The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
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Show HN: Epub.to – ePub to pdf, mobi, Kindle, and an API
Show HN: Epub.to – ePub to pdf, mobi, Kindle, and an API
Show HN: Ht – HTTPie Clone in Rust
Show HN: Ht – HTTPie Clone in Rust
Show HN: Remarkbox – Hosted comments without ads or tracking
Show HN: YTT Tech – My curated database of instructional YouTube Videos
Show HN: Haven – Run a private website to share with only the people you choose
Launch HN: Albedo (YC W21) – Highest resolution satellite imagery
Hey HN! I’m Topher, here with Winston and AJ, and we’re the co-founders of Albedo (<a href="https://albedo.space" rel="nofollow">https://albedo.space</a>). We’re building satellites that will capture both visible and thermal imagery - at a resolution 9x higher than what is available today (see comparison: <a href="https://photos.app.goo.gl/gwokp4WT8JPvyue98" rel="nofollow">https://photos.app.goo.gl/gwokp4WT8JPvyue98</a>).<p>My technical background is primarily in optics/imaging science related to remote sensing. I previously worked for Lockheed Martin, where I met AJ, who is an expert in satellite architecture and systems engineering. We’ve spent most of our career working on classified space systems, and while the missions we were involved with are super cool, that world is slower to adopt the latest new space technologies. We started Albedo in order to create a new type of satellite architecture that captures high resolution imagery at a fraction of the cost historically required. Winston was previously a software engineer at Facebook, where he frequently used satellite imagery and realized the huge potential of higher resolution datasets.<p>While the use cases for satellite imagery are endless, adoption has been underwhelming - even for obvious and larger applications like agriculture, insurance, energy, and mapping. The main limitations that have prevented widespread use are high cost, inaccessibility, and low resolution.<p>Today, buying commercial satellite imagery involves a back-and-forth with a salesperson in a sometimes months-long process, with high prices that exclude all but the biggest companies. This process needs to be simplified with transparent, commodity pricing and an automated process, where all you need to buy imagery is a credit card. On the accessibility front, it’s surprising how few providers have nailed down a streamlined, fully cloud-based delivery mechanism. While working at Facebook, Winston sometimes dealt with imagery delivered through FTP servers or physical hard drives. Another thing users are looking for is more transparency when tasking a new satellite image, such as an immediate assessment of when it will be collected. These are all problems we are working on solving at Albedo.<p>On the space side, we’re able to achieve the substantial cost savings by taking advantage of emerging space technologies, two of which are electric propulsion and on-orbit refueling. Our satellites will fly super close to the earth, essentially in the atmosphere, enabling 10cm resolution without having to build a school bus sized satellite.<p>Electric propulsion makes the fuel on our satellites way more efficient, at the expense of low thrust. Think about it like your car gasoline going from 30 to 300 mpg, but you could only drive 5 mph. Our propulsion only needs to maintain a steady offset to the atmospheric drag, so low thrust and high efficiency is perfect. By the time our first few satellites run out of fuel, on-orbit refueling will be a reality, and we can just refill our tanks. We’re still in the architecture and design phase, but we expect to have our first few satellites flying in 2024 and the full constellation up in 2027.<p>The current climate crisis requires a diverse set of sensors in space to support emissions monitoring, ESG initiatives/investments, and infrastructure sustainability. Thermal sensors are a key component for this, and very few are currently in orbit. Since our satellites are larger than normal, they are uniquely suited to capture the long wavelengths of thermal energy at a resolution of 2 meters. We’ll also be taking advantage of advances in microbolometer technology, to eliminate the crazy cooling requirements that have made thermal satellites so expensive in the past. The current state-of-the-art for thermal resolution is 70 meters, which is only marginally useful for most applications.<p>We’re aiming to adopt the stance of being a pure data provider (i.e. not doing analytics). We think the best way to facilitate overall market growth is to do one thing incredibly well: sell imagery better, cheaper, and faster than what users have available today. While this allows us to be vertical agnostic, some of our more well-suited applications include: crop health monitoring, pipeline inspection, property insurance underwriting/weather damage evaluation, and wildfire/vegetation management around power lines. By making high-res imagery a commodity, we are also betting on it unlocking new applications in a similar fashion to GPS (e.g. Tinder, Pokemon Go, and Uber).<p>One last thing - new remote sensing regulations were released by NOAA last May, removing the previous limit on resolution. So between the technology side and regulatory side, the timing is kind of perfect for us.<p>All thoughts and questions are appreciated - and we’d love to hear if you know of any companies that could benefit from our imagery. Thanks for reading!
Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog
Hi HN!<p>Seb here, with my co-founder Mat. We are building an open-source observability platform aimed at the end user. We assemble what we consider the best open source APIs and interfaces such as Prometheus and Grafana, but make them as easy to use and featureful as Datadog, with for example TLS and authentication by default. It's scalable (horizontally and vertically) and upgradable without a team of experts. Check it out here: <a href="http://opstrace.com/" rel="nofollow">http://opstrace.com/</a> & <a href="https://github.com/opstrace/opstrace" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/opstrace/opstrace</a><p>About us: I co-founded dotCloud which became Docker, and was also an early employee at Cloudflare where I built their monitoring system back when there was no Prometheus (I had to use OpenTSDB :-). I have since been told it's all been replaced with modern stuff—thankfully! Mat and I met at Mesosphere where, after building DC/OS, we led the teams that would eventually transition the company to Kubernetes.<p>In 2019, I was at RedHat and Mat was still at Mesosphere. A few months after IBM announced purchasing RedHat, Mat and I started brainstorming problems that we could solve in the infrastructure space. We started interviewing a lot of companies, always asking them the same questions: "How do you build and test your code? How do you deploy? What technologies do you use? How do you monitor your system? Logs? Outages?" A clear set of common problems emerged.<p>Companies that used external vendors—such as CloudWatch, Datadog, SignalFX—grew to a certain size where cost became unpredictable and wildly excessive. As a result (one of many downsides we would come to uncover) they monitored less (i.e. just error logs, no real metrics/logs in staging/dev and turning metrics off in prod to reduce cost).<p>Companies going the opposite route—choosing to build in-house with open source software—had different problems. Building their stack took time away from their product development, and resulted in poorly maintained, complicated messes. Those companies are usually tempted to go to SaaS but at their scale, the cost is often prohibitive.<p>It seemed crazy to us that we are still stuck in this world where we have to choose between these two paths. As infrastructure engineers, we take pride in building good software for other engineers. So we started Opstrace to fix it.<p>Opstrace started with a few core principles: (1) The customer should always own their data; Opstrace runs entirely in your cloud account and your data never leaves your network. (2) We don’t want to be a storage vendor—that is, we won’t bill customers by data volume because this creates the wrong incentives for us. (AWS and GCP are already pretty good at storage.)
(3) Transparency and predictability of costs—you pay your cloud provider for the storage/network/compute for running Opstrace and can take advantage of any credits/discounts you negotiate with them. We are incentivized to help you understand exactly where you are spending money because you pay us for the value you get from our product with per-user pricing. (For more about costs, see our recent blog post here: <a href="https://opstrace.com/blog/pulling-cost-curtain-back" rel="nofollow">https://opstrace.com/blog/pulling-cost-curtain-back</a>). (4) It should be REAL Open Source with the Apache License, Version 2.0.<p>To get started, you install Opstrace into your AWS or GCP account with one command: `opstrace create`. This installs Opstrace in your account, creates a domain name and sets up authentication for you for free. Once logged in you can create tenants that each contain APIs for Prometheus, Fluentd/Loki and more. Each tenant has a Grafana instance you can use. A tenant can be used to logically separate domains, for example, things like prod, test, staging or teams. Whatever you prefer.<p>At the heart of Opstrace runs a Cortex (<a href="https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex</a>) cluster to provide the above-mentioned scalable Prometheus API, and a Loki (<a href="https://github.com/grafana/loki" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/grafana/loki</a>) cluster for the logs. We front those with authenticated endpoints (all public in our repo). All the data ends up stored only in S3 thanks to the amazing work of the developers on those projects.<p>An "open source Datadog" requires more than just metrics and logs. We are actively working on a new UI for managing, querying and visualizing your data and many more features, like automatic ingestion of logs/metrics from cloud services (CloudWatch/Stackdriver), Datadog compatible API endpoints to ease migrations and side by side comparisons and synthetics (e.g. Pingdom). You can follow along on our public roadmap: <a href="https://opstrace.com/docs/references/roadmap" rel="nofollow">https://opstrace.com/docs/references/roadmap</a>.<p>We will always be open source, and we make money by charging a per-user subscription for our commercial version which will contain fine-grained authz, bring-your-own OIDC and custom domains.<p>Check out our repo (<a href="https://github.com/opstrace/opstrace" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/opstrace/opstrace</a>) and give it a spin (<a href="https://opstrace.com/docs/quickstart" rel="nofollow">https://opstrace.com/docs/quickstart</a>).<p>We’d love to hear what your perspective is. What are your experiences related to the problems discussed here? Are you all happy with the tools you’re using today?
Show HN: Collection of deep learning implementations with side-by-side notes
Show HN: Reddit Wallstreetbets Top Leaderboard
Show HN: A usable eBook reader inside a browser (azw3, mobi, ePub, pdf)
Show HN: Low-power Kindle-based dashboard
Show HN: My multiplayer custom-engine game that loads in less than a second
Berty: Peer-to-peer messaging app that works with or without internet access
Show HN: I made an alarm clock
Launch HN: Aviron (YC W21) – High-Intensity Peloton for Rowing
Hey HN! I’m Andy, founder of Aviron (<a href="https://avironactive.com/" rel="nofollow">https://avironactive.com/</a>). We make a high-intensity version of Peloton for rowing, with competitive games, live races and strength programs. Our content puts a focus on HIIT (high intensity interval training) due to its physical and cognitive benefits.<p>I feel like sometimes this pisses the hardcore rowers off but I’m not a rower, I’m a tech guy. I also think fitness is important and have been working out all of my adult life. Before Aviron, I worked full time and long hours so I did a lot of my thinking during late night gym sessions. Like many people I avoided the rower because not only did I not enjoy cardio but damn that machine was hard and boring. There was a moment at some point in 2016 when I realized I could do something with this. The connected fitness market in the US at that time was small but growing rapidly.<p>Aviron is a rowing machine because it’s the most efficient and effective workout you can have in a short amount of time on one machine. The rowing motion is low impact, engages 85% of muscles, is very difficult and as a result can also be boring. This makes the rowing machine an ideal ‘candidate’ to pair with the gaming-inspired, competitive content I began thinking about in 2016.<p>The research was telling me there was a definite potential market niche I could fill but what I didn't know was that no manufacturer would speak to me. I probably called and emailed 50 manufacturers. I eventually kickstarted a few conversations and finally a relationship, by flying to Taiwan, connecting with a local who could translate, and knocking on doors in person. It sounds reasonable in hindsight but the process to finalizing a production contract start to finish took me a full year. A year of trying to understand the manufacturing landscape, developing relationships and convincing potential suppliers that I would eventually be worth their time.<p>Ultimately my key takeaway is that Taiwanese manufacturing relationships are just that - relationships. Manufacturers are looking for long-term trusting partnerships and they are much less motivated by money than my initial assumption. I’m reminded of this constantly - this month alone I have received emails re: product delays twice - and I stupidly tried to throw money at the problem, in the process offending the Taiwan team by implying they would work harder if money was on the table.<p>Finding and building a solid relationship with a production partner was challenging but I would give it a 7/10 relative to the hurdles that came later. The manufacturer had no experience or interest in getting the machine to work along with our custom android touchscreen. As much as I see myself as a “tech guy”, I don’t have an engineering degree. My dad does and so does my brother but I went the business degree route. Long story short, figuring out the details of making these two pieces work together was a nightmare. Again, in hindsight, it’s kind of cool - I understand my machine inside and out; I’m confident I could take it apart down to the screws and put it back together. I can also work comfortably with an oscilloscope and understand how most of the components work on a typical fitness equipment circuit board - there was a lot of circuit board soldering trial and error at one point.<p>I knew that I was taking on a lot with a software and hardware venture but what nobody tells you is how many miles you’re going to drive and fly when you’re taking on hardware. During our slow tip-toe pivot from B2B to B2C sales, we discovered home customers would find 10x the problems a gym would. There was a week in 2019 I drove to a customer’s home 6 hours away multiple times a week for nearly a month. Each trip I thought we had found the solution; the ride back was crushing. This was one of many problems we faced.<p>I’m happy to be able to say the bugs are mostly worked out! Our customers navigate a 22” touchscreen to browse 250ish content options - like my favorite and the first game we ever developed - Last Hope, an end-of-the-world inspired game where you’re being chased by zombies. As your row to escape the Ai will benchmark your fitness output and adjust the zombies’ speed to maintain a challenging pace for your fitness level.<p>The content for Aviron was developed with strength training and High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) in mind. For example, one of our 6 workouts categories is “Pros vs. Joes”, a program that allows you to compete against pre-recorded Olympians and professional athletes in a race.<p>Our customers are fitness enthusiasts who don’t enjoy long cardio workouts and crave the competitive and challenging pace of activities like CrossFit and F45, at home - especially throughout Covid. HIIT workouts tend to be shorter, have been proven to improve cognitive ability and help slow the aging process via preservation of DNA.<p>To me, the dual cognitive and physical benefits were really key. I began to work out in my teens, physically I felt better and my self esteem improved. Cognitively, I went from dealing with undiagnosed ADHD and struggling my way through school to slowly noticing an improvement. People told me I was “growing out of” ADHD - which is probably partially true - but something clicked when I was researching fitness programming for Aviron. Learning about HIIT and it’s (data proven) benefits, I started to realize that my commitment to consistent and challenging physical fitness had likely paid a large part in my “growing out it” as well.<p>Currently, we have bootstrapped Aviron to a good place; we’ve sold nearly a thousand rowers to gyms, hotels, schools and even Nike headquarters as well as homes. Or churn rate is <1% and our customers are telling us they’re happy. And they’re paying their membership every month so we believe them. :)<p>We are continually working on Aviron to improve the software, content and customer experience so if you have a chance please check us out and let me know what you think. I’m excited to hear from the community. I’ll be hanging out in the comments all day.
Show HN: Filmulator – a streamlined, open-source raw photo editor
Show HN: Filmulator – a streamlined, open-source raw photo editor
All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits