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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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’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
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.
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
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
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 [email protected]
FWIW, I did use chatgpt to write a lot of boilerplate JS and fix my bootstrap templates!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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'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.
[+] [-] koeng|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] unsupp0rted|1 year ago|reply
Bespoke synthetic DNA is much cooler though.
[+] [-] drones|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kuczmama|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] KRAKRISMOTT|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] blueferret|1 year ago|reply
I don't suppose you'll need documentation help at some point in the near future...?
[+] [-] b20000|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperman|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] javcasas|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] logtempo|1 year ago|reply
Might interest you!
[+] [-] JohnMakin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jmkni|1 year ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] tip_of_the_hat|1 year ago|reply
Would love to hear any feedback thoughts!
[+] [-] jawns|1 year ago|reply
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 $45 toward a new washing machine.
[+] [-] pkoird|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] curtisblaine|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperman|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lesostep|1 year ago|reply
It would solve the problem of littering your house with cheap products, save the buyer the embarrassment of gifting something that looks like 2$ 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.
[+] [-] carlosjobim|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] j2bax|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] westcort|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] OisinMoran|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] pyrrhotech|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bbor|1 year ago|reply
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"...
[+] [-] c_o_n_v_e_x|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] m3kw9|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cosgrove|1 year ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] halfcat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] carabiner|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] AznHisoka|1 year ago|reply
So far, there’s more than 1500 subscribers after a month and a half
[+] [-] willemh|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] moralestapia|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] will_wright|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] danthedudeis|1 year ago|reply
I've been wanting to build this too. Want to chat? Happy to collaborate
My username at gmail.com
[+] [-] stpn|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] AtomicOrbital|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Hasz|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] abroun_beholder|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kjksf|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] pebblesun|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] abnercoimbre|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] jvanderbot|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] matteason|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] funksta|1 year ago|reply
Both are very fun and rewarding, and I love building things that help spend less time in front of a (glowing) screen.
[+] [-] ysavir|1 year ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] emceestork|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] _kush|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] typpo|1 year ago|reply
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.