like legos. Pretty much nowhere but FreeGenes has open source genetic parts (I used to run that project), and I think open source genetic parts need to be in the world
I sometimes derive protocols from off-shelf ones, but pretty much everything beyond that is in-house. Most off-shelf protocols work for 1 sample in 1 tube - I had to adapt them to working on 1 plate of 384 tubes (and get those to work with robots). There is a significant amount of robotic code that I use, and a few custom protocols that are from a random obscure scientific paper in 1980s or 1990s
Synthetic DNA for data storage seems much higher to degradation (ie, heat, light, or other sources of radiation). Not sure if I would use syn DNA to for anything long term.
The oldest sequenced DNA is 1.6 million years old. In the right conditions, it lasts far longer than pretty much any storage method right now. Plus I also sometimes store things in Bacillus subtilis, which is very hardy https://keonigandall.com/posts/sporenet.html
You are asking for a counterexample
but I think s/he was asking for what assurances the software can provide. Is it proven to be perfect, bug free in both specification and the physical analysis?
Remember compared to you assume we
are all laymen.
It would be interesting for us on the armchairs how such software even works. Is it like (ahem!) antivirus software looking for patterns?
The reasons I ask for a counter example is because the number of “what ifs” are pretty much unlimited and easy to come up with, whereas I have to do a lot more thinking to answer them. It’s asymmetric and gets tiring
Answer is: no, not proven to be perfect. Most source is closed for the software. There is no specification. Never been a red team trying to break it. Unknown if it’s ever stopped any threats. There is no requirement to do it, and it’s all voluntary (though pretty much all synthesis providers do it). Mostly they just hash kmers and translations thereof and scan a pathogens/functional database. So implementable in a simple KV store for the most part. The bigger problem is false positives, and most work is done in de-shittifying the upstream pathogens data.
Last I checked all the groups charged a lot of money for access, unfortunately, and I’m not really big enough to join a group like the International Gene Synthesis Consortium :(
That's how Twist/Agilent do oligo pool synthesis (and Dynegene now). I'm pretty interested in the Genscript / Avery digital method of electrochemical synthesis. Turns out those pools ain't good enough to be used in a biological context, which is where I come in - I can assemble them well into sequence perfect stuff
I found a virology textbook at the local Catholic book fair when I was in 6th grade, got hooked, teacher in 7th grade let me order GFP transformation kits to the school that I could do at home, then off to the races from there. I was in this article if you're interested in more deets: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/science/biohackers-gene-e...
That's awesome. I also got hit hard by the science bug (pun intended) as a kid, which I can partly attribute to finding a random virology textbook in an academic bookstore dollar bin. I was obsessed with virology at least until college. I ended up majoring in math in college but made it through Ochem II and did some lab internships before committing to that path. Now I'm a ML/software engineer with a healthy interest in biochem.
Cool! Though it's a bit scary how easy it would be for someone to make something dangerous as mentioned in the nyt article. The 2018 article ends:
>“There are really only two things that could wipe 30 million people off of the planet: a nuclear weapon, or a biological one,” ....
>“Somehow, the U.S. government fears and prepares for the former, but not remotely for the latter. It baffles me.”
I guess we may have seen that kind of thing happen a year later with covid though that would have been government sponsored mucking around rather than DIY if it wasn't natural. Not sure how we stop that happening again?
Personally, I think the threat from the biologics itself is a little overstated. If COVID was released from a lab (I think it was natural), it was most likely due to bad governance and management of the lab. For DIY things - most DNA can be screened. I have had companies offer screening services for about 50k-100k a year. I can't afford that! So hopefully a free service or something near to that comes online.
I never went to university or anything, but did work for 4 years at UCI in directed evolution / mitochondrial engineering, then 3 years at Stanford on the FreeGenes project (got invited to work at both). Barely passed high school cause I didn't care about my classes there.
The key is doing that at an industrial scale, reproducibly, with hundreds to thousands of plasmids at once. Becomes less simple. You encounter bullshit problems with biology, which I guess is valuable because it makes a moat!
This is a great app, especially in this age of AI code generation, I am already using it. Looking forward for features such as light mode and exportability among other things.
This seems like a cool idea but I'd have to see it in action for something I need to learn.
The first thing that jumps to mind is that I want to click on a piece of code and see the explanation for it. It seems that it only goes in the other direction. I could imagine looking at the code and understanding most of it and just wanting to understand part of it.
I could anticipate an issue though - it could be many-to-one from explanation to code. The UI for that would be complicated.
If you’ve not seen it, there’s a vscode extension called CodeTour that does something similar, could be good inspiration (or maybe you already do better!)
I actually have several potential improvement ideas.
1. Put the walkthrough it in a graph, or a minimap to see the whole picture easily? Or in a https://c4model.com/ visualization
2. Why not make clickable code references visually stand out?
3. Make a VScode extension for it
This is awesome!! I can see a major use case for enterprise or government but along with that would come the desire for on-prem. Any chances of that happening?
I'd be happy to build and support an on-prem solution, but I'd a need commitment from an enterprise/government org. If that's something you're interested in, shoot me an email at alex@annotate.dev!
This is a really clever idea, and worked great on mobile as well. Is there a way to choose to display the code window underneath the documentation instead of on top?
I think I'd also like an option for the code window to be at the bottom. Generally when I'm reading blogs/articles on my phone I put the line of text I'm reading at the top of my screen.
The code being up the top felt like it was in the way of where I was naturally expecting the line I wanted to read was.
Also, I think this is great! Definitely something I'd want for my documentation.
You know how sometimes the gift you really want is cash or a gift card, but people often prefer to give you physical gifts that you can open and admire?
Imagine a line of faux jewelry that is marked up to real-jewelry prices and that, unbeknownst to the gift giver, comes with a hidden gift card code. So somebody asks you what you'd like for your birthday and you say, "Oh, I'd really like some Lagniappe brand jewelry," and they go out and buy you a $50 necklace that's actually worth only a buck or two, but has a gift card code worth $45 on the underside of the box.
You thank them profusely for the lovely necklace, they feel good for having bought you something besides a gift card, and you feel good that you can put $45 toward a new washing machine.
This is such a first world problem. It's normalized in many 3rd world countries to give and receive cash (red envelopes). Directly not giving money and resorting to gift cards (and roundabout methods like these) just, doesn't make sense to my third world brain is all I'm saying.
Many, meaning, not all. It's obviously a cultural thing. That red envelope idea is ancient.
China and Vietnam that do the red envelope bit would be "second world" countries, incidentally, as they were part of the communist block under that old "three worlds" labeling.
> China and Vietnam that do the red envelope bit would be "second world" countries, incidentally, as they were part of the communist block under that old "three worlds" labeling.
Although China played both sides & its support is one of the larger factors for why the US won the cold war.
Red Envelopes are more of a formality where you more or less receive as much as you give out. People in Asia still do "first world" presents in Christmas or Birthdays or etc.
This sounds very useful, but isn't this service going to automatically fail as soon as it starts to be known because you can't market it to the intended audience (the gift-receivers) without marketing at the same time to the adversarial audience (the gift-givers)?
I love the thought! Just a friendly warning - gift cards attract the fraud industry. This could result in a wide array of undesirable effects. Make sure you or someone on your team or someone you can call up and consult with knows the industry of gift card fraud really well. This will be very helpful in early planning and feasibility studies.
Wouldn't it be simpler to sell $20-30 dollar jewelry for 50$ with explicit promise that this jewelry is very easy to return in exchange for the 50$ gift card? You could add RFC chips to them so people couldn't return counterfeits. Epoxy resin is good at covering chips.
It would solve the problem of littering your house with cheap products, save the buyer the embarrassment of gifting something that looks like 2$ jewelry (it is noticeable when it is that cheap), and it makes easier for people to pretend that they actually want that necklace for the necklace and not for the gift card.
This is so incredibly narcissistic and mercantile. Being a grown up means you understand that you're not owed any gifts and that when somebody makes you a gift it is mainly for their pleasure and something to be grateful for, that they thought of you.
These kind of people who think receiving gifts is some kind of entitlement are the same kind of people who start bringing up their diets when you invite them for dinner. Cold, calculating, reptilian. No human emotion or joy of life.
Wait, hang on, not wanting to be served poison for dinner is a cold calculating reptilian thing to do? What else do these reptilians do? Run the government?
What these reptilians do is only think about themselves.
If you're invited for dinner it doesn't mean that somebody owes you a meal. It means somebody wanted to make a nice gesture towards you and get to know you more intimately, perhaps to discuss important things.
You eat something before you go, because it's not about the food. You can ask about the ingredients when you are at the table.
Exactly. Because being invited for dinner is not about stuffing your belly for free, it is a social meeting with more important matters. So if you have an allergy or a diet, you can mention that when you're seated. The host can make something that suits you, and if they aren't able, you can just have the drinks. That's why you eat before going out to dinner, so you don't have to worry about your belly. And it is also very convenient in case if the cooking is just bad.
I've noticed that these kind of social rules and politeness has been increasingly lost in people, and it is because of widespread narcissism. It's "me, me, me". The result is that people don't invite each other to dinners or other social gatherings, and everybody is worse off because of that.
> So if you have an allergy or a diet, you can mention that when you're seated. The host can make something that suits you, and if they aren't able, you can just have the drinks.
If I invited someone over for dinner and went through the effort to prepare a nice meal for them, and they waited until they were seated at the table to tell me that the food I've just put on their plate is something they can't eat or they will go into anaphylaxis, I would be pretty ticked off. "Oh, don't worry, I ate ahead of time" would make me feel even more ticked off, because I wouldn't have gone through the effort and expense of preparing a nice meal just to have a bunch of uneaten food sitting on the table while we have a social meeting.
The purpose of giving the host a heads up about food allergies is to avoid the host putting effort into preparing a meal that the guest can't eat. How is it a better outcome for the guest to remain unfed, food to go to waste, and the host to have this information sprung on them at the last moment?
You're saying that this kind of gentle heads up is an indication of narcissism, but I think it's exactly the opposite. It's a way of helping to ensure that things go according to plan.
Then the problem is with you. Like I've repeated, it is not about the food, it's about the company. You're thinking about your effort and your expenses, but inviting somebody for dinner is a nice gesture. What if you burnt the food by mistake while stressing about in the kitchen? Should the guest have a right to be mad because they're not getting their delicious meal? Of course not (and I hope I didn't need to state this). So why should you be ticked off if somebody does not eat at a dinner? Exception if you are only two people, and it's really about the food. But then I'd expect you to combine things ahead.
> "Oh, don't worry, I ate ahead of time"
That's not something you tell and not something you ask.
> How is it a better outcome for the guest to remain unfed, food to go to waste, and the host to have this information sprung on them at the last moment?
Because it's not about the food. You eat the leftovers for lunch the next day. You have something at home that you can make the guests if they're really hungry and can't eat the main meal.
If you're invited for dinner it's not about you or your aching belly. It is about having a more intimate meeting with other people. So don't bother them about your diet unless they ask, and don't go on an empty belly. The guests are not there to get "fed", inviting somebody for dinner is an excuse to have a nice time in a relaxed environment with people you like or want to know better.
I cannot count the times someone felt the need to bend over backwards to accommodate me because of something I didn’t want to do/eat/drink/whatever when I‘d been perfectly fine without any special treatment and moving on with whatever we were doing.
Plausible deniability can often short-circuit bullshit rituals. White lies are social lubricant. Come on, this isn't very advanced grass-touching here. I don't know if it will work, but I like the idea and admire the attempt.
Is it? It just seems wasteful and unnecessery. Even gifts cards are pretty stupid for anyone that has access to a credit card. It’s strictly worse than having the actual cash for all but the unbanked (including kids).
I've been working on a social link sharing site called lynmki that allows you to follow a subset of someone's interests rather than having to follow everything they post. E.g. Someone posts lovely examples of typography, and also about events on in their city but you live halfway across the globe so just want the typography.
I'm focussing on smaller circles, avoiding "algorithmic" feeds (aware sorting by reverse chronological order is an algorithm), and no advertising.
It borrows a lot from the greats like HN, Delicious, etc. and there's a long way to go (I just added likes last week) but people are already finding some nice links from it!
You can see it at https://lynkmi.com/ and I'd recommend reading the about page for even more. If it sounds interesting to you please sign up to the waitlist—it's very short!
Delicious had the feeds for every tag, I think. It's been a long time, hah. They're definitely nice to have! I have something similar with my HN searches. Although HN doesn't have tags, HNRSS makes it so you can do this.
I've been building algorithmic trading models for the last 4+ years. After trading them successfully with my own capital for more than a year, I launched https://grizzlybulls.com as an alternative to the traditional hedge fund monetization path.
Since launching in January 2022, we've significantly outperformed the market with lower volatility and reduced max drawdown:
Model - Return - Max drawdown
S&P 500 (benchmark): +9.91% -27.56%
Platinum: +45.34% -16.48%
Gold: +39.53% -19.12%
Silver: +17.24% -22.96%
Bronze: +14.12% -23.93%
Vix Basic: +9.81% -24.23%
TA - Mean Reversion: +17.77% -19.92%
TA - Trend: +17.29% -24.98%
This is an unleveraged, apples to apples comparison. These are not high frequency trading models. Most of them only make a trade every 2-4 weeks on average. During long signals, the models are simply long the S&P 500 and during short signals, they go to cash. This can be implemented very tax efficiently by holding a core ETF long position that never gets sold and then selling S&P 500 futures (ES or MES) of equal value to the ETFs against the long position. This way your account will accumulate unrealized capital gains indefinitely and you'll only pay tax on the net result of successful hedging. The cherry on top is that the S&P 500 futures are section 1256 contracts that are taxed at 60% long term / 40% short term capital gains rates regardless of the duration they are held.
The models use a variety of indicators, many of them custom built. Most important are various VIX metrics (absolute level, VIX futures curve shape/slope, divergences against S&P 500 price, etc), trend-following TA metrics (MACD, EMV, etc), mean-reversion TA metrics (Bollinger Bands, CMO, etc), macroeconomic (unemployment, housing starts, leading composite), and monetary policy (yield curve inversion, equity risk premium, dot plot, etc). They've been backtested very cautiously to avoid overfitting.
1. Love the name, not enough Pyrrhonists on hacker news these days! The OG.
2. Love the website, your design skills are killer. I hate that entire industry and even still my monkey brain went "oo I want to see the Euphoria index, sign up!"
3. This is kinda quintissential AI. Not to distract this thread from the valuable topic of non-trendy projects, but this is a great example of why we need to reclaim "AI" as a much more general term. I mean "algorithmic trading" could be a synonym for "human-like problem solving"...
Congrats on your success to date. I spent quite a bit of time putting together a trend system based on breakouts in futures markets. The system itself was nothing overly special. I purchased a few decades worth of futures data, created and backtested the system with Tradingblox.
The biggest problem was that the system really needed a minimum account of $1m USD so that each position wasnt too large and to get the diversification across different futures markets.
Good algorithms make the market more efficient, and this remark of yours about the future being unpredictable probably isn’t as great of a display of wittiness as you imagined.
This is nice to hear about. Can you tell me more about how your live results matched or diverged from your backtesting?
Did you list the returns of the commodities as a comparison, or are you trading those futures as well in the mix? (I know you only talked about ES/MES)
I've studied many systems over the years and never found any that matched or outperformed their backtests. So far our live results have hit between 1/4 and 3/4 of backtest performance depending on the model. Needless to say the high inflation and high interest rate market climate over the last two years hasn't been seen in the rest of the backtest period, but conditions are starting to normalize now.
Nevertheless, it would be prudent to expect any algorithmic trading model to underperform its backtest going forward, but there's enough leeway in the CAGR and max drawdown figures to underperform the backtest and still produce substantial alpha, especially for the more advanced models.
Right now the models are specialized to trade equities. I may develop new models that trade commodities in the future though.
To implement the strategy in the most tax efficient manner without leverage you would want to have an account worth 5 * (S&P 500 futures price). Today that would be about $26,375. MES uses a multiple of 5 while ES uses a multiple of 10.
However, with today's $0 commissions, if you aren't overly concerned about taxes, you can try out this strategy with as little as $500 and simply buy and sell one share of the ETF VOO on signal changes. Alternatively, if you have the risk appetite, you can get started with trading MES futures with less than $10k, though caution should always be warranted when using any amount of leverage.
A place to connect the books you want to read with friends who already own them, and vice-versa. Imagine a distributed library composed of your friends’ books.
Encouraging sharing with friends and starting conversations about topics you might never have considered having not known they were into the same books as you.
Very rough draft but it has the core functionality, even if it’s a bit cumbersome.
As an adult, many of the books one buys is to keep them. There's even that saying "He who lends a book is an ..."; working against you. In contrast, most of your children books you get rid of them, garage sale, give them away, whatever. Save for a few of them that become special, most are pretty much disposable.
As an adult, buying books is not a pressing situation, sure there's a lot of those you'd want to buy but you can easily put that for later, even forget about it. Take a kid into a bookstore and they want all the books, and they want them at that moment. So, it is more of a pressing issue to keep your kids busy with new books all the time.
PS: If you need a partner on this, I'd be up for it! My daughter is past the stage of kid books now but I wouldn't mind building it for the benefit of other kids.
love the idea! I would have registered if it weren't using passkey. is there a reason you chose this for user verification? I've never used it and am hesitant to adopt technologies that give chrome more control over the browser market
Many password managers have passkey support, I'm using the free version of Bitwarden and can recommend it. Windows Hello can also be used, and afaik Apple Keychain too.
I chose it because I wanted to learn more about passkeys and I liked the idea that I wouldn’t have to deal with private credentials themselves; just save a public key to my database. I use both KeePassXC and Bitwarden and they’re slowly getting support for passkeys (currently only on desktop).
I briefly had the ability to add a new passkey to the same account but wanted to keep it simple for my friends and not confuse them more. If that’s something that could help I’d be open to adding it in again.
I’m building a crawler for remote job postings. As well as a daily email that emails the latest remote jobs found in the past 24 hours to people who sign up: https://bloomberry.com/remote-jobs/
So far, there’s more than 1500 subscribers after a month and a half
Also, I thoroughly enjoyed your article -- How AI is disrupting the demand for software engineers: data from 20M job postings (https://bloomberry.com/how-ai-is-disrupting-the-tech-job-mar...). I've subscribed to your newsletter as well. Keep up the great work!
I had a similar idea of scraping lever, greenhouse and linkedin to get informed of absolute latest senior software engineer jobs. I also wanted to correlate to past job posts to rule out duplicates/reposts, and to analyze against what I am looking for. Some jobs rule out certain states and timezones. Other jobs are primarily java which is my only hard-no.
Would be cool if you could add user-specific filters somehow (via email?), since, looking at the previews it seems largely US-specific. I’d like to see EU/global remote jobs.
I've been working on a local-first personal finance/expense tracker called Tender: https://tender.run
Tender runs as a PWA and uses the Automerge crdt and sqlite via wasm. The app more or less runs entirely in your browser (works offline!), though our server proxies connections to pull in plaid/splitwise data.
Feature-wise, we're targeting folks who do want to manage their expenses but not have to do fine-grained budgeting. There's tools for tracking getting paid back and a splitwise integration as well. The app is desktop-centric right now, but we're working on getting a good mobile workflow together too.
Since everything is browser-based, it was actually quite easy to get a demo sandbox environment working. You can give it a quick spin here: https://demo.tender.run
Hey, so you may not be targeting this particular market but it is adjacent and something I would pay $5-10 a month for. Have you considered expanding this eventually into a Empower (formerly Personal Capital) competitor?
What I mainly use from them is:
- investment performance tracking across my various accounts.
- retirement planning/forecasting
- cash flow, expense, and income tracking overtime.
- warnings about upcoming credit card bills; amount is never right but I pay my statement in full so just a little thing saying “Hey this is going to hit your account on this date” is helpful for me.
- basic budgeting
Anyway a local first privacy respecting alternative I would definitely pay for. iPad support would be a must for me.
Just some unsolicited feedback. Best of luck
EDIT: forgot to mention the reason I am looking for alternatives. Empower bought Personal Capital and are getting much more aggressive in pushing their management services.
So, I figure it is only a matter of time before they either start selling my data or cut me off since I am not interested in anything they are selling. They have really nice iOS apps though.
Hah - I too am a former personal capital (and mint) user.
We've thought about if we want to tackle those features and become an all-encompassing personal finance, but it certainly is a wide feature set to cover for our team. Right now we're focused on polishing our small feature set, though I appreciate the feedback.
The 1-liner description reminded me of https://actualbudget.com/, which I think is mostly defunct now since the main author took a day job (looked very cool at the time but I never tried it unfortunately). Open source too.
It's definitely something I need. I don't need anything really complicated. I've actually been looking for a service like this for a while. Tried Mint once, but thought it was just a bit too much.
I am productionizing a golang project which I have working ... it parses an input image at the pixel level to synthesize its audio equivalent ... inspired by a 3Blue1Brown video on Hilbert Curves ... as it traverses the entire image pixel by pixel it assigns to each pixel an audio frequency which it increments for next pixel ... in doing so it collapses the 2D image into a 1D line of pixels ... then it engages audio oscillators at each element of this line at the assigned frequency with volume determined by the light intensity of the respective source pixel ... it then aggregates all these audio tones into a single tone which represents the source input image ( inverse Fourier Transform ) ... entire process above is reversible so the system can go from image to audio as well as audio to image ... goal is to allow Blind people to see with their ears ... alternatively it can allow the Deaf to hear with their eyes ...
Long-term (decades), no-subscription archival storage. Essentially, you buy a block of space, upload your data over time, and it gets distributed when you need it (if you lost a primary backup), or on your death (to friends and relatives, or whoever you choose), or on a specific future date.
It's a mashup of a safety deposit box, time capsule, and deadman switch.
It's not ready yet, but will be ready in a few weeks. If you're interested, I would really like to talk to you. My email is ethan@ethanmye.rs
FWIW, I did use chatgpt to write a lot of boilerplate JS and fix my bootstrap templates!
I worked on this in 2018/19. It's a really hard problem, and the only people I've found doing it at scale is a small Norwegian company called https://piql.no. They encode large files into film and store it in the Arctic World Archive - and they did GitHub's Arctic Code Vault.
DNA storage is interesting, though can be damaged by radiation. Would love to see where you land with this project - it's one of the few cases where crypto may actually be the only real digital solution.
I think boring, standard solutions are actually pretty effective. We use commercial cloud cold storage for primary backup, with a self-hosted cache layer in front to drive down cost. Commercial off-the-shelf storage is also the best characterized and has a proven track record.
NIST has some great reviews of the stability of optical media, and it’s quite good, done for the library of Congress.
DNA storage would enable some pretty crazy storage density, but ensuring there’s a compatible reader around in 30 years might be difficult
How are your clients sure that your storage lasts decades and doesn't end if you lose interest / fail / sell to another company? (They can't, of course, so: how do you convince them?)
It's a good question. A lot of it centers around creating good corporate governance and a reason for either me (or someone else) to stay interested (careful incentive design). This is obviously antithetical to the typical scale-up strategy of a tech company, and the financials are very similar to an insurance company. It's also why there is no free plan in the pricing.
In terms of convincing, for the technically-minded, I have a public disaster recovery plan, a public business continuity plan, and "escape hatches" for "common" events -- war, subpoenas, changes in law, a post-RSA future, etc. The goal is to cover as many events as possible, including the very improbable (like AWS losing a whole AZ!). The backing clouds are Microsoft Files and AWS S3, both with excellent track records and absurdly good durability. There is some special caching in front to minimize cost.
For the less technically-minded, there are no good alternatives. Self-hosted data is difficult to geographically distribute (and if you do it's difficult to update true cold storage). Cloud services have a very high lifetime cost, and unclear rules around data distribution to next of kin. Other methods, like burying some vacuum sealed MDISCs in a freezer, are not realistic.
I am of the opinion that while it is impossible to predict the future, it is possible to plan for it.
How it compares to the more established forever.com? I have an account but dont like that they dont accept zip/encrypted files. I have to diguise them as video files :)
It seems like they mostly focus on digitization, with some cloud storage being offered. A few key differences:
Data distribution: one of the hard parts is actually sharing the memories you’ve saved when you die (or at some future date). When you create an archive, you choose someone to give that data to.
Storage: no restrictions of what you upload, subject to US law. If you want to upload big encrypted blobs and give the key to someone else, I am happy to support it. Over the timespans we’re talking about, you want to look into quantum resistant encryption.
Cost: on a per gb price, I am much cheaper, as there’s no digitization labor involved. I think digitization is declining, as even my grandma kept most of her pictures on her iPhone. There still exists a great digitization market, but it is getting smaller.
My own photogrammetry pipeline because I'm fascinated by the tech (automatically create 3d models from photos). There are also a huge number of commercial applications but I haven't addressed one well enough yet.
So far I've built a first pass of the pipeline using C++/CUDA and used it to power a SaaS and desktop photogrammetry app (free for personal non-commercial use). Got some useful feedback from the initial release of the desktop app back in January and I'm hoping to spend some time iterating to improve further later in the year (currently contracting to generate some funds).
It's possible that some deep learning generative AI network will take over all 3d model generation from photos tasks in the future but I'm hoping/betting that a) classical techniques will give higher resolution, more accurate results for a while yet and b) even if deep learning matches in accuracy and resolution it will always be possible to get better efficiency for big chunks of the pipeline using classical techniques.
I would love if someone would make a photometry app that ingests video (such as iPhone video of my house or drone footage of my property) and outputs a 3D gaussian splatting model.
I want it just for fun, but I’m sure it to real estate agents!
Well, you can just extract the frames from the video and save them as PNGs. I am not sure though if iPhone videos contain the metadata necessary for photogrammetry model generation (camera angle, etc.).
It's a web-based scratchpad and note taker for developers and power users.
It sits somewhere between Obsidian and Simplenote.
It's particularly optimized for keyboard navigation: Ctrl + K / ⌘ + K to open note navigator where you can quickly create new note, switch between notes, delete notes.
Even though it runs in the browser, when running on Chrome you can store notes in a folder on disk and share between computers if that folder is replicated via DropBox / OneDrive / Google Drive etc.
It seems like they're trying to solve a problem that they've observed. I know I'd like to read more on the "recognizes user intent and supports it with rich interactions" comment. Time for a manifesto?
Xterm feels faster to me than all alternatives I've tried (not kitty). I suspect it's input to screen latency. Also, crisp bitmap fonts.
Startup is instant too.
It has comparatively very good "fidelity", giving usable screen outputs with most applications without tinkering.
A factor of 2x in throughput is nothing to sweat about I think, given that xterm is fast enough.
Haven't verified the benchmarks in your link, and not tried kitty, but I believe the bench did not test xterm with bitmap fonts which I believe are significantly faster.
I'd also look at CPU rasterization performance. I often don't have graphics acceleration available (in a VM).
I'm building https://ambiph.one, an ambient music/white noise/soundscape web app. It's a free alternative to apps which have a monthly fee or are covered in ads. Lots of lovely feedback from people who've found it useful for sleep, tinnitus, focus, ADHD etc
Just launched a PWA and now working on more mixing features like spatial audio, reverb and high/low-pass filters to let you create even more immersive sound environments.
A privacy-first personal finance stack, with free and SaaS versions, with "power user" developer-friendly data analysis.
No ads, no data sale, E2E encryption, localhost option, basic budgetting and transaction parsing, but for power users allows spinning up a jupyter notebook to play with your financial data.
Access to fine-grained, well-classified financial data costs money. The localhost option provides a way for you to integrate with providers of said data, e.g., using their "developer" api keys. As long as they support free personal use and you stay in their limits, the localhost option incurs no cost to you, and we have no reason (and no way!) to charge anything if you `git pull` and set up these integrations using our readme.md.
All storage will be encrypted w/ client side keys.
For SaaS, we do the integration automatically and pass hosting and fintech costs on as a monthly subscription. We provide automatic report options that also incur small charges, mostly to cover additional compute, hosting, and higher-tier integration with data providers. These reports can use transient data and/or pass encrypted payloads to client side report generation or display, e.g., SPA or CLI tools.
https://hyperpaper.me/ – rich, customizable planner pdfs for e-Ink tablets. I have another related project that I'm slowly working on, essentially an RSS reader that sends daily pdf digests/newspapers to your tablet.
Both are very fun and rewarding, and I love building things that help spend less time in front of a (glowing) screen.
Over the past few years, I've built up a bunch of tooling for virtual D&D/TTRPG games I played with friends. DM prepping, note sharing, inventory management, scheduling, etc. And all of that with Discord integrations so you can pretty much manage everything from a Discord server.
I'm currently in the process of converting it to a proper commercial service and making it available to others. If this sounds like something that would be of use to anyone, I'd love to hear from you! Email is in my about section (or just respond here).
I'd love to hear from them! Once I get a design update I want to start a private beta. If they're interested in participating, I'd be glad to give them free lifetime access. :)
I'm working on a tool that easily allows you to theme your UI using CSS variables called Blueberry. https://www.getblueberry.io/
The idea is that each CSS variable becomes a widget and then the Blueberry endpoint will serve those variables so you can let your users customize profile pages/portals and other places they integrate with you UI.
I haven't used this program specifically but I'm using an OK one (called "Take a break") and credit it with letting me look at screens again.
A few years ago my eyes would dry out within a few minutes of using a screen. I tried eye drops, resting my eyes, taking longer breaks, etc... which didn't work.
I did some research and there's something called the 20-20-20 rule which means looking at something at least 20 feet away for 20 seconds every 20 minutes. I found this app and it fixed my issues. Turns out the issue is your eye not changing what it's focusing on.
Highly recommend trying it even if you're not actively experiencing issues.
Your app looks a lot nicer than the one I'm using so I'll give it a try!
Thank you! My journey has been pretty much the same - extremely dry and irritated eyes after screen use and then 20-20-20 solved it so I decided to build this app :)
Nice app! Just downloaded however there's a bug where regardless of the focus time I set (when the app first launches) it always counts down from 20mins. If I edit the focus time in settings it will change.
I'm working on https://quickchart.io/, a web API for generating chart images. I've expanded it to a WYSIWYG chart editor at https://quickchart.io/chart-maker/, which lets you create an endpoint that you can use to generate variations of custom charts. This is useful for creating charts quickly, or using them in places that don't support dynamic charting (email, SMS, various app plugins, etc).
I messed around with some AI features, mostly just for fun and to see if they could help users onboard. But the core product is decidedly not AI.
I'm making a small compost freezer. This way, while your compost is in your kitchen and before you put it in the municipal compost bin outside, it doesn't smell, isn't wet, doesn't attract flies, and the bag doesn't rip. It has the form factor of a small trash can and uses a TEC for cooling.
Have you checked out bokashi and KNF? I found them interesting. I have a few years of background in organic gardening, and had a lot of fun doing it. But I've not try out bokashi yet.
https://pico.sh - a set of services catered toward terminal workflows. Static site hosting, ngrok alternative, blog platform, and a docker registry using ssh
This is actually a really cool idea. I work in the fintech industry and a simulator where we (employees sitting through boring compliance training presentations) could play as money-launderers and attempt to launder cash through the various schemes like layering etc would be a fucking awesome learning experience. I think you'd have a ready market there.
Trying to keep it "realistic" in the sense of how the structures are set up (bank reporting regulations, offshore companies, shell companies etc) but I'm optimizing for fun. It's an isometric Transport Tycoon-styled game but instead of building physical infrastructure you create financial connections between nodes like drug op -> cash business -> bank -> offshore company -> real estate investment.
It’s mainly an excuse to learn some new things (HTMX, Prisma, DigitalOcean, etc.), as well as get comfortable building and shipping something from scratch on my own.
My goal is to eventually see large (and funny) swings in reactions in realtime.
I am working on a data management tool called Ottava. Essentially, it's a tool that enable users to input data in a format resembling a pivot table, allowing them to conduct data analysis without the need for data transformation. For instance, users can create a gradebook with student names in the row header and subject in the column header.
The tool automatically converts this layout into database (unpivot), enabling users to perform aggregations such as SUM or AVERAGE without having to write formulas. Because the structure designed by the user often carries significance, such as organizing dates into columns with a hierarchical structure like Year -> Quarter -> Month.
Users can organize their data with grouped rows/columns and insert aggregations. Simultaneously, Ottava can derive insights from the structure metadata and propose various types of charts for data exploration. Subsequently, users can select the charts they are interested in, choose datasets, or drill down into the charts, providing further insight for Ottava to offer more precise chart suggestions based on user interactions.
Unlike AI with the capability to autopilot, our objective is to build a Mazda MX-5 for data analysis: providing users with both enjoyment and control while exploring data.
I'm building a gamified habit tracker, similar to Habitica[1], but simplified in some ways, and with offline support. My biggest issues with Habitica are their lack of offline support (even on mobile), and their extremely downtime-prone servers. My goal is to make something more pleasant to use.
I don't have a link to share since it's still fairly early in development, but I'm making good progress!
If you do graphics like Habitica, I think another improvement over them would be to do the graphics better. Not sure if others share this opinion but Habitica's art style I really find awful, generic and boring. Less so the pixel art (I like pixel art), but the colour palettes and sprites just don't feel great for me.
Been working on a fishing journal app. Pulls in weather, tides (salt), USGS streamflows (streams), add access points, save notes, make journal entries with catch log, and photo/videos.
Not into fishing and so not the target audience for this, but I just wanted to say this thing jumps out at me as one of those products the excitement over "web 2.0" and the API gold rush was all about. A world of niche web-accessible raw data streams, ready to be processed, combined, added to, and made into something useful by an enterprising developer. Cool project.
https://github.com/U8String/U8String which is a UTF-8 string library for C# that aims to offer rich and performant API to replace standard string for scenarios where you do want to consume UTF-8 directly. I'm working on it since last summer actually, it turned out to be much higher complexity project than expected :)
Also comes with a few niceties like the ability to directly consume Streams, Sockets, WebSockets and SafeFileHandles with U8Reader (sync/async) that solves painful and error-prone manual buffer handling when reading lines/segments/messages. It is kind of like higher level Rust's BufReader.
That's what bool.ToString() defaults to which I'm matching. As for the file API, it's a bit unfinished as I'm re-consolidating logic into U8File (OpenRead and ReadLines work acceptably, U8File.Read works too - U8Reader is in a more polished state), but the intention for the files is to detect and strip BOMs (it already does that in most[0] places[1]).
There is way more heavy lifting that the library does on the "data goes in" side of things because "data goes out" story in .NET is already in a good shape with everything accepting ReadOnlySpan<byte> and ReadOnlyMemory<byte> - zero-allocation interpolated UTF-8 output into streams, sockets, etc. is achieved through extension methods and should you want to write UTF-8 BOM, you can simply do so beforehand working with the corresponding API directly.
However, if you have a particular use case in mind that you're interested in or have trouble with - do let me know as I'd love to have more user feedback!
Nix-based PXE booting. It can boot different images than your NixOS-based system configurations, but the main focus has been to support NixOS. We even have a system which is able to scan your hardware pre-boot, and then launch the initial ramdisk with a kernel which has all the required drivers pre-installed. https://github.com/majbacka-labs/nixos.fi
I've been suspecting for a long time that Google might be doing something similar. Of course you need enough devices around (and internet) for this to work but it's pretty cool, I hope it takes off. Maybe a device manufacturer will be interested in this and buy/fund you.
I'm deeply engaged in rewriting my own data processing software from Elixir to C. I've already reduced the number of dedicated servers from 3 to 0.1 while scaling traffic and handling larger amounts of data. My goal is to optimize it for Raspberry Pi, just for fun... and it's also more ecologically friendly this way :)
By the way, I'd appreciate a programming partner with whom I can discuss security issues in C code. I would gladly exchange code review sessions. Is anyone interested here?
I'm working on a super simple way to monitor your API at an endpoint level - https://subbul.com/.
At work we spent a bunch of time implementing monitoring and alerting for all our APIs and I figured it would be nice to have a near plug-and-play solution, so I built exactly that.
Thanks! I'm using this as an experience to teach myself mainly. I'm not an expert cyclist but I prefer to DIY when I can.
For example, I looked at tires and wheels as a good litmus test. What were the minimum pieces of information that you need to know to pick the right tire or wheel and make those the only filters on the site.
In terms of expertise, I've mainly farmed out to the cyclist community on Mastodon and served requests on a first-come-first-serve basis. For example, one person pointed me to sheldonbrown.com for their article on tires and it was really illuminating.
https://weexpire.org - An opensource tool for creating emergency notes that can be read by your trusted contacts only after your death or if you are seriously injured.
Being as the timelines for seeing this product in action may be measured in decades (i.e. time of death, hopefully far away), how will you convince your customers that you will still be operating for decades? What happens if operations do cease?
One reliable way to convince customers is to provide emergency notes with a fixed expiration date of a maximum of 1 year from the time the note was written. After 1 year, customers are, in a way, forced to create a new emergency note, and at the same time, they can verify if anything is going to change soon on the platform (e.g. upcoming shutdown). This would also help to keep the emergency note’s content always up-to-date. When you sign up for car insurance, you do so for a maximum of 1 year, as prices and coverages may change.
A suite of widgets / tools that many SaaS apps want at some point, but that can be cumbersome to manage and build from scratch, e.g. Announcements, NPS widgets, Product Tours, Feedback widgets etc. etc.
All are creatable and editable without coding skills (after the initial copy-paste setup). So for example, product managers and customer success can manage them without having to bother devs.
Just for fun, I'm writing an internet forum software from scratch, strongly inspired by phpBB and the likes.
It is split into an Angular UI, C# ASP.NET Core RESTful API and postgres database.
I aimed to let EF Core handle the data model in the database and am pleasantly surprised by how well it works.
Also updating the database is a breeze with its migrations.
The features of a forum seem easy enough, but I find it difficult to detail it out into the data model at times.
We’re working on a privacy-focused iOS app that enables you to track anything. It’s called Reflect. The app enables you to answer questions like “how does meditation affect my mood” or “how does this new supplement intervention affect my sleep”. We already support detailed visualization and correlation between all of the metrics you track and are working on some very exciting features to make self-guided discovery even easier.
I’m having trouble understanding how to use the app! I am overwhelmed by the amount of configuration, and not sure how I am supposed to actually add activities or diary entries, for example.
Thank you for saying so. We want to make this interface easier to get started with with something like an onboarding flow or the SwiftUI TipKit.
Without knowing exactly what you want to use the app for, I’ll link you to our help page with some tutorials: https://ntl.ai/reflect/support
Currently the flow to tracking is to create a form template (called a Reflection template) to track a category of metrics such as Mood. In that template you add metrics like Happiness, Fatigue, etc. Once the template is created you have a form available that you can fill out at your convenience. You can design another template like Supplements with metrics for specific dosages, for example. Your history can be visualized and those metrics can be correlated shortly after.
Every time you fill out an entry you have the option of adding notes, which can serve as a diary functionality. Those notes are searchable in your history.
Let us know any other feedback you have, we’d really like to make this as usable as possible.
Most of my customers have been AI protein designers, ironically. Turns out SOMEBODY has to wrangle atoms in the real biological world and that’s me!
After almost a year of work I finally smoothed out all the kinks in the process, so can now go from a design to synthetic DNA in a cell in about a week (not counting oligo pool synthesis time). I can do about 600,000bp per week, which is large enough to synthesize the smallest bacterial genome (each week), tho I only do about 1000bp fragments. I’m also completely bootstrapped and self funded, and only get help from my several opentrons robots