I've written many scripts and programs to make my life easier (and just for fun, really). Here are a few of my most used programs: - A service that constantly checks for freelancing/contract jobs that meet my list of criteria, then sends a desktop+phone push notifications for me to take a deeper look. - An automatic backup service that uses Borg and triggers when I connect my external hard drive to my computer. It handles all kinds of failures and knows how to organize my stuff too. - A savings and spending tracking and reporting dashboard, because I just couldn't find one that "clicks" with me.

I think most of my programs are just automating things I use regularly, but isn't that the point of software, really?

If you don't mind me asking, do you run the first one on your local computer or do you use some kind of cloud service like ec2 so it runs constantly without worrying about down time?

Using ec2 is an overkill in my case. I'm running it on my raspberry pi. Even if it had down time, it wouldn't really have a big impact on me.

I'm quitting my full-time job this month (already gave my notice) to start a startup with my brother. We're trying to make cheap-but-performant prosthetic hands using 3D printers and Arduino, focusing on the north-west of Syria. To shed some light, it's estimated that around *50 THOUSAND* people suffer from minor or major imputations due to the ongoing war, and most of them need some form of prosthetics. Some estimates even upwards *80 THOUSAND*![1]

Now, I know most of the technical stuff we need, and my brother knows all the medical details (he's a physical therapist), but neither of us have built a startup before.

We have a plan on mind, but I would love to chat with anyone with experience building similar startups (a mix of software and hardware), or really anyone who's interested in this project.

We also plan on starting a crowdfunding campaign soon this month.

[1](https://www.ri.org/providing-life-changing-prosthetics-for-s...)

I applaud you, but it sounds like this isn't really a 'startup'.

Who will pay for this? I imagine the recipients aren't rich.

Looking forward to seeing your announcement of a fund to deliver these charitably at zero cost to patients. :)

Good luck!

Exactly, the recipients are really in a bad financial situation and many of them live in tents even in the freezing weather. So we've looked into alternative ways to do this, and we're now focusing on NGOs partnerships (NGOs pay, and the recipient gets it for free; we already have one experimental partnership) and crowdfunding (planing on announcing a campaign sometime this month!).

Sounds like a great cause. I have experience in building hardware, and can put you in touch with some folks who might be great contacts for your endeavor. Sending an email :)

I just want to wish you the best if luck. May you go far and high!

Great project

Note: this is not an official SQLite repo. SQLite does not use Git[1].

[1] https://sqlite.org/whynotgit.html

No, I just stumbled upon it and thought I should share it :)

Seems like a nice idea, but still looks like a lot of manual work..

Nice! any plans to opensource your code :) ?

Oh, I can do but I promise you that it's rough as a badger's arse because it was a quick lash up. I'll see if I can throw it up somewhere later today.

I'm curious to know how relevant this study is to the tech used today... Especially cryptocurrencies..

It isn’t relevant to crypto. This is specifically about spam email mitigation. I don’t agree with their conclusion, which is “we can’t reduce spam to the level we’d like without imposing undue burden on legitimate senders so we shouldn’t do it at all”. The “all or nothing” doesn’t make sense. They never consider things like whitelists (legitimate senders need to do zero work), different levels of work required for different senders (eg a sender’s IP address isn’t recognized so dramatically increase the work requirements), etc.

It's only relevant in that Satoshi took the proof of work idea for Bitcoin from a spam prevention system like the OP discusses.

A lot of cryptos try to get around proof of work (proof of stake, for example) because PoW takes a long time and uses a lot of electricity, and this is the paper's main complaint -- but so far it's proved quite secure for Bitcoin. The Bitcoin blockchain has never been successfully hacked.