Show HN: The Population Project https://ift.tt/OBk638E

Show HN: The Population Project Two years ago, I turned 50. After a successful career as an entrepreneur, a business angel and a novelist, I set out to start a philanthropic venture under the following constraints: - it had to be global. - it had to be beautiful (in my eyes, at least). - it had to be technology and stats driven. I decided I would try to list the full name and date of birth of all humans alive. While some may find the concept pointless, I immediately knew I had struck gold: - it was global and incredibly hard. - it had an almost artistic quality to it, like an ever-changing installation. - as a libertarian, I resent that states conduct censuses and then sit on the data. - One billion people in the world aren't officially registered. At least someone would acknowledge their existence. I created a non-profit called The Population Project. I would never make a dime off it, but at least my costs would be tax-deductible. I then started researching lists of names online. I quickly adopted two principles. First I would collect a minimal set of information : full name, birth date, and birth place. Second, I would only scrape public information, i.e. nothing behind a password. After a few months, I realized I needed help from more experienced developers. I chose to work on 4D, a platform I had used in the past to develop my company's information system. It was a tough choice: 4D is not a leading player in the back-end world, but I figured the growth of API tooling would make language choice less critical. The first iteration of our database was frustrating - way too slow to publish a website. I learned the power of incremental change, with each marginal improvement saving you a few percent of speed or space. I also got to implement concepts I had heard about but never implemented, such as mirroring, partitioning, or hash-indexing. Then I hired a team of six data processors in Madagascar who clean up and process the lists found online. Lots of Python and Excel macros in their day-to-day. I have instilled in them an obsession with quality. A bad record will sit in our base forever. After trying dozens of softwares, we've settled on Adobe Acrobat and Octoparse. The final piece was the website. I lucked out in finding a strong team in Romania. They build with Next.js and deploy on Vercel. I gave them Wikipedia as the model to aim for. We/they haven't been able to match Wikipedia's simplicity. Our pages are too heavy. But I find the site user-friendly, pleasing to the eye and reasonably fast. We can and we will do better. A word about privacy. Some people complain that because it publishes names and DOBs, the Population Project infringes on their privacy. We obviously don't see it that way. - All our info is public. That DOB you find on the site is probably in the voter list of your state, a list that anyone can request or plainfully download. - The info we publish is minimal. Basically, we say that you exist. No one will find anything about your race, religion, sexual preferences, job or income. - We have adopted Wikipedia's privacy policy. We do not record your IP, unless you create or edit a record. - We're using Matomo for our Analytics. Great stuff. It's not free but they do not use your data like GA. Why am I telling you all this? From the beginning, I've envisioned a three-step process: 1) Build the database and populate it with millions of Western profiles. 2) Launch the site, where anybody can create or edit records and share them with their family. 3) When we've reached critical mass (1B records?), start making deals with NGOs and governments, and venture into other alphabets. We have just completed step 1. Step 2 is daunting as hell. I have grown a business but I have never grown a website. While I am ready to spend a bit of money on PR or SEO, I am not delusional: to reach the level of success we have in mind, we need this thing to go (somewhat) viral. How do you do that? https://ift.tt/IDHzhA6 August 7, 2023 at 09:16PM

Show HN: Subscription-Based Alternative to Gumroad https://ift.tt/2j8DEfa

Show HN: Subscription-Based Alternative to Gumroad https://turbolink.io August 9, 2023 at 03:14AM

Show HN: Ggml.js – Serverless AI Inference on Browser with Web Assembly https://ift.tt/fCirBUv

Show HN: Ggml.js – Serverless AI Inference on Browser with Web Assembly What is ggml.js? Run any ggml ported ML models directly on your web browser with ggml.js This project provides JavaScript bindings on ggml models, so that you can embed GGML models to your web apps to build serverless AI inferencing. Currently the framework supports following model types: - Dolly v2 - GPT2 - GPT J - GPT NEO X - MPT - Replit - StarCoder You can find more details about the framework: https://ift.tt/Gnj734Q For live demo examples, you can visit here: https://ift.tt/y76g2SV Source Code: https://ift.tt/m6L8djl Please do provide any feedback/questions/suggestions in the comments. I'll be happy to take it up :) https://ift.tt/Gnj734Q August 9, 2023 at 12:50AM

Show HN: A C++11 Hierarchical State Machine Library https://ift.tt/03AQicS

Show HN: A C++11 Hierarchical State Machine Library https://ift.tt/W234iSo August 8, 2023 at 10:45PM

Show HN: Building an Audio Journaling App – Looking for Community Insights https://ift.tt/dsHJxPo

Show HN: Building an Audio Journaling App – Looking for Community Insights I am a product designer by profession, and recently, I ventured into coding and started developing applications. Today, I'm excited to share a project I've been passionately working on. The concept is a voice-activated journal: just voice-record your thoughts, and the app will transcribe them into text. I built this to help those like me who struggle to build a journaling habit. Also has features that encourage habbit building like a streak/tracker and a threshold marker encouraging you to record a minimum amount. I used OpneAI Whisper to power the transcriptions which means you can record journals in most common languages and it will transcribe it accurately. I am hoping to get feedback from all of you: Would you use this? If Yes, how often? If No, What would hold you back? Would you pay for this? If yes: How much, If no: what if added would make you want to pay for it? Screenshots: https://ift.tt/5bVJE96 https://ift.tt/Vb3tj1T August 8, 2023 at 12:45PM

Show HN: Ready to Send – a Gmail add-on that automatically drafts email replies https://ift.tt/UwRJo0b

Show HN: Ready to Send – a Gmail add-on that automatically drafts email replies Hi HN! Ready to Send works seamlessly with Gmail, crafting draft responses for your new, unread emails. You can add personalized info for each contact, ensuring every message sounds genuine. LMK your feedback below! https://ift.tt/1NSzWCg August 8, 2023 at 06:49AM

Show HN: An AI Textbook https://ift.tt/clkZowf

Show HN: An AI Textbook Hi HN, Introducing Inquistory, the world's first AI textbook for history. Unlike a textbook, students don’t passively read through long chapters of content. Inquistory briefly explains a high level ideas a student, and student's must inquire about the content to advance. Like a textbook, Inquistory utilizes both primary and secondary sources create content. This involves displaying relevant images inline with text and providing citations for the sources referenced. Read the wild story how we got started: https://ift.tt/uki4Uor Currently in private beta, you can sign up on our website: https://inquistory.com/ https://inquistory.com/ August 8, 2023 at 03:10AM