Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
cmos
My mother is living alone in her house and we are getting to the point where she might not be able to live alone. I built "Still Kicking", a picture frame that monitors her motion and sends back basic reports and can detect falls and sleep quality to a phone app, to help give her more time at home.
It's just an mmWave sensor connected to an ESP32. But it works nicely, and I'm thinking of starting a company making them, though I'm not clear if the elderly would be ok with this minimal (no camera) intrusion.
It would just work out of the box.. the real one would have a small cell modem so it wouldn't need any networking setup, and it would act as a gateway if you have more than one in a house. There are industrial versions of this for nursing homes. This would be a bit more warm and fuzzy for home use.
digitaltrees
I own a national home care provider (in 13 states) and EHR. We are looking for products like this. Book office hours if you’re interested in discussing:
taylorhou
Booked a time! We built senior smartphone assistance without humans
digitaltrees
Great talking to you. Very cool project.
cmos
Booked a time!
popupeyecare
I love it. As a physician, I see so many cases of elderly patients who have fallen and not been found for hours if not days.
In elder care, I am building https://statphone.com - one emergency number that rings multiple family members simultaneously and breaks through DND. Would love to chat/collaborate.
naikrovek
“Still Kicking” is a fantastic name for that.
lurkshark
There was a Minnesota company called Healthsense (was acquired by GreatCall which was then acquired by BestBuy, not sure if the company/tech exists anymore) that had a similar approach on a broader scale. Their system used a bunch of mundane smart home sensors in the usual configuration (e.g. contact sensors on doors, motion sensors, etc) but also for tracking patterns and habits, like the refrigerator door, toilet seat, bed, etc. The idea being that an abrupt shift in behavior would trigger a notice for a loved one or nurse to check in. I always thought this was a cool idea and it's a shame it didn't take off a bit more.
The question of "intrusion" was always interesting to me because old folks often face going from nothing to assisted living or nursing home which is often quite intrusive, where somewhat ironically adding a bunch of sensors to your home allows you a bit more privacy.
Kind of a tangent, but I like your type of system as an alternative to the emergency pendants. It always struck me as strange to expect old folks at risk of fall to remember to charge and wear a pendant at all times.
Aboutplants
Start this company! You see the responses from just a small sample, this is your sign to go in on it! Good luck!
tortugapatrick
Mom had a stroke a few years ago and while thankfully she's recovered well, I'd buy this. Having designed for seniors and helped senior care focused companies, it's not so much the senior that you'd sell to but their adult children.
Good luck and for what it's worth, go for it!
akg_67
Look into some of the products and services used in Japan for elderly care at home.
My FIL, in his late 80's was living at home alone. My wife used a monitoring service, provided by local package delivery company. They installed motion sensors in the toilet and on the door. If no motion detected for 24 hours, the company will alert my wife by phone and send the nearest delivery driver to check on him.
I myself have tried Home Assistant setup on Raspberry Pi and variety of sensors for different purposes.
rjha
This was covered on HN a while back, https://alvis.care/
kokkis
I'm building a financial censorship monitor at https://nofunds.org/, that tells a story of how money has been turned into a political weapon to silence journalists, activists, and civil society by freezing assets, blocking accounts, sanctioning, and banning payments. It's part of my master's thesis https://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/187407 and also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36430596, but now I wanted to make a more comprehensive list, using Claude API and manual work. I'm designing a website right now, and the site is live within 2 months (given the API rate limitations currently to process articles). I know Hacker News is quite critical of Bitcoin, but it's also worthy to warn that, indeed, Bitcoin is at least a marginal tool to those whose bank accounts may be endangered. I'm basically arguing that Bitcoin can be used to resist such financial censorship, deplatforming and so on.
Tianning
I built cross-border compliance Management info system dashboards at a Swiss private bank. The much more widespread reality is: entire nationalities and residencies get quietly moved to "do not serve" lists because the regulatory cost of serving them exceeds revenue. No public process, no appeal, no notice, you just can't open an account:financial exclusion most people never see.
kokkis
That's also very interesting phenomenon. Instead of censoring after the bank accounts have been granted, one could also "censor" or rather exclude a person or group of people or an organisation by not granting a bank account in the first place. Quite shrewd, and extremely unnoticeable. I mean, whole nationalities are excluded based on quite absurd reasons. But I guess fear led to this in many ways.
sinak
Have you read or connected with Rainey Reitman, who just published the book Transaction Denied?
kokkis
Hey, I haven't and that sounds very interesting to read in my case especially. I'll give it a look! Thanks mate.
jmstfv
this is interesting.
my hunch is that we're moving towards more surveillance, censorship and deplatforming in the future, and CBDCs are a major tool for that.
I like Bitcoin, despite its problems (price volatility and quantum vulnerability) but I think censorship-resistant stablecoins would be a better solution for people looking to protect themselves from Big Brother.
vablings
Shockingly bitcoin gained a lot more power for me when prominent government officials started using it to start operating outside the checks and balances of the banking system.
dheera
Don't they sneeze peoples' Bitcoin just the same?
With Feds showing up with your door with guns and handcuffs, you'll have to hand over your private keys, and that's how they freeze BTC accounts. It's not particularly immune to the same threats.
williebeek
Store your Bitcoin private key in a password manager. Would you really give out your keyvault master password to them?
dheera
It doesn't matter how it's stored if they have guns and handcuffs or any other form of $5 wrench (xkcd.com/538).
kokkis
Yeah, that's the classic xkcd-reality. It will be a rather difficult to enforce that _en masse_. However, should that happen, then the money is the least of one's worries. In any case, financial censorship in that case would be the least of one's worries, if it comes down to such threats and physical violence.
angarrido
[dead]
paulmooreparks
I'm building Tela (https://github.com/paulmooreparks/tela), a self-hosted relay that tunnels TCP services through encrypted WireGuard connections. The key difference from Tailscale and similar tools is that it requires no TUN adapter, no root access, and no admin privileges on either end. It runs entirely in userspace.
My initial motivation was wanting to RDP and SSH into my home workstation from a locked-down corporate laptop when I travel. I couldn't install Tailscale on the laptop, and I didn't want to pay for a cloud VM just to do SSH port forwarding. Now I use it to tie together half a dozen machines, both locally and on Hetzner & Linode. I can SSH and RDP into remote machines, host a git repo on one machine and access it from the others, and (optionally) share files across all of them on a local mount.
You run a hub (telahubd), register machines with a lightweight agent (telad), and connect from anywhere with the client (tela). All three are single Go binaries with no external dependencies. The hub never sees your traffic. It just relays opaque WireGuard ciphertext.
All binaries run on Windows, Linux, and macOS. There is also a desktop GUI app, TelaVisor, that wraps the client and enables remote management of hubs and agents.
It's Apache 2.0-license and pre-1.0 release, but I'm polishing it for a stable 1.0 release in the next month or so.
I'm also working on an enterprise-grade management portal that works with Tela, https://awansaya.net/
dhrm1k
ah nice. i’ve actually been building something pretty similar on top of wireguard too
my use case is a bit different though. i started because i wanted to give friends access to specific things in my homelab, but very selectively. like “you can use jellyfin on this one machine, but you can’t ssh, and you can’t even see my other devices”
tailscale is honestly amazing for getting devices connected, i still use it a lot. but once i started trying to do these very specific “this machine can talk to that machine only on this port” kind of setups, it started feeling more complex than it should be, at least for personal use. ACL editor is more confusing when it comes to this. i know we have got option for tags and things, but those are very poorly documented and i haven't found a single tutorial that works nicely.
your userspace approach is really interesting btw, especially the no tun / no root part. makes sense to run it on rigit enterprise environments.
paulmooreparks
Tela has ACLs per machine, but not per service. That's an interesting use case, and I'm shocked that I missed it. I've added it to the pre-1.0 roadmap. Thank you!
Another thing on the release roadmap is a TUN/root story, since there is value in having that layer as well. Tela will always support the user-space approach, however, so that unlike Tailscale it's always accessible.
undefined
Ingon
I've been working on a similar tool for a while - connet (https://github.com/connet-dev/connet). It builds upon QUIC (instead of wireguard), but I think from an enduser perspective the results ends up looking pretty similar.
mentalgear
Very interesting - but I also find it important for solutions to state the trade-offs if they provide a novel approach that doesn't have the same requirements as the main contenders. In your case, what are the trade offs for running in user space ?
paulmooreparks
That's true. I'd say, probably performance is the first trade-off, weighing kernel against user-space. For the sorts of scenarios I envision for Tela, it's probably not a huge loss (I won't be running Facebook off of a Tela hub, I don't think). Another is that I have to run and tear down the client myself, though I do have support for running the tela client as a service.
It's funny... I've started using so many of the nifty management features of TelaVisor and Awan Saya that I am now considering adding lower-level support for the features that I explicitly wrote for user-space.
nine_k
Nice! It looks essentially like userspace NAT, only active for particular ports. I'm contemplating a similar setup to handle access to my home machines: when I'm in my home network, some ports are forwarded to 127.x.y.z directly from the remote machine, and when I'm away, the same ports are forwarded via a Wireguard connection. This way, at home I can use the full speed of the LAN, and when away, the speed is limited by the Wireguard gateway, but I still connect to the same host:port, wherever I am.
watsonjs
> My initial motivation was wanting to RDP and SSH into my home workstation from a locked-down corporate laptop when I travel. I couldn't install Tailscale on the laptop
I'm not sure it would work but did you try running tailscale client through a docker container so it's not installed directly in your host system?
paulmooreparks
It would work, but this laptop is so locked down that I can't even install Docker without begging for permission (it's for a consultant role, not a dev role, so...). That said, my stop-gap solution while I worked on Tela was a cheap Linode VM with tailscale installed, and using SSH port-forwarding to get to RDP. Even at that tiny price, it grated me.
coldstartops
Pretty cool! I see on enterprise edition you also support a virtual mount, is it FUSE based? I got a similar tool but went the other way around, I wanted to browse files synchronously (and bidirectional sync of edits) between two devices via FUSE mounts, and ended up tunneling TCP for this in the end.
paulmooreparks
Thanks! The file sharing is part of the base, FOSS Tela. It uses WebDAV rather than FUSE. The tela client runs a local WebDAV server that proxies file operations through the WireGuard tunnel to the agent on the remote machine. You can mount it as a network drive (Windows maps it as a drive letter, Linux/macOS mount it as a directory) or access it via TelaVisor or the tela CLI. It can be configured as read-only or read-write. Certain file extensions can be banned from upload or rename.
I went with WebDAV because it works on all three platforms without a kernel module or extra driver. For my use case (browsing files, grabbing configs, etc.) it works well enough.
Bi-directional sync is an interesting idea. Right now the sharing is one-directional (the agent exposes a directory, the client mounts it), but I could see adding something like that as a layer on top.
itake
I think this is the same as using a cloudflared tunnel?
to access my home desktop machine, I run:
``` $ ssh itake@ssh.domain.me -o ProxyCommand="cloudflared access ssh --hostname %h" ```
and I setup all the cloudflare access tunnels to connect to the service.
paulmooreparks
If I understand you correctly, you SSH in via cloudflared and then use that tunnel to reach other services through that session. That would work, yes.
Tela takes a little different approach. The agent exposes services directly through the WireGuard tunnel without SSH as an intermediary, so you don't need sshd running on the target. Each machine gets its own loopback address on the client, so there is no port remapping.
The big difference is the relay, though. With cloudflared, Cloudflare terminates TLS at their edge. With Tela, you run the hub yourself and encryption is end-to-end. The hub only ever sees encrypted data (apart from a small header).
Shorel
Now add an Android client and exit node support and it will completely replace Tailscale for me. :)
paulmooreparks
Thank you! That means more than you know. :) I've thought about an Android client. It would have the same problem that exit-node support would have: Tela is currently engineered as a user-space alternative to Tailscale. However, as I mentioned in another reply here, I've gotten so fond of a lot of the other features of Tela that I might consider adding support for low-level features that require kernel support. It might not be 1.0, but I'm open to suggestions.
DevDesmond
I got addicted to scrolling content on my phone, so I built a digital pet whose growth and well-being depends on you staying off your phone! This way, if I spend all night scrolling the browser, my pet will get depression.
Unlike similar apps such as Focus Friend or Forest, which use active timers to police screen time, my app is an inversion that works like an idle game; All screen time is tracked all day, (with double the punishments at night), and upon check-in, you get feedback on your device usage.
memonkey
I've always been very interested in these types of games. Grew up playing Neopets which was inspiration to becoming a software engineer. Am interested in gamified aspects as well. The thing I've not quite figured out is how to make these types of games _actually_ addictive? Neopets had a lot going for it IMO. Would love to know if this is actually working for you (and maybe others) personally and why.
mghackerlady
I wish I knew why these games are so addictive, I collected Tamagotchi a few years back and ended up with a handful of originals and one of the fancy new color screen ones (that now goes for obscene amounts of money on ebay).
varenc
How are you able to track all screen time on an iOS device? I had thought the APIs to do this aren't available.
buddybuilder
I believe Apple opened up their screen time APIs https://developer.apple.com/documentation/screentime
paulhebert
I'm continuing to hack on Tiled Words, my daily word puzzle!
After winning the Playlin Player's Choice award I've noticed an uptick in players as well as some people sharing videos on YouTube which has been fun. I've got a few thousand people playing every day.
I just launched user accounts today so user's can now track their progress across devices and share their stats with each other. This ended up being a bigger chunk of work than I expected but I'm really pleased with how it turned out. (Though I launched it 15 minutes ago so I'm holding my breath for bug reports)
I'm fine-tuning my internal puzzle-building now with the goal of letting people use them to make and share their own puzzles soon!
dodu_
I can't say I'm a regular user but a while ago I stumbled upon another post about tiledwords while a loved one was in the hospital and it was a fun and welcome distraction to solve some of the puzzles together while stuck in an otherwise grim environment.
Thanks for making this and I wish you all the success in the future.
paulhebert
I’m glad Tiled Words could make that hard time a little easier. I hope your loved one has recovered and is doing better now
martimchaves
I love tiled words, I've actually been doing the daily puzzle for a while, have completed over a 100 of them! It's part of my morning routine :)
I'm not sure if it would fit the theme, but sometimes I end up searching what an expression means, or where does it come from. Maybe it would be cool to have a little info box after you discover what the word is. Just an idea! Not sure if it would clutter things, and you can always search it yourself, but something I've been thinking about. I still remember looking up peanut gallery and sand dollar!
paulhebert
Thanks for playing! Congrats on 100 puzzles!
That’s a fun idea. I often stumble across fun facts while making the clues. I’ll think about this more and experiment a bit when I have time!
rnoorda
I've been enjoying Tiled Words! I find myself playing in a weird way, by totally ignoring the clues. I look at the title and try to puzzle out all the answers myself. I don't know if I'm alone in that, but it could be a neat mode to have a setting to hide the clues.
paulhebert
Thanks! I’ve heard that from a few people! Adding that as an official mode is on my road map but there are a few big features ahead of it right now
mockingloris
Thanks for making this. It's totally refreshingly intuitive while doing the practice puzzle!
Just tried it out on my browser. Will be following this.
Also would love to see your workflow you spoke about, on coming up with puzzle ideas and tile arrangements. Cheers!
paulhebert
Thanks for checking it out! I’ll try to share that soon
vlatoshi
this is so cool, i liked the musical instruments one!
would be super interested to hear more about the puzzle-making process too, is it fully automated with AI at this point or is there still a good amount of manual work and fine-tuning involved?
bookmarked already, can't wait to play tomorrow again
paulhebert
Thanks!
It’s a lot of manual work right now. I don’t use AI in the process. I think it could help with some of the brainstorming but I kind of like the human connection of making a puzzle and having people solve it.
Here’s the basic process.
My wife and I do this part together:
- Think of a theme
- Think of words related to that theme, ideally with a second meaning
- Think of clues for those words
Once we have a good set of clues I plug them into a program I wrote to make crosswords.
The program isn’t that smart. It tries making random crosswords. I run it 1500 times and then sort the results to get the best ones. This brute force approach works pretty well for how simple it is.
I pick the crossword I want and then I use another tool to split up and rearrange the tiles. This step could probably be automated but there’s some finicky logic to the best way to split up the tiles and it goes pretty fast manually.
I’ve been meaning to make a video of the process! I’ll share it here when I do
tele_ski
Very nice, the movement and snapping of the tiles is very nicely done, enjoyed today's puzzle!
paulhebert
Haha I spent a looong time perfecting that so I’m glad it’s appreciated!
kvirani
Oh wow. This seems like it was a lot of work. Bookmarked and installed!
paulhebert
Haha yeah it’s been a labor of love!
The design and dev took a while but building the has been the most time consuming at this point. My wife and I make the puzzles together.
We’re getting close to 6 months of daily, hand crafted puzzles!
msolomentsev
I've been writing a 'book' (more of an extended blog post that I'd like to put out for free) attempting to explain quantum computing to a layman-ish audience.
I sort of got inspired to do this after seeing so many QC PR posts on HN, and finding the educational material in this space to be either too academic, too narrow in scope, or totally facile. I think given the incredible hype (and potential promise) of this industry, there should be on-ramps for technically minded people to get an understanding of what's going on. I don't think you should need to be a quantum physicist to be able to follow the field (I am only an electrical engineer).
My book tries to cover the computational theory, the actual hardware implementations, and the potential applications of quantum computers. More than that, I want to be unbiased and stray away from what I feel is misleading hype. It's been a work in progress for about 6 months now, with a lot of time spent gaining fluency in the field. But the end is in sight! :)
3form
One thing I would like to see addressed is the misconception that QC can help turn NP problems into P. I see this floating from time to time.
msolomentsev
Yes, totally. I feel like the computational complexity part of quantum computing is actually pretty well explained to the 'layman' by some of Scott Aaronson's work, but unfortunately it's not well placed in context (i.e. it very much focuses on the theoretical CS, and not the whole QC picture). You have to sort of start digging for material about computational complexity theory/quantum and stumble into his output.
wonger_
Awesome! Anywhere we can look for updates, like a website?
FWIW, my shallow understanding of quantum computing as a programmer, in case you wanted perspectives from your potential audience:
- I thought quantum physics was a sham? Like on par with string theory. But apparently that's not true
- I hear QC only breaks certain kinds of cryptography algorithms (involving factoring big primes?), and that we can upgrade to more foolproof algorithms.
- I hear that one of the main challenges is improving error bounds? I'm not sure how error is involved and how it can be wrangled to get a deterministic or useful result
- Idk what a qubit is or how you make one or how you put several together
msolomentsev
Planning on starting a substack/blog soon!
Your questions are helpful bar-setter for me, and more or less align with the questions that I had when I was starting out this project (sans the skepticism of quantum mechanics period, I take that as a given). Going down your list:
- Yeah there's a distinction between asymmetric and symmetric encryption schemes. Asymmetric schemes are typically used to make a shared private key which is then used in ensuing symmetrically encoded communications. Those asymmetric schemes are broadly vulnerable to quantum based attacks, hence the need to upgrade to 'post quantum encryption schemes' (PQS). PQS approaches have been developed and are slowly being rolled out, even though it's unclear when the threat of quantum-enabled cracking will be real.
- Yes, I cover this extensively. This actually relates to your last question as well, since error depends in part on what kind of qubit platform you're working with. A superconducting qubit naturally 'decoheres' (loses its unique state) over time, with some sort of semipredictable rate of decoherence, whereas photonic qubits sometimes just get lost! All platforms have some sort of built in error due to the fact that you are applying essentially analog gates to them, and these gates have some imprecision that may build up over millions of operations. I'd characterize the challenges as A) reducing error, and B) correcting the errors that inevitably occur.
- This was one of my sticking points too. The short answer is that there are a few different modalities all competing to be 'the one', and no one really knows what's going to win out. They all have their own (dis)advantages.
arter45
No, quantum physics is not a sham. Lasers are an application of quantum physics, for example. Usage of quantum physics principles in non scientific (thoughts are entangled!) or arbitrary macroscopic contexts (since electrons can cross a barrier, a human can pass through a wall) is an entirely different thing.
rcbdev
I would be very interested where you got some of these misconceptions and half-truths.
wonger_
I think I watched some educational TV program like 15 years ago that did a poor job explaining quantum physics, or overhyped it and set off my BS detectors. Idk. A weird mix of poor memory and miscommunication and outdated information I think. EDIT oh and Schrodinger's cat! Doesn't make sense to me.
The latter points were things I gathered from skimming recent headlines and articles. I should read more thoroughly.
verdatel
As a comparison, take a look at this book -> https://nostarch.com/quantum-computing. I found it very accessible!
msolomentsev
Thanks for sharing this. I think there are a few books in this vein: intro to quantum algorithms, basically. I particularly liked Thomas Wong's “Introduction to Classical and Quantum Computing”. I'm not so particularly interested in the math details, and I want my book to go further. I haven't found any (layman-friendly) text that breaks down the actual mechanisms of operation behind the qubit modalities, considers the implications of successful QC development, etc.
electrodyssey
I'd like to see that post when it's ready!
bnjemian
Would like to check this out when you're ready to share.
s3micolon0
Following!
marcusdev
I'm working on a fully offline, client-side train journey planner for UK rail - https://railraptor.com
When booking flights, I use sites like Kiwi and Skyscanner that let you do flexible searches - multiple destinations, custom connections, creative routes, etc. But rail search feels oddly constrained. All the UK train operators offer basically the same experience, and surface the exact same routes. I always suspected there were better or just different options that weren’t being shown. Where is the "Skyscanner for trains"?
After digging through the national rail data feeds, I decided to have a go at building my own route planner that runs completely offline in the browser. This gave me the freedom to implement more complex filters, search to/from multiple stations, and do it without a persistent network connection.
Now I'm finding routes that aren't offered by the standard train operators, connecting at different stations, and finding it's often easier to travel to different stations (some I'd never heard of) that get me closer and faster to where I actually want to go!
It's still a little rough and I'd like to add more features such as fares, VSTP data, and direct-links to book tickets, but wanted to share early and get some initial feedback before investing more time into it. So, thanks in advance - let me know what you think.
jimnotgym
I like your idea. If you dig around Rory Sutherlands YouTube appearances he talks about how train routers fall down by always looking for the fastest route, where he would prefer the nicest, often cheaper and slightly slower. He has a fair amount to say on the subject so it is a bit of a goldmine.
I sent you some feedback on a routing failure because I didn't want to post exactly where I live here.
I think you need pricing. Works offline is cool, but why not pull in the pricing if people are online? Train fares are so variable depending on time of day, especially if they go via London. I could have a trip that could be £300 cheaper by taking a 30 minute longer trip that avoids London. I need pricing to get my best journey.
marcusdev
My thoughts exactly! Sometimes I don't mind travelling a little longer, or ending up at a nearby station, if it's a nicer journey.
Thank you for the feedback, pricing is definitely next on my to do list if I can make it work.
vectorcrumb
This sounds very nice! A slightly adjacent question: have you discovered any providers that can recommend train journeys based on price? Sort of like the explore feature you find on sites like Google Flights, Ryanair and Flixbus. Sometimes when the wanderlust hits I've tried searching around for cheap train tickets, but it isn't simple using sites likes DB/OEBB/SBB/SNCF/etc
marcusdev
https://raileasy.co.uk / https://trainsplit.com is the most flexible existing service I've found, but even that doesn't give you an "anywhere" option.
I'm looking at how to add price data to railraptor, but it might mean sacrificing the fully-offline capability... once I have prices it should absolutely be possible to build a filter along the lines of "find me the cheapest popular destinations that are at least 50 miles away".
snoozebutton
As someone not in the UK but would like to play with it / try it out but don't know much about the UK it would be nice if there was either a drop of locations so I could randomly pick a place or select on a map and get the closest stop.
A map feature might help people do "spur of the moment" planning if they are looking for more of an adventure than any specific location.
svenmakes
Great that it stores the entire timetable in only 6MB(?) of storage.
Some feedback: I don't think it can route through London as it isn't aware of tube connections between stations? And the classic stress test of Penzance to Thurso is too long for the routing algorithm, but I imagine that's beyond scope?
Pricing would make this a super useful tool!
marcusdev
Thanks for the feedback. I was missing the "Fixed Links" data, which covers any transfers that aren't part of the normal rail network (e.g. walking/bus/tube). I've just added that, so the tube routes via London should work for you now.
The routeing data is pretty complex - there are layers on layers of data files and rules to cover all the edge cases and weird stations/routes. It's been really fun to dig into it.
I'll look into adding more possible connections to see if it can find the Penzance route - I'd be curious to know if anyone has ever actually completed the 27 hour journey!
whiplash451
This sounds awesome. Have you checked how it fares against trainline? A quick demo would be very nice.
boutell
I love this! Dijkstra's Algorithm is always a fun time
marcusdev
I do love Disjkstra :) this actually uses a modified version of the "Raptor" algorithm for public transport routing (hence the name!): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
mauvehaus
Earlier today? My partner and I felled a couple of trees and bucked them into firewood to clear a spot on drier ground for our chicken coop, which had sunk halfway to China because we unknowingly landed it in a soup bowl three years ago when we moved in the winter when the ground was frozen. Also set and leveled four piers in the new spot for it to sit on.
Then slid it a few hundred feet across the lawn on composite deck boards we salvaged when we took a balcony down last year and landed it atop the new piers.
Then put the electric fence back up to keep the bears out.
Presently? A beer.
spudlyo
I'm writing an essay about how I use an ancient text editor, GNU Emacs, along with gptel, Gemini, some local models, yt-dlp, and patreon-dl to help me me study an ancient language, 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 demonstrate how I use a high-performance XML database engine to quickly perform Latin-to-English lookups against an XML-TEI formatted edition of the 19th century Lewis & Short dictionary, and using a RESTXQ endpoint and some XQuery code to dynamically reformat the entries into Org-mode for display in a pop-up buffer.
I intend demonstrate how I built a transcription pipeline in Emacs Lisp using tools such as yt-dlp and patreon-dl to grab Latin-language audio content from the Internet, transcode the audio with ffmpeg, do Voice Activity Detection and chunking in Python with Silero, load the chunks into Gemini's context window, and send it off for transcription and macronization, gather forced-alignment data using local a local wav2vec2-latin model, and finally add word-level linguistic analysis (POS, morphology, lemmas) using a local Stanza model trained on the Classical corpus.
This all gets saved to an an XML file which is loaded into BaseX along with some metadata. I'll then demonstrate some Emacs Lisp code which pulls it into an Org-mode based transcription buffer and minor-mode for reading and study, where I can play audio of any given Latin word, sentence, or paragraph, thanks to the forced-alignment and linguistic analysis data being stored in hidden text properties when the data was fetched from the database.
Lastly, I'd like to explore how to leverage these tools to automatically create flash cards with audio cues in Org mode using the anki-editor Emacs minor mode for sentence mining.
sneilan1
This is insanely cool. Thanks for sharing. I'll follow you on https://muppetlabs.com/.
phyzix5761
Emacs is ancient? I use it every day. And they just came out with a new major update.
hirako2000
It is ancient. The UX still has the same feel. Without a major revamp (which would be a terrible idea) we can still call it ancient. A perfect fit for antique studies.
phyzix5761
The UX is what you make it. Its fully customizable.
stanko
https://muffinman-io.itch.io/spacedeck-x
I'm still obsessed with making my game, which you can try it at the link above (it is desktop only). This is my first "real" game, and it has been incredibly fun and rewarding. I've been working on it in the evenings for about 4 or 5 months.
It is a very ambitious mix of genres - shoot-em-up and deck-building. A lot of people said that those are genres that shouldn't be combined, but I think it turned out to be a fun little game. Folks who are not fans of one (or either) of the genres are actually playing it. I built a global high-score leaderboard, and there are people (including a few of my friends) competing on it. Whoever knocks my friend "BER" from first place will earn a beer from me.
This is purely a fun project, although I'm now seriously considering releasing it on steam when I finish everything I planned for it. It is made in Kaplay, a small JavaScript gamedev library, which is a big part of what makes it fun. If you try it out, please leave a comment, I would love more feedback!
rrr_oh_man
OH MY GOD THIS IS GOOD.
Loved the music.
Didn't know what was going on half the time.
Positively overwhelmed.
Thanks for that little spark of joy!
stanko
Haha amazing, thank you! This made my morning :)
If I ever release on steam, can I please use your comment in promo material? I would anonymize it of course.
Edit: grammar
rrr_oh_man
Absolutely. I'd buy it and leave a review, too. :)
niceguy4
This is great!
Did you do the graphics, too? I've always want to write my own game but doing the game graphics is just not my thing.
stanko
Thank you, I did all of the sprites myself. This was the first time I tried doing pixel art and I love it. It is a kind of meditation for me.
I think you should give it a go, making games is a lot of fun. Try making a prototype with circles and rectangles. Later on, you can hire someone to do the graphics or you can buy an asset pack. In my case, I can't make music - the two tracks in the game are free PICO 8 tracks and my best friend is working on the new ones.
aggregator-ios
Love it! I was instantly hooked and its a lot of fun to play. And it's so smooth and easy to pick up!
chrismaltby
This is awesome. I only made it to stage 5 but love the mix of genres
stanko
Thank you, glad you like it! My idea was to make the player pick their cards during the shmup action, but then to have a breather when they reach the boss fight (contrary to the usual bullet hell boss fights).
Btw I think level 5 is higher than average.
ctbellmar
PlantLab (https://plantlab.ai) - AI plant health diagnosis for cannabis. It's an API, not an app [1]. Photo in, structured JSON out - condition, confidence, growth stage, nutrient lockout analysis. The response is for machines. Light burn at 0.92 confidence? Your controller dims the light. Calcium deficiency with excess potassium flagged as the lockout cause? Dosing pump adjusts.
I'm a software dev/data nerd, not a grower. I got interested because cannabis grow rooms are already full of automation - VPD controllers, pH/EC monitoring, dosing pumps, dimmable lights. But nothing was looking at the plant. Every sensor in the room measures the environment, not whether the plant is actually doing well. I wanted to add the eyes. And this seems to be a bound domain issue (i.e. limited number of issues/conditions/pests vs. all plants everywhere).
ViT-based multi-stage pipeline that verifies it's cannabis, classifies condition or pest, then runs nutrient subclassification if needed. 30 classes, 18ms inference, Go API, ONNX Runtime. Trained on a little over a million images from grower friends. Classification was 80% of the lift. I also shipped a Home Assistant integration - camera takes a scheduled snapshot, PlantLab diagnoses, HA acts on the result. No human involved.
Recently the part that's been the most fun is the autoresearch loop. Between training runs the system looks at its own confusion matrix, finds which classes it's mixing up, audits those training images for bad labels, and tells me what to fix. It's not fully autonomous yet but it's getting there - the model is increasingly debugging its own training data.
Solo project, <100 users, free tier is 3/day.
[1] I built a simple Android app for those who want to just try it out, it's on Google Store. Probably will make one for iOS too as time allows. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.plantlab.p...
steve_adams_86
Such a great idea. It's nice that with cannabis, despite there being so many cultivars, it's such a large industry based around essentially one plant. And while some varieties can look quite different, I think your API should generally be effective.
I've been thinking about similar systems for tissue cultures but I can't seem to find a way to generalize and still get good training data or effective results. Once you lose track of white balance, species, optical clarity and distortion from the vessel, etc... Results decline quite a bit in my experience. It makes it a neat yet fairly useless system outside of itself.
Granted, I have no idea what I'm doing and these could be solvable problems. Certainly much easier to solve by focusing on a single species.
I'm impressed with how well it classifies based on the image examples. A little over a million images is probably what makes it possible. My experiments have been much smaller. Maybe with more material I could overcome those limitations I mentioned, but I have a feeling the multi-species pipeline really drags it down.
Have you found that light temperature no longer skews feedback after so much training data? For me it really matters, causing classification to confuse light sources with actual plant condition (hence the colour card for white balance helping so much)
ctbellmar
Thanks! Yeah, the single-species focus does a lot of the work. Under the hood it's not one big model - there's a cannabis verification gate, then routing into disease vs pest vs deficiency, then narrower classifiers from there. Each one has a simpler job so accuracy stays high.
Early on the photography thing was a real problem. Training data was mostly decent shots, then inference would come in as some blurry phone photo under purple LEDs.
Confident misclassifications. The fix wasn't clever - just more data that looks like how people actually take photos of their plants. Messy, badly lit, half the leaf out of frame. Once there was enough of that in the training set the models stopped caring about white balance. About 1.1 million augmented images now and light temperature just isn't a factor. No color card needed.
For tissue culture - I'd bet the multi-species part is what's killing you. I'd pick the single highest-value species, collect a probably-uncomfortable amount of well-labeled data for just that one, and see if things change. Right now you might not be able to tell what's a data problem vs a fundamental limitation, because the generalization overhead masks both.
steve_adams_86
> there's a cannabis verification gate, then routing into disease vs pest vs deficiency, then narrower classifiers from there. Each one has a simpler job so accuracy stays high.
That never occurred to me. That's a great insight.
> I'd pick the single highest-value species, collect a probably-uncomfortable amount of well-labeled data for just that one
I think you're right. If I want to move forward with it I think it's the only feasible way to validate a proof of concept. Generalizing can't produce a useful tool at my scale.
Thank you! I think this was a helpful nudge. Narrow classifiers could make some things a lot easier. Do you know of any reading materials about routing like this? Is it just programmatic decision tree stuff, or is there something more clever I'm unaware of?
all2
I'd love to use this for not cannabis things. I'm looking at building a greenhouse soon, and having this kind of automation for tomatoes or carrots would be dream-like.
ctbellmar
That's the idea - hence PlantLab, not CannaLab. Cannabis makes sense as the entry point because it's a cash crop with a big hobbyist scene, so there's enough interest to get real usage data early. But the goal is broader - tomatoes, grapes, whatever grows.
One crop at a time though. A so-so classifier across 50 species is way less useful than a really good one for the thing you're actually growing.
rrvsh
Trying to figure out how to get a job in this market for someone with sub 3 YoE in the industry :/ It's hard out there for juniors, y'all. I'm working at a company that I thought I could stay for years in, but my CTO left and now I'm shafted with basically all of their responsibilities - I'm not overly perturbed by this, as it's well within my ability, but I would much rather spend the next few years as an IC and really develop my skills as a SWE rather than jumping to manager this early... Also just getting an interview is insanely hard nowadays for some reason!
amysox
It's hard out there for everyone in this market. I've got literal decades of experience, but I've been pounding the virtual pavement for month after month, and still nothing.
atlgator
same.
mittermayr
20 solid years of experience, self-employed at the moment, but I got curious a while back and started browsing jobs, and it's ... well, tough to even find something unless you're an extreme specialist and trust to bank on that technology or niche sustaining you through the next few years.
MrDresden
To be honest it sounds like you hit the jackpot there.
You say this is a company you could see yourself working at for some time, and have been handed C suite level responsibility that you can handle. So seemingly you are content and able to handle the work load.
Learning to be a IC is something anyone can do given time, but learning to be a manager can only be learned by being on the job, if you are able to get it in the first place.
Now is really not a good time to jump ship, unless you know for certain that the new position is going to be stable.
Grab the opportunity, do a good job and perhaps study how to be a better IC in your free time. You'll come out on the other side with skills and experiences that many in this field will be missing.
rrvsh
Well I wanted to mainly commisserate with others also trying to job search so I didn't mention this, but its a relatively early stage startup with a very flawed business direction, which is why the CTO and the COO left, so it's a genuine sinking ship I'm trying to get off.
Still, thank you for the advice - I am definitely doing my best to make the best of my work hours!
opesorry
I'm with you on this. I will hit 3 YoE in June and have been doing excellent in my current role yet having no luck finding a new job. Interviews are hard to come by and I'm a month out on even getting a rejection reply from some companies.
hariwb
i'm interested in hiring early career people for my company - feel free to reach out to me at the email in my profile if you're interested
hariwb
i'm interested in hiring early career people for my company - feel free to reach out to me at the email in my profile if you're interested
em-bee
get your company to hire a fractional CTO to share the load so you get more time for coding. you can contact me. i am available.
Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?