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Show HN: Kloudi – Locally-hosted universal CLI

Launch HN: Cord (YC W21) – training data toolbox for computer vision

Hey HN community -<p>I’m Ulrik from Cord (<a href="https://cord.tech" rel="nofollow">https://cord.tech</a>) in the current YC W21 batch [1] - we are building software that allows people to label their data intelligently using a toolbox of various ‘labeling algorithms’. Labeling algorithms are any units of intelligence (e.g. a pre-trained model, or an interpolation algorithm) that help automate the annotation process. This enables data science and machine learning teams to rapidly iterate on their ML models without having to farm out labeling tasks to an external workforce.<p>Today we’re launching the first part of our product, our Web App, which serves our initial set of automation features through a GUI. It also allows you to classify images and draw vector labels, visualize data, and perform collaborative QA.<p>Computer vision ML algorithms are widely used for tasks like detecting everyday objects such as cars and pedestrians. However, they are yet to see widespread adoption for things like detecting cancerous polyps during an endoscopic procedure or blood clots in MRI scans. The lack of massive-scale labeled training datasets that fuel contemporary approaches is often the blocking element in building ML applications that solve these more specialised tasks. We also believe that the core part of the IP of an ML application stems from the labeled data used to train it.<p>Creating these datasets is challenging for several reasons. Labeling the data requires expensive domain-expert annotators, and privacy might prevent the data from being sent to an external workforce. Ultimately most labeling work tends to be done using open-source tools that were not created for speed and purpose-built to handle massive-scale datasets[2]. These tools also tend to provide a poor experience for the end consumer of the training data (e.g., data scientists, ML engineers) because they lack intelligence and require high manual input.<p>The initial seed of the idea came while I was working on a CS master’s project of visualizing massive-scale medical image datasets. I saw saw how much time and effort was being spent by doctors on labeling data. I met my co-founder Eric, who had worked as a quant researcher in finance, and after meeting him we realized we could take an algorithmic approach to tackling the labeling problem. Instead of writing trading algorithms, we turned our focus to writing labeling algorithms.<p>For example, for a food calorie estimation project we translated image level classifications of food items to individualized bounding box labels using a labeling algorithm we wrote with our SDK, requiring only one manual label per food item. Although it was an image dataset, our algorithm approximated noisy bounding box labels by using a CSRT object tracker across images. It then trained a shallow Faster RCNN ‘micro-model’ on the noisy labels, ran inference on the data, and suppressed earlier noisy labels. We then quickly visually reviewed and adjusted the results on our Web App[3]. We have applied a similar approach in areas such as gastroenterology[4] and pathology.<p>The days of relying on an army of human annotators and waiting to start the model building process are hopefully (soon) over. We are incredibly excited to be driving for that change - and are delighted to be sharing Cord with the HN community! We would love to hear your feedback. How are you going about creating and managing training data today? What are your key constraints? If you have used a creative method to label your data before, please share. Thank you so much in advance!<p>[1] What I Learned From My First Month at Y Combinator - <a href="https://medium.com/swlh/what-i-learned-from-my-first-month-at-y-combinator-5b35fb9ebb7b" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/swlh/what-i-learned-from-my-first-month-a...</a><p>[2] Why You Should Ditch Your In-House Training Data Tools (And Avoid Building Your Own) - <a href="https://medium.com/p/ef78915ee84f" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/p/ef78915ee84f</a><p>[3] Label a Dataset with a Few Lines of Code - <a href="https://eric-landau.medium.com/label-a-dataset-with-a-few-lines-of-code-45c140ff119d" rel="nofollow">https://eric-landau.medium.com/label-a-dataset-with-a-few-li...</a><p>[4] Pain Relief for Doctors Labelling Data - <a href="https://eric-landau.medium.com/pain-relief-for-doctors-labelling-data-72f3e5e31c92" rel="nofollow">https://eric-landau.medium.com/pain-relief-for-doctors-label...</a>

Launch HN: Cord (YC W21) – training data toolbox for computer vision

Hey HN community -<p>I’m Ulrik from Cord (<a href="https://cord.tech" rel="nofollow">https://cord.tech</a>) in the current YC W21 batch [1] - we are building software that allows people to label their data intelligently using a toolbox of various ‘labeling algorithms’. Labeling algorithms are any units of intelligence (e.g. a pre-trained model, or an interpolation algorithm) that help automate the annotation process. This enables data science and machine learning teams to rapidly iterate on their ML models without having to farm out labeling tasks to an external workforce.<p>Today we’re launching the first part of our product, our Web App, which serves our initial set of automation features through a GUI. It also allows you to classify images and draw vector labels, visualize data, and perform collaborative QA.<p>Computer vision ML algorithms are widely used for tasks like detecting everyday objects such as cars and pedestrians. However, they are yet to see widespread adoption for things like detecting cancerous polyps during an endoscopic procedure or blood clots in MRI scans. The lack of massive-scale labeled training datasets that fuel contemporary approaches is often the blocking element in building ML applications that solve these more specialised tasks. We also believe that the core part of the IP of an ML application stems from the labeled data used to train it.<p>Creating these datasets is challenging for several reasons. Labeling the data requires expensive domain-expert annotators, and privacy might prevent the data from being sent to an external workforce. Ultimately most labeling work tends to be done using open-source tools that were not created for speed and purpose-built to handle massive-scale datasets[2]. These tools also tend to provide a poor experience for the end consumer of the training data (e.g., data scientists, ML engineers) because they lack intelligence and require high manual input.<p>The initial seed of the idea came while I was working on a CS master’s project of visualizing massive-scale medical image datasets. I saw saw how much time and effort was being spent by doctors on labeling data. I met my co-founder Eric, who had worked as a quant researcher in finance, and after meeting him we realized we could take an algorithmic approach to tackling the labeling problem. Instead of writing trading algorithms, we turned our focus to writing labeling algorithms.<p>For example, for a food calorie estimation project we translated image level classifications of food items to individualized bounding box labels using a labeling algorithm we wrote with our SDK, requiring only one manual label per food item. Although it was an image dataset, our algorithm approximated noisy bounding box labels by using a CSRT object tracker across images. It then trained a shallow Faster RCNN ‘micro-model’ on the noisy labels, ran inference on the data, and suppressed earlier noisy labels. We then quickly visually reviewed and adjusted the results on our Web App[3]. We have applied a similar approach in areas such as gastroenterology[4] and pathology.<p>The days of relying on an army of human annotators and waiting to start the model building process are hopefully (soon) over. We are incredibly excited to be driving for that change - and are delighted to be sharing Cord with the HN community! We would love to hear your feedback. How are you going about creating and managing training data today? What are your key constraints? If you have used a creative method to label your data before, please share. Thank you so much in advance!<p>[1] What I Learned From My First Month at Y Combinator - <a href="https://medium.com/swlh/what-i-learned-from-my-first-month-at-y-combinator-5b35fb9ebb7b" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/swlh/what-i-learned-from-my-first-month-a...</a><p>[2] Why You Should Ditch Your In-House Training Data Tools (And Avoid Building Your Own) - <a href="https://medium.com/p/ef78915ee84f" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/p/ef78915ee84f</a><p>[3] Label a Dataset with a Few Lines of Code - <a href="https://eric-landau.medium.com/label-a-dataset-with-a-few-lines-of-code-45c140ff119d" rel="nofollow">https://eric-landau.medium.com/label-a-dataset-with-a-few-li...</a><p>[4] Pain Relief for Doctors Labelling Data - <a href="https://eric-landau.medium.com/pain-relief-for-doctors-labelling-data-72f3e5e31c92" rel="nofollow">https://eric-landau.medium.com/pain-relief-for-doctors-label...</a>

Launch HN: Cord (YC W21) – training data toolbox for computer vision

Hey HN community -<p>I’m Ulrik from Cord (<a href="https://cord.tech" rel="nofollow">https://cord.tech</a>) in the current YC W21 batch [1] - we are building software that allows people to label their data intelligently using a toolbox of various ‘labeling algorithms’. Labeling algorithms are any units of intelligence (e.g. a pre-trained model, or an interpolation algorithm) that help automate the annotation process. This enables data science and machine learning teams to rapidly iterate on their ML models without having to farm out labeling tasks to an external workforce.<p>Today we’re launching the first part of our product, our Web App, which serves our initial set of automation features through a GUI. It also allows you to classify images and draw vector labels, visualize data, and perform collaborative QA.<p>Computer vision ML algorithms are widely used for tasks like detecting everyday objects such as cars and pedestrians. However, they are yet to see widespread adoption for things like detecting cancerous polyps during an endoscopic procedure or blood clots in MRI scans. The lack of massive-scale labeled training datasets that fuel contemporary approaches is often the blocking element in building ML applications that solve these more specialised tasks. We also believe that the core part of the IP of an ML application stems from the labeled data used to train it.<p>Creating these datasets is challenging for several reasons. Labeling the data requires expensive domain-expert annotators, and privacy might prevent the data from being sent to an external workforce. Ultimately most labeling work tends to be done using open-source tools that were not created for speed and purpose-built to handle massive-scale datasets[2]. These tools also tend to provide a poor experience for the end consumer of the training data (e.g., data scientists, ML engineers) because they lack intelligence and require high manual input.<p>The initial seed of the idea came while I was working on a CS master’s project of visualizing massive-scale medical image datasets. I saw saw how much time and effort was being spent by doctors on labeling data. I met my co-founder Eric, who had worked as a quant researcher in finance, and after meeting him we realized we could take an algorithmic approach to tackling the labeling problem. Instead of writing trading algorithms, we turned our focus to writing labeling algorithms.<p>For example, for a food calorie estimation project we translated image level classifications of food items to individualized bounding box labels using a labeling algorithm we wrote with our SDK, requiring only one manual label per food item. Although it was an image dataset, our algorithm approximated noisy bounding box labels by using a CSRT object tracker across images. It then trained a shallow Faster RCNN ‘micro-model’ on the noisy labels, ran inference on the data, and suppressed earlier noisy labels. We then quickly visually reviewed and adjusted the results on our Web App[3]. We have applied a similar approach in areas such as gastroenterology[4] and pathology.<p>The days of relying on an army of human annotators and waiting to start the model building process are hopefully (soon) over. We are incredibly excited to be driving for that change - and are delighted to be sharing Cord with the HN community! We would love to hear your feedback. How are you going about creating and managing training data today? What are your key constraints? If you have used a creative method to label your data before, please share. Thank you so much in advance!<p>[1] What I Learned From My First Month at Y Combinator - <a href="https://medium.com/swlh/what-i-learned-from-my-first-month-at-y-combinator-5b35fb9ebb7b" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/swlh/what-i-learned-from-my-first-month-a...</a><p>[2] Why You Should Ditch Your In-House Training Data Tools (And Avoid Building Your Own) - <a href="https://medium.com/p/ef78915ee84f" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/p/ef78915ee84f</a><p>[3] Label a Dataset with a Few Lines of Code - <a href="https://eric-landau.medium.com/label-a-dataset-with-a-few-lines-of-code-45c140ff119d" rel="nofollow">https://eric-landau.medium.com/label-a-dataset-with-a-few-li...</a><p>[4] Pain Relief for Doctors Labelling Data - <a href="https://eric-landau.medium.com/pain-relief-for-doctors-labelling-data-72f3e5e31c92" rel="nofollow">https://eric-landau.medium.com/pain-relief-for-doctors-label...</a>

Launch HN: Chorus Meditation (YC W21) – Meditation for Non-Meditators

Hey everyone! I’m Ali and, together with my co-founders MK, Alex, and Warren, I’m building Chorus Meditation (<a href="https://chorusmeditation.com/" rel="nofollow">https://chorusmeditation.com/</a>). We provide online group meditation classes led by trained instructors.<p>MK and I met after we both had found the benefits of a traditional meditation practice, but only after much difficulty getting started because it took over 30 days to feel the benefits and it can often feel isolating and like nothing is “working.” At the time, MK was a top SoulCycle instructor. She is a master at creating community and motivating people to be their best through a perfect balance of humor, approachability, vulnerability, and acceptance. I was an avid SoulCycle rider and we bonded over our shared love for meditation and separately, our love for the instantly gratifying and social experience that SoulCycle had created. She and I decided that if we could create an experience for the mind that mirrored what SoulCycle had done for the body, we could help millions of people just like us.<p>So, we spent months, combining different mindfulness techniques into a new method, testing out various versions on our living floors. We tried starting the class with a 3 minute traditional meditation before moving into the breathing pattern - no dice - we had promised people non-traditional meditation so when we hit them with exactly traditional meditation right at the start, it turned people off. Next we tried getting into the breathing pattern right off the bat -- still no dice. But we kept at it, and 16 major iterations later, we landed on what is now our Chorus class.<p>Traditional meditation can be life-changing for those who stick with it, but the unfortunate truth is that for most people it’s hard to sustain the discipline to stick with it long enough to unlock the ah-ha moment. Once you cross that threshold you feel its power, but with Chorus we are trying to help people who struggle with that onboarding phase cross the threshold more easily. We've found that one of the main barriers many people run into with traditional meditation is that they're doing it alone, and they often feel like nothing is happening. So, we made Chorus 1) social, with warm, personable teachers and fellow class attendees, 2) fun, with new and popular music, and 3) designed to give motivating results in the first session and on-going. For example, the breathing pattern we use brings more oxygen into the body than normal inhales and exhales, which causes a tingling sensation, giving users a quick and satisfying feeling even in the first session. You can think of the tingles like endorphins in exercise - they feel good and tell you that <i>something</i> is working - so you are satisfied and want to come back for more. Everything in Chorus is designed to motivate you to keep going.<p>Our members pay $40-a-month to have access to live and pre-recorded classes set to the beat of popular music like Beyonce, Odesza, Bon Iver, etc, that help them start their day with a positive mindset or unwind at night before bed. If you want to give it a try, we just launched a new class specifically designed to help you sleep — <a href="https://chorusmeditation.com/#book-a-class" rel="nofollow">https://chorusmeditation.com/#book-a-class</a><p>One of our users, a mother of young twins, shared: “my first experience unlocked something in me. Something visceral, and I thought - ‘this is so worth exploring.’” This is exactly the kind of reaction we’re going for.<p>I want to emphasize that we’re in no way trying to replace traditional meditation. We, ourselves, are reverent students of traditional practices. And we're well aware that we don't have anything to teach the millennia-old traditions of India and China. What we are trying to do is bridge the gap for people who find traditional techniques challenging so that they can avoid the discouraging feeling of “I’m doing this wrong” and empower them to develop their own mindfulness practice.<p>Another thing we do to support our users in the early stages of practice is provide a community in which they can share their experiences and get encouragement to keep going. This is one of the more satisfying aspects for us, because people report their positive experiences as well as their challenges. We hear from users who report feeling more calm and focused, or sleeping better, all the way up to "Chorus has truly transformed my life...I didn’t think I would ever have a relationship with my mom again, and now because of Chorus, I do.”<p>We are building Chorus for our collective community, so I’d really love to hear this community’s feedback. We'd love to hear from everybody, whether you're a complete meditation skeptic, someone who's found meditation challenging, or a seasoned meditator who has achieved total equanimity! We're eager to hear your experiences and thoughts and feedback!<p>Over to you, HN!

Launch HN: Chorus Meditation (YC W21) – Meditation for Non-Meditators

Hey everyone! I’m Ali and, together with my co-founders MK, Alex, and Warren, I’m building Chorus Meditation (<a href="https://chorusmeditation.com/" rel="nofollow">https://chorusmeditation.com/</a>). We provide online group meditation classes led by trained instructors.<p>MK and I met after we both had found the benefits of a traditional meditation practice, but only after much difficulty getting started because it took over 30 days to feel the benefits and it can often feel isolating and like nothing is “working.” At the time, MK was a top SoulCycle instructor. She is a master at creating community and motivating people to be their best through a perfect balance of humor, approachability, vulnerability, and acceptance. I was an avid SoulCycle rider and we bonded over our shared love for meditation and separately, our love for the instantly gratifying and social experience that SoulCycle had created. She and I decided that if we could create an experience for the mind that mirrored what SoulCycle had done for the body, we could help millions of people just like us.<p>So, we spent months, combining different mindfulness techniques into a new method, testing out various versions on our living floors. We tried starting the class with a 3 minute traditional meditation before moving into the breathing pattern - no dice - we had promised people non-traditional meditation so when we hit them with exactly traditional meditation right at the start, it turned people off. Next we tried getting into the breathing pattern right off the bat -- still no dice. But we kept at it, and 16 major iterations later, we landed on what is now our Chorus class.<p>Traditional meditation can be life-changing for those who stick with it, but the unfortunate truth is that for most people it’s hard to sustain the discipline to stick with it long enough to unlock the ah-ha moment. Once you cross that threshold you feel its power, but with Chorus we are trying to help people who struggle with that onboarding phase cross the threshold more easily. We've found that one of the main barriers many people run into with traditional meditation is that they're doing it alone, and they often feel like nothing is happening. So, we made Chorus 1) social, with warm, personable teachers and fellow class attendees, 2) fun, with new and popular music, and 3) designed to give motivating results in the first session and on-going. For example, the breathing pattern we use brings more oxygen into the body than normal inhales and exhales, which causes a tingling sensation, giving users a quick and satisfying feeling even in the first session. You can think of the tingles like endorphins in exercise - they feel good and tell you that <i>something</i> is working - so you are satisfied and want to come back for more. Everything in Chorus is designed to motivate you to keep going.<p>Our members pay $40-a-month to have access to live and pre-recorded classes set to the beat of popular music like Beyonce, Odesza, Bon Iver, etc, that help them start their day with a positive mindset or unwind at night before bed. If you want to give it a try, we just launched a new class specifically designed to help you sleep — <a href="https://chorusmeditation.com/#book-a-class" rel="nofollow">https://chorusmeditation.com/#book-a-class</a><p>One of our users, a mother of young twins, shared: “my first experience unlocked something in me. Something visceral, and I thought - ‘this is so worth exploring.’” This is exactly the kind of reaction we’re going for.<p>I want to emphasize that we’re in no way trying to replace traditional meditation. We, ourselves, are reverent students of traditional practices. And we're well aware that we don't have anything to teach the millennia-old traditions of India and China. What we are trying to do is bridge the gap for people who find traditional techniques challenging so that they can avoid the discouraging feeling of “I’m doing this wrong” and empower them to develop their own mindfulness practice.<p>Another thing we do to support our users in the early stages of practice is provide a community in which they can share their experiences and get encouragement to keep going. This is one of the more satisfying aspects for us, because people report their positive experiences as well as their challenges. We hear from users who report feeling more calm and focused, or sleeping better, all the way up to "Chorus has truly transformed my life...I didn’t think I would ever have a relationship with my mom again, and now because of Chorus, I do.”<p>We are building Chorus for our collective community, so I’d really love to hear this community’s feedback. We'd love to hear from everybody, whether you're a complete meditation skeptic, someone who's found meditation challenging, or a seasoned meditator who has achieved total equanimity! We're eager to hear your experiences and thoughts and feedback!<p>Over to you, HN!

Launch HN: Chorus Meditation (YC W21) – Meditation for Non-Meditators

Hey everyone! I’m Ali and, together with my co-founders MK, Alex, and Warren, I’m building Chorus Meditation (<a href="https://chorusmeditation.com/" rel="nofollow">https://chorusmeditation.com/</a>). We provide online group meditation classes led by trained instructors.<p>MK and I met after we both had found the benefits of a traditional meditation practice, but only after much difficulty getting started because it took over 30 days to feel the benefits and it can often feel isolating and like nothing is “working.” At the time, MK was a top SoulCycle instructor. She is a master at creating community and motivating people to be their best through a perfect balance of humor, approachability, vulnerability, and acceptance. I was an avid SoulCycle rider and we bonded over our shared love for meditation and separately, our love for the instantly gratifying and social experience that SoulCycle had created. She and I decided that if we could create an experience for the mind that mirrored what SoulCycle had done for the body, we could help millions of people just like us.<p>So, we spent months, combining different mindfulness techniques into a new method, testing out various versions on our living floors. We tried starting the class with a 3 minute traditional meditation before moving into the breathing pattern - no dice - we had promised people non-traditional meditation so when we hit them with exactly traditional meditation right at the start, it turned people off. Next we tried getting into the breathing pattern right off the bat -- still no dice. But we kept at it, and 16 major iterations later, we landed on what is now our Chorus class.<p>Traditional meditation can be life-changing for those who stick with it, but the unfortunate truth is that for most people it’s hard to sustain the discipline to stick with it long enough to unlock the ah-ha moment. Once you cross that threshold you feel its power, but with Chorus we are trying to help people who struggle with that onboarding phase cross the threshold more easily. We've found that one of the main barriers many people run into with traditional meditation is that they're doing it alone, and they often feel like nothing is happening. So, we made Chorus 1) social, with warm, personable teachers and fellow class attendees, 2) fun, with new and popular music, and 3) designed to give motivating results in the first session and on-going. For example, the breathing pattern we use brings more oxygen into the body than normal inhales and exhales, which causes a tingling sensation, giving users a quick and satisfying feeling even in the first session. You can think of the tingles like endorphins in exercise - they feel good and tell you that <i>something</i> is working - so you are satisfied and want to come back for more. Everything in Chorus is designed to motivate you to keep going.<p>Our members pay $40-a-month to have access to live and pre-recorded classes set to the beat of popular music like Beyonce, Odesza, Bon Iver, etc, that help them start their day with a positive mindset or unwind at night before bed. If you want to give it a try, we just launched a new class specifically designed to help you sleep — <a href="https://chorusmeditation.com/#book-a-class" rel="nofollow">https://chorusmeditation.com/#book-a-class</a><p>One of our users, a mother of young twins, shared: “my first experience unlocked something in me. Something visceral, and I thought - ‘this is so worth exploring.’” This is exactly the kind of reaction we’re going for.<p>I want to emphasize that we’re in no way trying to replace traditional meditation. We, ourselves, are reverent students of traditional practices. And we're well aware that we don't have anything to teach the millennia-old traditions of India and China. What we are trying to do is bridge the gap for people who find traditional techniques challenging so that they can avoid the discouraging feeling of “I’m doing this wrong” and empower them to develop their own mindfulness practice.<p>Another thing we do to support our users in the early stages of practice is provide a community in which they can share their experiences and get encouragement to keep going. This is one of the more satisfying aspects for us, because people report their positive experiences as well as their challenges. We hear from users who report feeling more calm and focused, or sleeping better, all the way up to "Chorus has truly transformed my life...I didn’t think I would ever have a relationship with my mom again, and now because of Chorus, I do.”<p>We are building Chorus for our collective community, so I’d really love to hear this community’s feedback. We'd love to hear from everybody, whether you're a complete meditation skeptic, someone who's found meditation challenging, or a seasoned meditator who has achieved total equanimity! We're eager to hear your experiences and thoughts and feedback!<p>Over to you, HN!

Launch HN: Chorus Meditation (YC W21) – Meditation for Non-Meditators

Hey everyone! I’m Ali and, together with my co-founders MK, Alex, and Warren, I’m building Chorus Meditation (<a href="https://chorusmeditation.com/" rel="nofollow">https://chorusmeditation.com/</a>). We provide online group meditation classes led by trained instructors.<p>MK and I met after we both had found the benefits of a traditional meditation practice, but only after much difficulty getting started because it took over 30 days to feel the benefits and it can often feel isolating and like nothing is “working.” At the time, MK was a top SoulCycle instructor. She is a master at creating community and motivating people to be their best through a perfect balance of humor, approachability, vulnerability, and acceptance. I was an avid SoulCycle rider and we bonded over our shared love for meditation and separately, our love for the instantly gratifying and social experience that SoulCycle had created. She and I decided that if we could create an experience for the mind that mirrored what SoulCycle had done for the body, we could help millions of people just like us.<p>So, we spent months, combining different mindfulness techniques into a new method, testing out various versions on our living floors. We tried starting the class with a 3 minute traditional meditation before moving into the breathing pattern - no dice - we had promised people non-traditional meditation so when we hit them with exactly traditional meditation right at the start, it turned people off. Next we tried getting into the breathing pattern right off the bat -- still no dice. But we kept at it, and 16 major iterations later, we landed on what is now our Chorus class.<p>Traditional meditation can be life-changing for those who stick with it, but the unfortunate truth is that for most people it’s hard to sustain the discipline to stick with it long enough to unlock the ah-ha moment. Once you cross that threshold you feel its power, but with Chorus we are trying to help people who struggle with that onboarding phase cross the threshold more easily. We've found that one of the main barriers many people run into with traditional meditation is that they're doing it alone, and they often feel like nothing is happening. So, we made Chorus 1) social, with warm, personable teachers and fellow class attendees, 2) fun, with new and popular music, and 3) designed to give motivating results in the first session and on-going. For example, the breathing pattern we use brings more oxygen into the body than normal inhales and exhales, which causes a tingling sensation, giving users a quick and satisfying feeling even in the first session. You can think of the tingles like endorphins in exercise - they feel good and tell you that <i>something</i> is working - so you are satisfied and want to come back for more. Everything in Chorus is designed to motivate you to keep going.<p>Our members pay $40-a-month to have access to live and pre-recorded classes set to the beat of popular music like Beyonce, Odesza, Bon Iver, etc, that help them start their day with a positive mindset or unwind at night before bed. If you want to give it a try, we just launched a new class specifically designed to help you sleep — <a href="https://chorusmeditation.com/#book-a-class" rel="nofollow">https://chorusmeditation.com/#book-a-class</a><p>One of our users, a mother of young twins, shared: “my first experience unlocked something in me. Something visceral, and I thought - ‘this is so worth exploring.’” This is exactly the kind of reaction we’re going for.<p>I want to emphasize that we’re in no way trying to replace traditional meditation. We, ourselves, are reverent students of traditional practices. And we're well aware that we don't have anything to teach the millennia-old traditions of India and China. What we are trying to do is bridge the gap for people who find traditional techniques challenging so that they can avoid the discouraging feeling of “I’m doing this wrong” and empower them to develop their own mindfulness practice.<p>Another thing we do to support our users in the early stages of practice is provide a community in which they can share their experiences and get encouragement to keep going. This is one of the more satisfying aspects for us, because people report their positive experiences as well as their challenges. We hear from users who report feeling more calm and focused, or sleeping better, all the way up to "Chorus has truly transformed my life...I didn’t think I would ever have a relationship with my mom again, and now because of Chorus, I do.”<p>We are building Chorus for our collective community, so I’d really love to hear this community’s feedback. We'd love to hear from everybody, whether you're a complete meditation skeptic, someone who's found meditation challenging, or a seasoned meditator who has achieved total equanimity! We're eager to hear your experiences and thoughts and feedback!<p>Over to you, HN!

Launch HN: Great Question (YC W21) – Customer research tools for software teams

Hi HN!<p>I’m Ned and along with my co-founder PJ (pjmurraynz) we’re building Great Question (<a href="https://greatquestion.co" rel="nofollow">https://greatquestion.co</a>) to make it easy to do customer research as part of every sprint or product release.<p>The maxim of Y Combinator is “talk to customers, build something people want” yet relatively few software teams regularly engage in customer research. This was definitely the case for us in our last startup, and even when we sold that business to a place with a well resourced research team we were largely on our own. Without any real tools or processes to do customer research we ended up muddling through, but it was always ad hoc - and often skipped so we could just get a release out the door. Bad news.<p>By talking to lots of customers (meta!) we learned that one of the biggest challenges teams face is in the logistics of research: finding customers to talk to, scheduling calls & paying incentives. The research community calls this Research Operations. We’re setting out to fix these problems by building tools that make it easy for small teams to do what companies like Facebook and Google do with massive teams of research coordinators.<p>We help you do better customer research, more often in four ways:<p>First, we help you build an on-demand pool of research subjects. These are customers who opt in to be notified about customer interview requests and surveys, or find out about beta product releases. They could also be customers you find in other forums or communities, through content marketing or direct outreach.<p>Second, we let you book time with a customer in a couple of clicks, or send out a survey or prototype test. We give you templates to save you creating these things from scratch every time, but also to keep you following best practice. Templates like Product Market Fit surveys are live now with more advanced ones like Van Westendorp pricing surveys coming soon (email me for early access).<p>Third, we handle all the messaging on platform to protect the privacy and consent of your users but also to manage what's called "participant fatigue", and handle any incentives to make sure you get the responses you need.<p>Finally, we make it easy to share what you’re learning with your team. Store your notes, observations, video files and transcripts in one place. Post it to Slack, get an email digest of learnings & upcoming interviews, and find previous research reports in one central place.<p>All of this is to say we’re building the tool we wish we had while building product at our last startup, and also in the belly of the beast after we got acquired. The tool that helps you go from having some big gnarly question to start getting answers in minutes, and which brings your team along for the journey. We use the tool religiously in-house and it's had a massive impact on not only our own product development process, but our first engineering hire (ex Twitch) has noted how much more connected he feels with our customers and the product he's building.<p>What do you all think? We’d love your feedback on the product and our approach. In particular we’d love to know how customer research works at your company and the challenges you face making it happen!

Launch HN: Great Question (YC W21) – Customer research tools for software teams

Hi HN!<p>I’m Ned and along with my co-founder PJ (pjmurraynz) we’re building Great Question (<a href="https://greatquestion.co" rel="nofollow">https://greatquestion.co</a>) to make it easy to do customer research as part of every sprint or product release.<p>The maxim of Y Combinator is “talk to customers, build something people want” yet relatively few software teams regularly engage in customer research. This was definitely the case for us in our last startup, and even when we sold that business to a place with a well resourced research team we were largely on our own. Without any real tools or processes to do customer research we ended up muddling through, but it was always ad hoc - and often skipped so we could just get a release out the door. Bad news.<p>By talking to lots of customers (meta!) we learned that one of the biggest challenges teams face is in the logistics of research: finding customers to talk to, scheduling calls & paying incentives. The research community calls this Research Operations. We’re setting out to fix these problems by building tools that make it easy for small teams to do what companies like Facebook and Google do with massive teams of research coordinators.<p>We help you do better customer research, more often in four ways:<p>First, we help you build an on-demand pool of research subjects. These are customers who opt in to be notified about customer interview requests and surveys, or find out about beta product releases. They could also be customers you find in other forums or communities, through content marketing or direct outreach.<p>Second, we let you book time with a customer in a couple of clicks, or send out a survey or prototype test. We give you templates to save you creating these things from scratch every time, but also to keep you following best practice. Templates like Product Market Fit surveys are live now with more advanced ones like Van Westendorp pricing surveys coming soon (email me for early access).<p>Third, we handle all the messaging on platform to protect the privacy and consent of your users but also to manage what's called "participant fatigue", and handle any incentives to make sure you get the responses you need.<p>Finally, we make it easy to share what you’re learning with your team. Store your notes, observations, video files and transcripts in one place. Post it to Slack, get an email digest of learnings & upcoming interviews, and find previous research reports in one central place.<p>All of this is to say we’re building the tool we wish we had while building product at our last startup, and also in the belly of the beast after we got acquired. The tool that helps you go from having some big gnarly question to start getting answers in minutes, and which brings your team along for the journey. We use the tool religiously in-house and it's had a massive impact on not only our own product development process, but our first engineering hire (ex Twitch) has noted how much more connected he feels with our customers and the product he's building.<p>What do you all think? We’d love your feedback on the product and our approach. In particular we’d love to know how customer research works at your company and the challenges you face making it happen!

Show HN: I built an internet speed analytics tool

Show HN: I built an internet speed analytics tool

Launch HN: Taste (YC W21) – Recreate nice restaurant experiences at home

Launch HN: Taste (YC W21) – Recreate nice restaurant experiences at home

Launch HN: Taste (YC W21) – Recreate nice restaurant experiences at home

Show HN: "100 Page Python Intro" eBook

Show HN: Screenstab – A tool to turn screenshots into image assets

Show HN: Screenstab – A tool to turn screenshots into image assets

Launch HN: Wasp (YC W21) – DSL for building full-stack web apps

Hi HN!<p>We are Martin and Matija, twin brothers and creators of Wasp (<a href="https://wasp-lang.dev" rel="nofollow">https://wasp-lang.dev</a>). Wasp is a declarative language that makes it really easy to build full-stack web apps while still using the latest technologies such as React, Node.js and Prisma.<p>Martin and I both studied computer science where we mostly focused on algorithms for bioinformatics. Afterwards we led engineering teams in several SaaS companies, on the way gaining plenty of experience in building web apps.<p>Moving from one project to another, we used various technologies: JQuery -> Backbone -> Angular -> React, own scripts / makefile -> Grunt -> Gulp -> Webpack, PHP -> Java -> Node.js, … , and we always felt that things are harder than they should be. We were spending a lot of time adopting the latest tech stack and figuring out the best practices: how to make the web app performant, scalable, economical and secure and also how to connect all the pieces of the stack together.<p>While the tech stack kept advancing rapidly, the core requirements of the apps we were building changed very little (auth, routing, data model CRUD, ACL, …). That is why about 1.5 years ago we started thinking about separating web app specification (what it should do) from its implementation (how it should do it).<p>This led us to the idea of extracting common web app features and concepts into a special specification language from which we could generate code in the currently popular technologies. We don’t think it is feasible to replace everything with a single language so that is why we went with a DSL which integrates with the modern stack (right now React, NodeJS, Prisma).<p>Wasp lets you define high-level aspects of your web app (auth, routing, ACL, data models, CRUD) via a simple specification language and then write your specific logic in React and Node.js. The majority of the code is still being written in React and Node.js, with Wasp serving as the backbone of your whole application. To see some examples of what the language looks like in practice, take a look here: <a href="https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp/blob/master/examples/tutorials/TodoApp/main.wasp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp/blob/master/examples/tutor...</a><p>The main difference between Wasp and frameworks (e.g. Meteor, Blitz, Redwood) is that Wasp is a language, not a library. One benefit of that is a simpler and cleaner, declarative syntax, focused on the requirements and detached from the implementation details.<p>Another benefit of a DSL is that it allows Wasp to understand the web app’s requirements during the build time and reason about it before generating the final code. For example, when generating code to be deployed to production, it could pick the most appropriate architecture based on its understanding of the web app and deploy it to serverless or another type of architecture (or even a combination). Another example would be reusing your data model logic through all the parts of the stack while defining it just once in Wasp. DSL opens the potential for optimisations, static analysis and extensibility.<p>Wasp’s compiler is built in Haskell and it compiles the source code in Wasp + React/Node.js into the target code in just React and Node.js (currently in Javascript, but we plan to move to Typescript soon). The generated code is human readable and can easily be inspected and even ejected if Wasp becomes too limiting.<p>We are currently in Alpha and many features are still rough or missing, but you can try it out and build and deploy web apps! There are things we haven’t solved yet and others that will probably change as we progress.<p>You can check out our repo at <a href="https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp</a> and give it a try at <a href="https://wasp-lang.dev/docs/" rel="nofollow">https://wasp-lang.dev/docs/</a>.<p>Thank you for reading! We would love to get your feedback and also hear about your experiences building web apps - what has worked for you and where do you see the opportunities for improvement?