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

Bespoke synthetic DNA is much cooler though.

We both happened to be traveling in the same country one New Year's and got to talking.

- 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 don't suppose you'll need documentation help at some point in the near future...?

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?

Might interest you!

>“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?

Sorry but that's so outside of my understanding it reads like pure science fiction

(I'm sure it's a thing, I'm just a moron)

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!

So yeah, at a certain mass...

Would love to hear any feedback thoughts!

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

I'm not familiar with the c4 model, I'll need to investigate.

> Why not make clickable code references visually stand out

Is the goal here that you want to know that a specific text block annotates a part of the code?

> Make a VScode extension for it

I think I will! I need to noodle a bit on the user experience here

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 [email protected]!

Not currently, can you elaborate why you'd want to the code window at the bottom?

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.

I use Figma to get a proof of concept of how I want things laid out. From there it's more tinkering at the code level.

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.

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.

Indeed it seems that way. It's kind of funny and sad at the same time when people get frustrated over such things.

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.

There would have to be two websites or something.

Yes. That... doesn't sound like a very hard technical challenge?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

I'm also building it in public so follow along if you want: https://twitter.com/TheOisinMoran/status/1725929527761596434

edit: thank goodness the domain name actually is https://lynkmi.com/, crisis averted.

#1 use right now is making looping clips from youtube videos, but I want it to function as a semi-shared way to organize bookmarks

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.

https://opnshlf.com

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 thought of doing this a while ago but for children books, never went on to actually do it but I definitely see a need in there,

* Children books are quite expensive

* Most of those you get over them in a couple minutes to an hour

* Your kids want new books every single day

Buying 5-10 and regularly trading them with other parents seems like a neat solution.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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"...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

https://beholder.vision

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 want it just for fun, but I’m sure it to real estate agents!

[1] https://www.skyebrowse.com/

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.

More info: https://edna.arslexis.io/help

https://github.com/martinn/quickapiclient

This is a product with a history of overpromising on the release date, but I'm being more realistic with the roadmap and streaming progress on Twitch.

If it helps think of it as the indie, non-AI version of Warp [1].

[0] https://terminal.click

[1] https://warp.dev

I recently saw a video about a terminal emulator being developed in Zig by Mitchell Hashimoto.

Googled now and found the text of the talk, which links to the video.

https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-and-useful-zig-pattern...

[0] https://vimeo.com/854038896

Having to open a RAM-hungry application to execute command-line applications is just negative progress.

Of all tested terminals xterm is faster only than konsole.

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).

How is the privacy aspect? Does it use ChatGPT? Do you support any local LLMs?

Terminal Click is made by a indie hacker (me) and will be selling copies on release. You’ll own the binary and that’s that.

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 [email protected]

FWIW, I did use chatgpt to write a lot of boilerplate JS and fix my bootstrap templates!

edit deadpan->deadman

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.

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

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch

It's not a perfect switch, but the idea is that you might have things you would only rather release when you're dead.

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.

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.

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.

If there is a link to sign up for a mailing list I'd be happy to be notified

I'd be really interested in something like this.

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.

I don't have a link to share since it's still fairly early in development, but I'm making good progress!

[1] https://habitica.com/

Both are very fun and rewarding, and I love building things that help spend less time in front of a (glowing) screen.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokashi_(horticulture)

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'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).

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!

I'm on an M1 OS 14.1.1

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.

This has been my design bible so far https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/money-la...

Real physics and computational communication problems. Crazy tech, fun stuff!!

https://bluelines.app/

https://opinionmoji.com/

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.

;)

https://builder.bike

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.

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.

Terminals introduced cursor movement feature in the 1970s. Bill Joy responded with releasing vi in 1976. Text editing as we know it today was born. It used ... the whole screen! How the shell responded to this new feature? It largely didn't.

Back to NGS. The programming language is in a good shape. Working on the UI.

https://github.com/ngs-lang/ngs/wiki/UI-Design

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.

https://ottava.io/

I give you a non-intrusive bait (ssh private key, crypto wallet private key), you store it anywhere you want to monitor.

We are right now also open sourcing our shading simulation code of WebGL as an npm package, check out https://github.com/open-pv/simshady if that is interesting for you.

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.

https://produktly.com/