Alternatives
Products that do what Ameelio – Free and Open Source Prison Communication Platform (Part II) does
A couple of months ago I made a post here announcing the launch of Letters, the first application developed by Ameelio (https://ameelio.org), a non-profit organization committed to making communication free between incarcerated people and their loved ones. Letters allows users to sign up, type a letter to their loved-one in prison/jail and we handle printing, packaging, stamping and shipping through USPS. It's still totally free and unlimited. We've also have went open source. (https://github.com/ameelio) When I made the post on HN…
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2020 · ameelio.org
- 2IM
A few years ago, right after high school, I decided to try to make a simultaneous translation app for Android as a side project, it took longer than expected (about 2 years) and I had to make a lot of compromises (I had to use Google's API and therefore make users use a developer key because at the time there were no free solutions for speech recognition and translation that had good quality). At the end of university, I decided to pick it up again and finally, using OpenAi's Whisper for speech recognition and Meta's NLLB for translation (with both running locally on the phone), I managed to…
2024 · github.com
- 3ID
Hi everyone, I am Bojta Lepenye, and first of all, I want to thank the core developers of Hashcat. In my experience, it is quite literally the most capable tool available for offline password cracking across a wide range of use cases. I have spent the last 4 years (from age 14 to 18) extensively working with Hashcat and the tools surrounding it, and I have documented what I have learned throughout that time (since January 18, 2022) in my first book. During that period, I also had to continuously update and rewrite major sections as the field evolved. One example was the introduction of GPU…
May 2026
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2021 · papyrus.so
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- 8MI
Hi one and all. I've created an encrypted personal organizer I wish to share with you all. I know.... you are sighing and thinking "Oh! No! not another one". doogiePIM is different in that it's built by the same coder that created one of the very first PIMs that came out around 18+ years ago and creator of TexNotes way back then (it was actually called Scribillo. Wow, I feel old). The original PIM was sold then abandoned by GemX Software and that made me feel really bad. So, I obtained the full code and started to build a far better version of the information manager. One that will…
2018
- 9AF
https://github.com/inoda/private_journal Built this to use myself, and I'm curious if anybody would be interested in using it. I'm also wondering if anybody has tips to make it more secure (I'm super super new to encryption and whatnot). The security is probably a bit overkill since chances are that nobody cares about what I'm journaling, but it is fun to implement from a code standpoint.
2019
- 10OI
I'm trying to get the motivation up to actually finish building out a "real" product, and I found myself needing a "win" to keep my momentum up. So, I hacked out a little one sentence journal app last night. I experimented with a few UI things (e.g.., the autosaving of the sentence for today and so on), so it was a good learning experience also. You can check it out at: http://osod.im
2012
- 11AD
Hi all, I threw together a small prototype I am calling “Notepad.ai”. A new take on UIs for interacting with LLMs. While I enjoy using LLM’s in the chat format I wanted to see what it would be like to do it in a more long form style. It let’s you write in a pretty free form, much like Window’s Notepad, but you can choose to hit ctrl+[ to analyze the text with a preset prompt of your choosing. It has a few other small features. It’s WIP and very experimental. I would appreciate any feedback or thoughts. Video: https://youtu.be/ntdlgFmSxQY Live Demo:…
2024 · github.com
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Yeah I know I hate the name too but I wasn't about to pay up for odyssey.app. It's an open source project so feel free to poke around with it / fork it. I talk about it more on the marketing website, but a few of us have been using it for the past month and kind of fun. Obviously there will be a slew of issues / feedback / nits that come from this, but c'est la vie. GH is here: https://github.com/johnlarkin1/odozi
Apr 2026 · odozi.app
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Hi Everyone, Today I'm proud to announce the upcoming launch of Postcard. You can visit the launch page here - http://www.postcardsocial.net However, since this is Hacker News, I thought the community might be more interested in my blog entry which explains in detail why the project should be of interest to developers including information about the open API Protocol it will adhere to. You can read the blog entry here - http://blog.postcardsocial.net/introducing-postcard/ Feedback is welcome and appreciated. I'm actively looking for beta testers and you can sign…
2013
- 14JR
Hello Hacker News! We’re Willem, Roeland, Felix and Madeline from Aikido Security (https://aikido.dev/) We’re building a “no BS’ application security platform. It’s the platform we wish existed, but couldn’t find. Willem, our CTO had to manage (application) security at many of his previous startups, and honestly, hated it. Most security tools we had to use made us feel dumb. They were super complex and riddled with false positives. Their platform was behind the book a demo button. They had intransparent pricing models and honestly charged us way too much. We think most of…
2024
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Over the last couple of months I have designed and written Keys, a Mac application the helps learning typing and that is supposed to meet Mac users standards for a well-designed application. My goal is to become a micro-ISV or indie developer. The app is only in the Mac app store for now (no trial yet), since end of May, and I have been busy putting together a website and a personal blog since. I would be very interested what the HN community thinks about the application, how you like it, and how it is presented, from a business angle. Prior to this project, I have done much more work on…
2012
- 16LA
Hey HN, Along with a handful of friends, I've been working on a note taking platform for the last couple years. We created a 2 minute pitch of our platform, if you'd prefer to read, maybe you'd want to checkout our README: https://github.com/lockbook/lockbook. If you don't want to do either of those things I'll try to summarize some of our core values: - everything end to end encrypted - open formats: markdown and svg - strong offline support - everything open source - native apps where possible - rust where possible Some other stuff we're proud of: - we have a CLI which…
2024 · youtube.com
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My Public Second Brain (https://brain.sspaeti.com) is built with the help of a wonderful tool called Quartz (https://brain.sspaeti.com/quartz-publish-obsidian-vault/). Obsidian (https://brain.sspaeti.com/obsidian/) has become my favorite for note-takers, given its flexible and linked structure that closely mirrors our natural way of thinking. With Quartz, I was able to seamlessly publish my Obsidian notes to a public vault, providing the groundwork for my Public Second Brain. The journey of making this possible involved some scripting as…
2023
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Hi, everyone. Been playing around with this recently as a sort of PGP successor. It's not all there yet, and I know it's missing some things from PGP, but I figured why not get a start and see what kind of interest/support it might get. https://stamp-protocol.github.io/ Effectively, this is a key management system that allows building and signing ("stamping") various claims about yourself and about others. The eventual goal is to create easy-to-use implementations of the protocol that allow logging in to websites or managing cryptographic keys for various…
2021
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Hello everyone. I'm a relatively new developer and I started my first project to go full production recently. It is a directory of payment processors and payment service providers. It's free to use and gives detailed info on their pricing, business model, supported business types, available countries, prohibited businesses and high risk business support. So far only 40 have been added with more to come. And I allow processors to contact me so that they're details can be added to the database. I'll eventually automate this and add verification the months to come. I hope you'll find it useful.…
2025 · sourcefees.com
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Recent news about Trump admin officials accidentally leaking war plans via Signal (The Atlantic, March 24, 2025) has renewed concerns over secure messaging. But for me, those concerns aren’t new. While visiting family and friends in Ukraine, I sat down with a friend for coffee at a café in Kyiv and that’s where it all started - the first sketch of a messenger built for privacy, not profit. We knew most messaging platforms were vulnerable to leaking data, tracking users, and exposing private conversations. We believed we could build something better. Then the war in Ukraine began, and…
2025 · gospl.chat
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TLDR: We built out an API for sending handwritten letters at https://www.handwrite.io/handwritten-notes-api Quick backstory: I was helping a small moving company build out some marketing automation as a side gig. We were ingesting housing data and as soon as a house went up for sale, we'd use lob.com to send a direct mail postcard letting the home owner know we'd love their business. But the postcards didn't convert well, and were super cliche so I went searching for something that might feel a little more personal. That's when I met my cofounder, Dan, here on Hacker News!…
2020
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Hello HN, Over the last year we've been building snote.app, a Privacy focused, End-to-End Encrypted alternative to Notion. You can write, plan, collaborate and get organized - it allows you to take notes, store files, add tasks, manage projects & more. Whether you're working solo or in a team. We are hoping to use this post as an opportunity to collect feedback from fellow hackers. If there's anything we can do better, please let us know
2023 · snote.app
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Hi HN! Writing has been a big part of my life for the last few years. It's helped me make sense of the world around me through journaling, and my blog and technical books have made wonders for my career as an engineer. Something I've always been missing is an online community where I can practice my skills and learn from other aspiring writers. I built Tavern, hoping to solve my own problem. Its main concept is that every Monday everyone in the app gets asked the same writing prompt and you have seven days to submit your answer. You can look at what others have posted, but only after you've…
2023 · writerstavern.io
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Hello Hacker News! We bring to you today 2 things: 1. Our passion project - LaoTzu Writer Studio - a modern writing application 2. Thoughts on the abysmal state of Kickstarter - likely well known to you all, but having experienced it for the first time, it is disheartening So lets start with the good stuff: LaoTzu Writer Studio - LaoTzu helps you build the framework of a novel, but still leaves the writing for you to do. That means there are indeed AI elements - like our Guard section that flags inconsistent canon in your universe, or the analyze section that determines writing stats,…
May 2026
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