[HN Gopher] Makeabetter.computer - Microgrants for projects that...
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Makeabetter.computer - Microgrants for projects that make computers
better
Author : Hirrolot
Score : 158 points
Date : 2022-05-30 09:48 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (makeabetter.computer)
(TXT) w3m dump (makeabetter.computer)
| baryphonic wrote:
| These amounts are so trivial, it's almost not worth applying.
| They need to increase by about 20x to start being worth it.
| wongarsu wrote:
| If they are trivial to you that probably just means you aren't
| in the target group. $200 is nothing to a full-time software
| engineer, but for a student $200 might be much more than they
| are willing (or able) to spend on a hobby project.
| freemint wrote:
| Exactly.
| pizza wrote:
| ...getting you back to square zero, where tightly-scoped micro
| projects never get investment. I mean if one of these tiny
| things is actually a killer idea, it'll make a big enough
| splash to get a couple orders of magnitude more funding,
| anyway, right?
| ModernMech wrote:
| I think the point is that you're not going to get any killer
| ideas from this. More power if they do, but the people
| working in the "make a better computer" space have been doing
| so deliberately for years, spending much more than $500 in
| the process.
|
| Maybe you get a better computer by sprinkling $500 checks
| around to random devs in the developing world, but it's not
| likely to work as a legitimate strategy to improve computing.
| If you really want to do that, take this entire fund and
| invest it in one of the many future of computing projects out
| there already well under way.
| mkl95 wrote:
| $500 mean little to me, [senior software engineer from a rich
| country], but it's higher than the average salary in many
| places.
| patrec wrote:
| The upper end looks to be about the average monthly developer
| salary of a poor country with many highly educated programmers
| (such as Belarus). There will also be a pool with talented
| individuals who are not yet on an average monthly developer
| salary, and if either your individual project or the scheme as
| a whole is somewhat successful there will also be a CV benefit
| in having been sponsored. And of course many developers all
| over the world would jump at an opportunity to get a month's
| funding to work on their pet project and keep the IP.
| karamanolev wrote:
| I'd guess the places where this is relevant will have plenty of
| rich-enough people who can self-fund. If if they can't, then
| the amount is definitely not trivial. $200 that you don't have
| is still $200 you don't have.
| eterevsky wrote:
| > (1) Building a self-hosted compiler or interpreter.
|
| > (2) Prototype an experimental browser.
|
| > (3) Make your computer express emotions.
|
| $100-$500 is a drop in the bucket for projects of this scale.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Not if your time is free (as in: a hobby project).
|
| The best effort I've seen at making a computer express emotions
| is Anki's Cozmo or Vector [1]. You can get one for less than
| $500 and hack it, or you can do your own hardware project for
| much less. Or make a conversational chatbot, APIs for GPT-J
| make that easier than ever.
|
| Similarly, an innovative browser-chrome that tries novel UI
| ideas while using webkit for rendering is very achievable on a
| tiny budget.
|
| 1: https://www.vectorrobot.shop/
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Either you are trying to encourage people with the money tag,
| or you are not doing anything and it is hard to imagine for
| this amount of money to be enough to move the needle for the
| type of person you need to make any progress on these types
| of big problems.
|
| Improving something that has been optimized for years is
| obviously not going to be easy (which it might still be, non-
| obviously, but that's very unlikely). Offering a very small
| amount of money evaluates the required work, and by doing so
| pretty poorly actually devalues it. That seems bad.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I imagine the idea is "there are plenty of students with
| more time than money, who are held back from doing really
| interesting projects by comparatively small amounts of
| money".
|
| This program isn't interesting to a software engineer
| working in Silicon Valley, but I know some brilliant 16-24
| year olds who have time on their hands but would have
| problems investing $200 into software tooling or a little
| hardware.
|
| Sure, those people won't build the next sentient robot, or
| the next gcc. But innovation often happens by exploring
| lots of ideas a little, to even figure out which ideas are
| worth exploring further. An army of hobby projects can be
| very effective at that.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > (3) Make your computer express emotions
|
| But I thought that already comes as standard on Windows...
|
| https://i.imgur.com/lk57d.png
| imachine1980_ wrote:
| i think you miss the mark,Clippy was there in the 97.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Facebook changed name to Meta. Imagine if Microsoft had
| renamed itself Clippy.
| vitorsr wrote:
| > $100-$500 is a drop in the bucket
|
| My fully-funded doctorate's federal research grant (Brazil)
| pays around 450 USD per month (cf. _Valores das bolsas no pais_
| [1]).
|
| [1] https://www.gov.br/capes/pt-br/acesso-a-informacao/acoes-
| e-p...
| glouwbug wrote:
| So you're saying it's a drop in the bucket?
| aeturnum wrote:
| Of course? That's why they are "micro"grants.
|
| Many projects that improve peoples' computers are done mostly
| for love - but that doesn't mean they don't get done a lot
| faster with a little money for expenses or to supplement
| income. A few hundred might let someone go to a conference to
| promote the project and get support, buy testing equipment,
| etc.
|
| It's not going to fund anything startup-style, but it very
| likely could help lots of small useful projects run more
| smoothly and reliably.
| capableweb wrote:
| > $100-$500 is a drop in the bucket for projects of this scale.
|
| Agree, but also depends on the location. But seems even the
| cheapest places to live in the world comes close to $500 a
| month for living costs.
|
| $1000-$5000 would have been nicer, then people in those
| locations would have at least a chance at a 10 month runway for
| the highest grant amount.
|
| I don't think the author is expecting people to _finish_ any of
| the funded projects, just to kickstart them or even give some
| inspiration.
| asicsp wrote:
| > _But seems even the cheapest places to live in the world
| comes close to $500 a month for living costs._
|
| I live in outskirts of a second-tier city in southern India.
| Spacious rented room and I employ a maid for washing needs.
| My average monthly cost is $150.
| eterevsky wrote:
| I'm not sure the cost of living is the right comparison here.
| I would rather use a professional salary as a basis.
|
| Somebody who can develop a self-hosting programming language
| that is useful for anything can probably earn at least $5000
| regardless of where they live. I wouldn't expect them to live
| on 1/10th of that even if this is technically possible.
| q-big wrote:
| > Somebody who can develop a self-hosting programming
| language that is useful for anything can probably earn at
| least $5000 regardless of where they live.
|
| I know quite some highly brillant people who have
| difficulties getting a decent job because they are really
| bad at self-promotion.
|
| So: No, being able to do that strongly depends on having
| quite some further traits that don't have anything to do
| with intelligence or programming skills (rather perhaps a
| little bit with hustling skills).
| csmeyer wrote:
| I'm working on an educational programming language (pickcode.io)
| and having something like this to pay off whatever AWS/Netlify
| stuff isn't in the free tier would be great.
| ptman wrote:
| https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/
| greenbit wrote:
| Idk, the amounts are small, not really enough to spur any great
| new thinking, but maybe what's going on here is that there are a
| lot of people with ideas and opinions already, who might just
| share their thoughts if someone bought them a free lunch or two.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Seems to me VCs do a lot of work in scouting out potential new
| companies and trends. This would be a cheap way of collecting
| those in a "pull" manner rather than "push". They'll end up
| getting a lot of early-stage ideas from people desperate for
| cash, but maybe that's exactly what they want.
| mikewarot wrote:
| This is an awesome idea. When the web was young, getting people
| to read and comment on your ideas was a great way to get feedback
| and encouragement for good ideas.
|
| Advertising has distorted and rendered the open web far less
| useful in this regard.
|
| Funding small one time projects without strings is something that
| DARPA used to do. It's been missed.
|
| In their application, they offer an option for the funded
| projects to write up their project as a blog post. I think it
| would also be good for them to offer funded projects an
| additional option to to be included in list/post from the
| funder's side. It would be a nice way to add perspective to
| outside observers.
| Archelaos wrote:
| Is this a parody?
| Hamcha wrote:
| Dunno if author is around here, but I'd like to point out a group
| who are working to make low-spec, low-powerusage software.
|
| https://100r.co/site/mission.html
|
| They're a couple living in a boat (all by choice) making games,
| music and books/comics. Having encountered challenges like being
| off the grid for a prolonged amount of time and having to budget
| electricity for months at a time, they built a whole suite of
| creative apps that run on an incredibly limited amount of specs,
| including building a platform akin to PICO8 that can run such
| creative software on many embedded devices like the Gameboy
| Advance (https://github.com/hundredrabbits/awesome-uxn)
| kennywinker wrote:
| Orca is a delightful piece of software. A livecoding music
| creating environment, that's both simple and very complex. Well
| worth checking out if you're interested in any kind of
| algorithmic music making!
|
| One thing I was a little surprised by was that such
| ideologically minded developers would shy away from a GPL style
| license for their work. It seems like for a lot of people
| "viral" open source licenses have fallen out of favour - but
| I'm not sure why.
| woojoo666 wrote:
| They use an MIT license, which is equally viral. And is
| copyleft really more ideological than permissive licenses?
| Copyleft still leverages copyright to its advantage, which
| can be seen as validating the usefulness of copyright
| Hamcha wrote:
| MIT is not viral and it's what makes it so popular, you
| trade a copyright notice somewhere for the right to re-
| license to any license of your choosing, that makes it the
| opposite of viral if anything.
|
| > And is copyleft really more ideological than permissive
| licenses?
|
| They are equally as ideological, but copyleft is definitely
| "louder" in a sense since it actually forces people to play
| along.
|
| > Copyleft still leverages copyright to its advantage,
| which can be seen as validating the usefulness of copyright
|
| Copyleft is an unfortunate name but the fact that it
| validates copyright doesn't invalidate itself. In a way,
| copyleft leverages copyright to fight copyright, though
| that's not really accurate. It's fighting a popular usage
| of copyright.
| woojoo666 wrote:
| Ah I thought you meant "viral" as in "popular". My
| mistake
|
| > They are equally as ideological, but copyleft is
| definitely "louder" in a sense since it actually forces
| people to play along.
|
| That's fair. I guess the ideology behind permissive
| licenses is to not force anybody to do anything
| unsafecast wrote:
| +1
|
| These two are some of the most interesting people I've come
| across. Both 100r.co and the xxiivv wiki are rabbit holes (ha)
| I go down in for hours.
| moritonal wrote:
| I was going to be mean, but the numbers actually work.
|
| If we take the medium salary for Software Dev in Denver at
| $149,000[1] (I know, I know some are paid vastly more), which is
| $105,077 after tax, and divide that by work-hours in a year,
| 1,768. Then we see they're paid about $60 an hour. So $500 means
| about 8 hours work. A day to play around with some project and
| add something is kinda do-able, especially if the dev throws some
| extra hours in because they're having fun.
|
| I would absolutely say however that their advised projects are
| toned down slightly.
|
| 1. https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Greater-
| De...
| ModernMech wrote:
| I dunno, if your goal is to change computing as we know it,
| what is a middling dev in Denver going to do about it in 8
| hours? Not to say anything about devs in Denver, but it's more
| the problem is so large that I can't see what $500 could do.
|
| It would probably be a better use of money just randomly
| handing it out to middle school science students to see what
| they can do. Get them on a trajectory to change the world
| rather than soliciting any concrete ideas; no one with an
| actual idea to make computers better is going to even blink for
| $500.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| If someone is paying $149k/y to work on ones own passion
| projects for free and keep the IP rights, let me know where to
| apply.
| [deleted]
| crypt1d wrote:
| Love the idea, hate the website. Something about these 'clever'
| console animations in a web browser seriously puts me off. We
| spent last 40 years moving away from consoles only to be sucked
| into fakes ones via this retro design approach. Ugh.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| They just used a console font and animated in the first 4
| paragraphs over maybe 1000ms. It is not the most obnoxious site
| I have used by a long shot.
| can16358p wrote:
| Taking the target audience into account, I think the design is
| right on spot and successful.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Right, they should have used a tailwind template right from the
| first google result :/
|
| It's exactly the type of site many people are crying for here
| on HN.
| programmer_dude wrote:
| Food for thought: why do people still use consoles inspite of
| all the progress made so far?
|
| If you answer is inertia, think again.
| dvh wrote:
| - It's fast, always was fast, I hate waiting for computer to
| do what should be instant
|
| - copy paste always works, good luck selecting text from
| button or menu of a gui app
|
| - font and colors same everywhere
|
| - if for some reason GUI is temporarily not working it is not
| downgrade for me
|
| - takes less resources, leaves more for actual work
| bodge5000 wrote:
| If you mean why do devs still use the terminal over GUI
| programs, I'd say a big reason why is because its kind of
| like its own universal GUI.
|
| Take git for example. If I use VSCode and you use Kraken for
| example, and you have a problem with git and ask for my help
| with it, depending on the complexity of the problem I might
| not be able to figure out how Kraken works or even what the
| issue is. We could fix that by settling on one GUI git
| program, but you say we should settle on Kraken and I say we
| settle on VSCode.
|
| The terminal meanwhile is the default choice, because its on
| every machine by default and is compatible with any other
| tool you use.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Nah, it is pretty much inertia. You can see it whenever
| PowerShell comes up, with all its vast improvements over the
| bash + coreutils ways of doing things, and people are still
| all "well it sucks because it doesn't work exactly the way
| I'm used to".
|
| Frankly, software developers gave up on GUI in the early
| 2000s despite huge discoverability and UX advancements
| because the money was suddenly in shoving ads down people's
| throats via the web. Fortunately for them, when users are
| your product instead of your customer UX is relatively
| unimportant.
| DriftRegion wrote:
| $500 to AnIdiotOnTheNet to revive the GUI!
| mathgladiator wrote:
| I'm shameless, so I applied with my LLC ( https://www.adama-
| platform.com/ ). At this point, it's less about the grant and
| more validation and marketing.
|
| I love the idea, and this could have helped a younger version of
| myself when I was poor.
| joshenders wrote:
| FYI this domain is getting blocked via some OpenDNS block list on
| the public wifi I'm using at the moment.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I think i know the play here. It is funded by angel investors /
| founders who then get to connect with talented people they may
| want to hire. It is kind of a paid interview :-). I might be
| wrong but not a bad idea.
|
| My government can give a approx $15000-$20000 grant but it has to
| be MVP for a business kind of thing.
|
| Back to this... I would apply for the grant mainly to test if the
| idea was worthy of a grant for my own motivation. I probably
| don't need money as there is enough free tier stuff to run it on.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Does anyone know of a similar program with grants that are about
| 10x this size ($1k to $5k)? That's what I would need to get some
| of my ideas demonstrated.
| edent wrote:
| Our project was a recipient of a similar microgrant -
| https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/01/openbenches-is-a-recipient-...
|
| It was fantastic! It let me buy some computing resources which I
| wouldn't have had access to. And, more than that, it was tangible
| proof that other people liked my idea - which is emotionally
| satisfying.
|
| There was no complex application process and no auditing. That
| certainly opened it up to me as I hate filling in forms.
|
| I hope one day I'm in a position to help others in a similar way.
| burning_hamster wrote:
| > And, more than that, it was tangible proof that other people
| liked my idea - which is emotionally satisfying.
|
| Not only emotionally satisfying. People forget how valuable
| such validation is for getting further funding.
| jph wrote:
| Great idea. If anyone here wants a microgrant and has POSIX
| distro skills, I can offer $100 to you or your favorite charity
| for help getting the `num` command added to the POSIX standard
| track so it becomes freely available for everyone.
|
| Num is free open source software that uses `awk` to calculate
| many typical statistics on the command line.
|
| https://github.com/numcommand/num
| frafra wrote:
| Correct URL: https://github.com/numcommand/num
| [deleted]
| gala8y wrote:
| I will donate $1k for GNU/Linux systems to handle cdate. /joke
| tyingq wrote:
| That's a nice little utility. A poor man's version would be to
| use Perl, which is mostly everywhere and comes bundled with
| List::Util. Missing a fair amount of what you're providing, but
| would work in a pinch, especially with some aliases to scrub
| the boilerplate out. echo "10 9 8" | perl
| -aMList::Util=/./ -E 'say min @F' # min echo "10 9 8" |
| perl -aMList::Util=/./ -E 'say max @F' # max echo "10 9
| 8" | perl -aMList::Util=/./ -E 'say sum @F' # sum echo
| "10 9 8" | perl -aMList::Util=/./ -E 'say sum(@F)/@F' # average
| echo "10 9 8" | perl -aMList::Util=/./ -E 'say reduce {"$a,$b"}
| @F' # arbitrary ops
| jph wrote:
| Good thank you, these are very helpful!
| Diris wrote:
| What would that imply actually?
| jph wrote:
| Ideally someone saying e.g. "I'm experienced with asking the
| POSIX standards folks to consider adding the `num` command to
| POSIX, and I'll do a few hours of volunteering to help toward
| this goal".
|
| Or "I know how to package the `num` command for Linux (e.g.
| Ubuntu apt, Fedora yum) and BSD (e.g. FreeBSD pkg, macOS
| brew), and I'll do a few hours of volunteering to set up
| packaging, in order for users to be able to install more
| easily".
| agentultra wrote:
| I want to build a screen- _less_ computing system that has a
| high-degree of affordances for people with different abilities. I
| want to be able to write software specifications in maths on an
| e-ink tablet, or a white-board, and have them interpreted and
| sent to an interactive theorem prover that displays the result
| back to me (or dictates it).
|
| A system akin to https://screenl.es or https://dynamicland.org/
| that can be assembled from existing parts as much as possible and
| extended to the needs of the user.
|
| But the focus is to move away from keyboards and glowing screens
| and this fixed notion of computing that we've been stuck in since
| the 90s.
|
| Nice to see projects like this. It makes me wonder if there are
| others out there with bigger budgets. As much as I enjoy hacking
| my reMarkable on the odd weekend there's a lot of work to do to
| get good gesture recognition capable of recognizing maths as well
| as hand-writing that is fast and can run on low-power devices.
| Plus the software stack to run the computing system on needs a
| lot of work to adapt to a screen-less paradigm. If I could
| dedicate myself to it full time I'd probably get much further
| than I can right now which has been... several years and mostly
| just have some hacky stuff running on my old RM1 and some email
| scripts.
|
| Just one of those projects that probably won't see the light of
| day because it's not capitalist enough.
| samsquire wrote:
| I wrote over 300 ideas down
|
| https://github.com/samsquire/ideas
| https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2
| https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3
| https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4 (incomplete)
|
| I've emailed them and I am interested in donating to see what
| interesting projects people shall come up with.
|
| I am interested in distributed systems, parallelism, data
| structures, algorithms, database architecture. I like the idea of
| a compiler that exposes its pipeline as a website that people can
| write materialized views over. Static analysis and optimisation
| crowdsourced. Like compiler explorer. If you represent your
| mappings as algebra then you can find equivalent plans like a
| cost based optimiser in a database.
|
| Ideas4 has data structure ideas.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. I read some of the ideas and I had some
| similar ones. Which is a nice feeling, as in OK I am not the
| only one thinking that!
|
| I will have a good read of more if yours when you get time, and
| maybe make my own public list. I have a private one but it is
| pretty short at the moment due to bad discipline in writing
| them down.
|
| They are private more because of inarticulate-ness than
| secrecy.
| mrtksn wrote:
| The amounts are actually not that bad for someone who is working
| on something in POC stage.
|
| The last few days I'm trying to integrate a JavaScript engine
| with Vapor(an OS backend framework written in Swift) to create a
| standalone, dead easy to run(no Docker, package managers or
| anything like that, easy to install and run as installing
| Firefox) multiplatform low code backend tool which roughy falls
| in the "Building a self-hosted compiler or interpreter."
| category. The idea is that it will allow developers focus on the
| product instead of dealing with server and data management at
| reasonable cost, control and performance. My app will take care
| of authentication, data storage and allow custom logic to be
| written using JS. Firebase kind of does it but it cannot be self
| hosted and there are horror stories of mistakes that can cost
| tens of thousands of dollars in a blink of an eye. The custom
| logic with functions is also too slow, it takes forever to wake
| up and run a function(though they introduced some solutions for
| the issue).
|
| As it turns out the JavaScript engine integration part is not as
| easy if you are not well versed with C/C++ and its tooling
| because builds will fail, platform ports are missing etc.
| JavaScriptCore is very nice on macOS but it appears that
| compiling it on Linux is not just running the two lines of code
| as described in the documentation.
|
| Maybe I should apply for this and use the money to pay someone
| proficient in the topic to compile JavaScriptCore and help me
| make it talk with my Swift codebase on Linux.
| samatman wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with the size of the grant, in the US a
| hundred dollar bill is a nice bag of groceries, this is one to
| five of them for showing off something cool which someone was
| already working on.
|
| Something like this which had a clear path from a few groceries
| to full sponsorship at a comfortable salary could really take
| off, I think.
|
| As is, it's in a sort of uncanny valley where you'd probably
| attract more high-quality work in total if the prize was "get on
| a list of cool new stuff" instead of money. It's easy for the
| friction involved in accepting money to exceed the value of a
| hundred bucks, which might prove a bit of a market for lemons.
|
| Or it might not, it's a worthy experiment.
|
| Props to the sponsors for doing this, I look forward to seeing
| what comes of it!
| webmaven wrote:
| Given the small sums (and the relatively limited scope of the
| examples), these seem more like "nano" grants to me.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Well... the median of the range quoted in title could cover a
| month of living in my city (if you don't need to pay rent).
| Although you're probably not going to prototype a browser or
| build a compiler in that time, and anyone capable of doing so
| would move the hell out of here to make at least 20 times that
| much anyway.
| webmaven wrote:
| Yeah, I've reconsidered my comment.
|
| These grants are definitely in line with the amounts of what
| are often called "micro-loans", which in some contexts are
| often as little as $200 (eg. Kiva). In other contexts a
| micro-loan is up to $50k (eg. SBA).
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| Isn't housing most people's single biggest outlay?
| nomdep wrote:
| > (1) Building a self-hosted compiler or interpreter.
|
| Aren't every compiler or interpreter self-hosted, because they
| run on your own machine?
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| No. A self-hosted language means the language's compiler or
| interpreter is written in that language.
|
| Go is written in Go. rustc is written in Rust. clang is written
| in C++. Etc.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> Aren 't every compiler or interpreter self-hosted, because
| they run on your own machine?_
|
| Self-hosting in this context means that the compiler is its own
| toolchain, it doesn't rely on another compiler to create its
| executable.
|
| That said, nearly all compilers need some other compiler to
| bootstrap to self-hosting status, though there are projects
| that aim to minimize that chicken-and-egg issue. More pointers
| here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2022-05-30 23:01 UTC)