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Showing posts from July, 2020

Launch HN: BaseDash (YC S20) – Edit your database with the ease of a spreadsheet https://ift.tt/3gcFMio

Launch HN: BaseDash (YC S20) – Edit your database with the ease of a spreadsheet Hey everyone! I'm Max from BaseDash ( https://www.basedash.io ). BaseDash is an internal tool that lets you edit your production database with the ease of a spreadsheet. It's like being able to use Airtable to manage your company's internal operations. I was working on a side project a few years ago that required a lot of manual data management. I was using Django Admin which was fine, but wished I could just set up a two-way sync between my SQL database and Airtable (without any crazy Zapier workflows). After building a quick prototype as an internal tool, I realized that there was a space missing for a product somewhere between an admin panel and a database client. Something with an amazing interface that's usable by both engineers and non-technical users who need to access data within their company (e.g. customer support, operations). From there, I built BaseDash with a strong focus on e
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Launch HN: Humanloop (YC S20) – A platform to annotate, train and deploy NLP https://ift.tt/3hPLoiS

Launch HN: Humanloop (YC S20) – A platform to annotate, train and deploy NLP Hey HN. We’re Peter, Raza and Jordan of Humanloop ( https://humanloop.com ) and we’re building a low code platform to annotate data, rapidly train and then deploy Natural Language Processing (NLP) models. We use active learning research to make this possible with 5-10x less labelled data. We’ve worked on large machine learning products in industry (Alexa, text-to-speech systems at Google and in insurance modelling) and seen first-hand the huge efforts required to get these systems trained, deployed and working well in production. Despite huge progress in pretrained models (BERT, GPT-3), one of the biggest bottlenecks remains getting enough _good quality_ labelled data. Unlike annotations for driverless cars, the data that’s being annotated for NLP often requires domain expertise that’s hard to outsource. We’ve spoken to teams using NLP for medical chat bots, legal contract analysis, cyber security monitoring a
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Launch HN: QuestDB (YC S20) – Fast open source time series database https://ift.tt/2EjYre2

Launch HN: QuestDB (YC S20) – Fast open source time series database Hey everyone, I’m Vlad and I co-founded QuestDB ( https://questdb.io ) with Nic and Tanc. QuestDB is an open source database for time series, events, and analytical workloads with a primary focus on performance ( https://ift.tt/2DmHzQo ). It started in 2012 when an energy trading company hired me to rebuild their real-time vessel tracking system. Management wanted me to use a well-known XML database that they had just bought a license for. This option would have required to take down production for about a week just to ingest the data. And a week downtime was not an option. With no more money to spend on software, I turned to alternatives such as OpenTSDB but they were not a fit for our data model. There was no solution in sight to deliver the project. Then, I stumbled upon Peter Lawrey’s Java Chronicle library [1]. It loaded the same data in 2 minutes instead of a week using memory-mapped files. Besides the performanc
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Launch HN: Daybreak Health (YC S20) – Online counseling designed for teens https://ift.tt/2XheXCv

Launch HN: Daybreak Health (YC S20) – Online counseling designed for teens I'm Alex, one of the cofounders of Daybreak Health (www.daybreakhealth.com) along with Luke and Sid. We help teens feel better, build skills for life and achieve their goals through online counseling. Our licensed counselors provide evidence-based counseling to teens through online video sessions, messaging, and a mobile app. The evidence supports that behavioral therapy like CBT and DBT is effective. It works to treat diagnosable conditions like anxiety and depression, and it also works to help young people feel happier and achieve their goals [1][2][3][4][5]. But too often teens don't get the mental health support they need because it is stigmatized, difficult to schedule and attend, and expensive. At Daybreak we bring counseling to the teen on a digital device and we charge less than half the cost of a traditional therapy session. In October of 2018, my younger brother nearly lost his life due to the
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Show HN: Bite-Sized Summaries of Patents https://ift.tt/32PiBaf

Show HN: Bite-Sized Summaries of Patents Hi everyone For the past several months I have been building a platform to publish bite-sized summaries of latest patents. The purpose is to help engineers and product managers keep track of changing technology landscape and learn faster. Recently, we published summaries of 22 Apple patents related to augmented & virtual reality. Follow this link to read: https://ift.tt/2WQMbIG Use cases described in summaries: Move around furniture, make travel less boring, a better Google Cardboard, enhanced interaction with maps, annotate real world objects & more. Please follow the collection if you like the idea :) July 24, 2020 at 09:09AM
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Launch HN: Sidekick (YC S20) – A new hardware device to connect remote teams https://ift.tt/2CX8vJw

Launch HN: Sidekick (YC S20) – A new hardware device to connect remote teams Hi HN, I'm Andy, one of the founders at Sidekick ( https://sidekick.video/ ). Sidekick is a new hardware device built to connect remote teams with an always-on video call. Sidekick sits on your desk next to your computer — with Sidekick you just turn to your teammates and talk, as if you're in the same room. Like many of you all, we were recently forced to start working remotely because of COVID. After fleeing NYC to return to our childhood homes, we quickly realized that starting a company while remote was brutal. We were missing out on all the spontaneous conversations and camaraderie that occur when we're in the same room. We knew we needed to simulate being in the same room to build our company. Initially we built Sidekick just for ourselves, but many of the founders in our YC batch wanted to try it out! We realized that our founding team wasn't an anomaly for wanting an always-on video dev
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Launch HN: Reploy (YC S20) – Instant fullstack staging environments for web apps https://ift.tt/2ZOiE3W

Launch HN: Reploy (YC S20) – Instant fullstack staging environments for web apps Hello Hacker News! We're Jay and Himank from Reploy ( https://getreploy.com ). We're building a platform that allows teams to easily configure full-stack staging environments or "previews" of their web app which are created on every open PR. In the past, Himank and I spent time at several startups (~10->200 employees), where we were on customer-facing, product-oriented teams. We often found ourselves in positions where we wanted to share our environment with designer/PM/sales folks who didn't necessarily have a dev environment setup, and ngrok didn't cut it. Further, even when trying to share our environment with fellow engineers, there was always a slow down when requiring that they git stash, git pull, etc.. The solution to these pain points was either: 1) Waiting for a full staging or production deployment, which in most cases, wasn't really practical (from a cost and/or
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Launch HN: Charityvest (YC S20) – Employee charitable funds and gift matching https://ift.tt/2OM2UZ7

Launch HN: Charityvest (YC S20) – Employee charitable funds and gift matching Stephen, Jon, and Ashby here, the co-founders of Charityvest ( https://charityvest.org ). We created a modern, simple, and affordable way for companies to include charitable giving in their suite of employee benefits. We give employees their own tax-deductible charitable giving fund, like an “HSA for Charity.” They can make contributions into their fund and, from their fund, support any of the 1.4M charities in the US, all on one tax receipt. Using the funds, we enable companies to operate gift matching programs that run on autopilot. Each donation to a charity from an employee is matched automatically by the company in our system. A company can set up a matching gift program and launch giving funds to employees in about 10 minutes of work. Historically, corporate charitable giving matching programs have been administratively painful to operate. Making payments to charities, maintaining tax records, and doing
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Show HN: My 10 yr olds recent scratch creations https://ift.tt/32yZMrz

Show HN: My 10 yr olds recent scratch creations Hi HN, my 10 yr old asked me to share his recent scratch creations with ya'll so here I am. He's relatively new to scratch. If you have a moment to spare, check out some of his work here. Enjoy! Swamp (platformer) - https://ift.tt/2DRmYH8 Unstoppable (visualizer) - https://ift.tt/3hfcMGN July 20, 2020 at 02:43AM
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Show HN: JavaScript regexp eBook with hundreds of examples and exercises https://ift.tt/3hbzP5u

Show HN: JavaScript regexp eBook with hundreds of examples and exercises Hello. I updated my ebook on JavaScript regular expressions [1] today - updates include corrections, additional content, exercises, solutions, etc All my ebooks [2] are currently free to help with quarantine reading. These include GNU grep & ripgrep, GNU sed, GNU awk and three books on regular expressions - Python, Ruby, JavaScript I'd appreciate your feedback and hope the books are useful. Happy learning :) [1] https://ift.tt/2rfH2x4 [2] https://ift.tt/389FB3W July 18, 2020 at 05:42PM
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Show HN: Midnight.pub – Virtual Speakeasy https://ift.tt/3fxJZNn

Show HN: Midnight.pub – Virtual Speakeasy Midnight is a side-project I've been working on for the past year, but only released in alpha a month ago. It aims to be the web equivalent of your local pub: a place you can go to and talk about your day with strangers or friends. It's heavily inspired by write.as (for simplicy) and Roam (for bi-directional linking). My hope is that it fosters creative writing as well as typical pub discussions. You can read more about it and the concept on https://midnight.pub Here are some example of interesting stories written: https://ift.tt/32qUApv https://ift.tt/3eDRqRY https://ift.tt/3h95gNG Thanks for reading! July 17, 2020 at 01:04PM
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Launch HN: Jika (YC S20) – Price A/B Testing for Shopify https://ift.tt/2ZzTJB9

Launch HN: Jika (YC S20) – Price A/B Testing for Shopify Hi all! I'm Kennan and I recently founded Jika ( https://jika.ai ). Jika helps Shopify sellers A/B test their product pricing so they can make more money. Let’s say you sell shoes on Shopify for $100 and want to test $110. You’d 1-click install the Jika Shopify App and go to a dashboard where you select and start a test for $110. We then handle the heavy lifting of showing price A to 50% of your visitors and price B to the other 50%. As the test is running, Jika keeps track of revenue, conversions, and visitors at each price point. You’d repeat this process as much as you can since the optimal price for a product is always changing. Up until now, most people have priced off competitors, but that doesn't cut it anymore with big companies getting more and more sophisticated. A prime example of this is Amazon accelerating their development of in-house brands (~640 in late 2019) and using their dataset to outprice other onlin
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Show HN: An easy way to do more focused work in Slack https://ift.tt/2ChXPFg

Show HN: An easy way to do more focused work in Slack The easiest way to describe Focus Mode is, ‘It’s the Pomodoro technique — designed exclusively for Slack.’ It lets users add the task they’re working on, set how long they’d like to focus on it, and how long the break should last between each focus period. In essence, it’s a nifty way to bring more focused work to the busy workspaces of Slack. The creators of Focus Mode are my team at Geekbot: the custom Slackbot that helps remote-first companies (including the likes of Zapier, Shopify, Zendesk) better manage routine tasks, like daily standups, in Slack. So to say we’re at home in Slack is an understatement: and our Geekbot experience was invaluable in helping us see what else was needed to make Slack a more focused, less distracting workspace. We’re really proud of Focus Mode because it’s simple to use (just three fields to fill in), it keeps your teammates in-sync with what you’re working on (that’s what the Geekbot mission is all
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Show HN: Tool for Creating SQL Pipelines – Structure.rest https://ift.tt/3gZvGkY

Show HN: Tool for Creating SQL Pipelines – Structure.rest Hi All! We've spent a few months on getting an MVP together, and would love to get some feedback on whether this tool meets you needs. Here is a link to a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBLi3vdKB-4&feature=emb_rel_pause Here's a link to our website: https://ift.tt/391iU2t And here's a blog article, I published today in the space: https://ift.tt/3fzkQSp July 15, 2020 at 10:55PM
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Launch HN: Legacy (YC S19) – we help men test and freeze their sperm https://ift.tt/30hABH8

Launch HN: Legacy (YC S19) – we help men test and freeze their sperm Hi everyone, I'm Khaled Kteily – and I helped found Legacy (YC S19). We help men become fathers through sperm testing, sperm improvement, and sperm freezing. To do this, we built an at-home sperm testing kit. Using our kit and courier services, we receive your semen sample at our labs. From there, we analyze your semen for a variety of parameters, most notably count, volume, concentration, motility, and morphology. This helps you understand your fertility. If the analysis concludes that your sperm are healthy, we then offer you the option to freeze at rates more competitive than a traditional clinic. If we find low counts or poor motility (the sperm's ability to swim), we'll provide you with lifestyle recommendations based on your analysis and a survey you completed. If necessary, we'll connect you with our urologist on staff or a reputable fertility doctor in your area. Men often assume they'll ha
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Show HN: Who wants to be hired in a new avatar https://ift.tt/2Zs4ju1

Show HN: Who wants to be hired in a new avatar Hello all, I saw that many people have lost their job due to the current economic situation and I have seen many people posting status and updates on Twitter, Reddit and LinkedIn about their job search struggle. Even on who wants to be hired thread on HN, I saw more than 300 people seeking jobs. I have been thinking very hard on how I can possibly help them find a job. So I thought of building a platform where profiles of few randomly selected job seekers (2-10) is featured daily to help them find the job quickly. My mission is to help 3000+ people find a job in 2020. Here's the link: https://www.jobroz.com. July 14, 2020 at 09:27PM
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Launch HN: Aquarium (YC S20) – Improve Your ML Dataset Quality https://ift.tt/3ew54Xm

Launch HN: Aquarium (YC S20) – Improve Your ML Dataset Quality Hi everyone! I’m Peter from Aquarium ( https://ift.tt/3dwAufn ). We help deep learning developers find problems in their datasets and models, then help fix them by smartly curating their datasets. We want to build the same high-power tooling for data curation that sophisticated ML companies like Cruise, Waymo, and Tesla have and bring it to the masses. ML models are defined by a combination of code and the data that the code trains on. A programmer must think hard about what behavior they want from their model, assemble a dataset of labeled examples of what they want their model to do, and then train their model on that dataset. As they encounter errors in production, they must collect and label data for the model to train on to fix these errors, and verify they're fixed by monitoring the model’s performance on a test set with previous failure cases. See Andrej Karpathy’s Software 2.0 article ( https://ift.tt/2hsOCzx )
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Show HN: Learnawesome.org – Open-source learning map for humanity https://ift.tt/2DnhovU

Show HN: Learnawesome.org – Open-source learning map for humanity Hello HN, Over the last 12 months, I have been building https://ift.tt/2y678SN This idea came from Danny Hillis' 2012 talk at OSCON, which itself was inspired from Neal Stepehenson's _The Diamond Age : A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer_ The dream is to build a tool that matches the right learning material to the right student at the right time. Wikipedia is great, but it doesn't do a good job of leveraging the rich variety of learning resources that exist on the Web. Same applies to GoodReads - which is focused only on books, whereas these days we actually learn from videos, articles, MOOCs, tweetstorms, slack/discord groups, podcasts, livestreams, newsletters, online conferences, apps & games, interactive explorables and much more. For now, I am building it as a social network for lifelong learners. It's open-source, built with Rails + PostgreSQL, and complies with standards like Dublin Core'
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Launch HN: Yotta Savings (YC S20) – Behavioral psychology to help people save https://ift.tt/2AGGO6K

Launch HN: Yotta Savings (YC S20) – Behavioral psychology to help people save Hey HN! We are Adam & Ben, co-founders of Yotta Savings ( https://ift.tt/2Ze0BUx ), an app that uses behavioral psychology to help people save money by making saving exciting. We were inspired to build Yotta by the Premium Bond program ( https://ift.tt/2s9qUZs ) in the UK and a Freakonomics episode on prize-linked savings ( https://ift.tt/2AGGSU2... ). Premium Bonds is a government-run prize-linked savings program in the UK that started in 1956. It’s a savings account where people get chances to win monthly prizes through a random chance raffle. The more you save, the more entries you get. Premium Bonds are popular because many people prefer the chance to win a life-changing amount of money rather than a small interest payment from a bank. As a result, the program has been successful: over 23M people save through Premium Bonds (33% of the population) with over $100B deposited. Human nature makes it diffic
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Show HN: SSVM – Speed up your Node.js apps with Rust and WebAssembly https://ift.tt/3gEU4Iu

Show HN: SSVM – Speed up your Node.js apps with Rust and WebAssembly Raw performance (the lack of) is always a contentious point for JavaScript, especially in our post-Moore era of computing. Node.js gets around this issue through extensive of use of native libraries and modules written in C, including the V8 JS engine itself. But as application developers, how do YOU create high performance functions? Write in C and run as a NAPI module? Write in Rust and run as a V8 wasm? Well, there is another (better and faster) way now! The SSVM is a fully featured WebAssembly VM that is optimized for server-side applications. https://ift.tt/38HMOsM You can write functions in Rust, compile to WebAssembly and run in SSVM, and access it as if they are JS functions in Node.js. Easy as pie. Give it a try (https://ift.tt/2O9fxgu)! By rewriting computationally intensive functions from JavaScript to Rust, developers could achieve 10x to 100x times performance (https://ift.tt/2BJxdwM) gain in terms of sta
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Show HN: I built a service to help companies save 35%+ on their AWS bills https://ift.tt/38LQv0n

Show HN: I built a service to help companies save 35%+ on their AWS bills Hey HN: I'm Kaveh, the founder of Usage (https://www.usage.ai/) We help companies drive down AWS costs. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. Stakeholders, especially engineers, are required to spend unnecessary time manually finding underutilized or overly expensive EC2s. We believe the optimization process should be done automatically through a series of sophisticated algorithms. At the moment, there are over 70,000 AWS EC2 prices - doing that manually just won't scale at most organizations. My background is in software engineering. Previous to founding Usage, I worked on high-performance computing research at JP Morgan Chase and as a software engineer at a number of smaller startups. Here's how it works: We are typically hired by the head of engineering. Usage makes its initial analysis of your organization's AWS usage, then it's passed to a human that manually verifies each rec
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Launch HN: ElectroNeek (YC W20) – Automatically find and automate routine work https://ift.tt/2BIZnbc

Launch HN: ElectroNeek (YC W20) – Automatically find and automate routine work Hey Hacker News! We are Sergey Yudovsky, Dmitry Karpov and Mike Rozhin, founders of ElectroNeek ( https://electroneek.com ), an automation platform for repetitive business tasks. The product we build let users design software ‘robots’ that imitate human actions in apps and websites, and deploy them to eliminate routine work. Our software also spots patterns of repetitive processes that users do in business app and suggests what to automate in the first place. Some of you may have heard of a technology niche called Robotic Process Automation, or RPA. Basically, it’s about automating user actions on Graphic User Interface level, so no API is needed to automate any type of repetitive work on the computer. It has been known for 20+ years in the software testing space but emerged as a business process automation tool over the last decade, getting big momentum in Enterprise (95% of Fortune 500 use it for back-offi
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