Alternatives
Products that do what The Population Project does
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,…
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- 2IV
Hi HN,<p>I've posted a couple times here before (mostly within posts pertaining to Amit Gupta's search for a bone marrow donor) and I wanted to share a site I've been working on for the past 5 months or so that recently went live. I'm going on my fifth year of being an Acute Myelogenous Leukemia survivor, and while I didn't need a bone marrow transplant myself at one point it was a very real possibility. At that time I became aware of the lack of minority bone marrow donors and made a promise to myself to try to do something about it if I were to survive. This site is something of a…
2012 · cheekswab.org
- 3MW
This was more of a sandbox to play with Raphael and Flot than anything else but I think there are some interesting statistics in there. It'd be awesome to do this over time but I really don't have the spare time required.
2011 · burntbrunch.github.com
- 4MF
Wrote a program in FreeBASIC to try and find out how Genetic Algorithms work. It's a quick hack that I wrote to try some theories with because the Wikipedia Article on GAs reads like greek to me. So I built it from the general principles i knew at the time. The "genome" per individual is an array of 9000 integers but I used only monochrome pictures with either black or white; An individual also has a fitness score. There are 1000 individuals in the population and only two are selected to reproduce. So that makes 9 million (yes, MEELION as El Reg would write) data points and the scoring…
2015
- 5TB
Hello everyone, I have always loved coding and in the couple I was thinking of making an open source project and it turned out to be awesome I hope you guys like it. I present Explore Singapore which I created as an open-source intelligence engine to execute retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) on Singapore's public policy documents and legal statutes and historical archives. The objective required building a domain-specific search engine which enables LLM systems to decrease errors by using government documents as their exclusive information source. What my Project does :- basically it…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 6OO
I'm currently participating in Philadelphia Startup Weekend. I successfully pitched my idea for a not for profit and we're currently hacking away on making it a reality. We are one2many.org, we foster a culture that celebrates giving & helping and that inspires people to be generous & compassionate to one another. People donate used goods to us - items like old iPhones, iPods, routers, trumpets, bunk beds, etc. - and we then give these items away to people for free, in exchange for their volunteer service participation at local organizations (Habitat for Humanity, local soup…
2012
- 7IM
Hi HN, I am a 75-year-old former fishmonger from Japan. Currently, I work at the compensation desk for the Fukushima nuclear disaster (TEPCO). Witnessing deep social divisions and the limitations of bureaucracy firsthand, I realized we need a new way for people to express their will without being "disposable." To address this, I’ve designed the *Virtual Protest Protocol (VPP)*. It’s an OSS framework for large-scale, 2D avatar-based digital demonstrations. I recently shared this with the *Open Technology Fund (OTF)* and received an encouraging "This is great" response. Now, I am looking for…
Feb 2026 · github.com
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- 9HM
I've been building a bunch of US geography tools/games/visualizations and thought folks on HN might like this one. There are also drive-time and bike-time tools available on the same page. For folks interested, all of the data comes from OpenStreetMap and the US Census at the moment - OSM for routing and points interest and the US Census for population data. Anonymous users can use it 5x/day. I put up a waitlist page to gauge interest in a paid version but there's no way for the public to make an account - feel free to bypass the limits in an incognito tab. The site is US-only…
Jul 2026 · blockatlas.com
- 10IM
Hey HN, I'm Aydin, a 13-year-old developer and indie maker looking to improve the world with my small startups. Recently, I built 2 micro SaaS projects. I spent days & weeks coding features, always telling myself that after coding one more feature I was for sure to get traction. This never happened. The reason: I never launched. With IndieReq, you can launch your startup fast and get real user feedback so you know exactly what features to ship and improve. All you have to do is sign up for free, create a feedback board, and share the public link with your users. It's that easy! If you've…
2025 · indiereq.com
- 11BA
I'm 17 and recently launched a private beta for Biohack - a tool that scans food products and gives a longevity score based on impact on aging factors such as inflammation, omega ratio, toxins and more. Still early and a bit rough, but I'm looking for honest feedback from people who care about health span and deep nutrition. Would love your thoughts.
2025 · getbiohack.app
- 12IM
Hi there! I've been working with data in one form or another, professionally, for about 5 years. I've been thinking about my own personal data and how it's used for at least twice that long. I've been sort of building something in my head for a while that solves my own problem and, in the beginning of this year, I found the opportunity to spend some time building it out. I'll leave the detailed explanation to the blog post but, in short, I built what amounts to an API crawler combined with a data processor to help you download your personal data from 3rd party services and work with it using…
2024 · joshcanhelp.com
- 13IS
Hey folks, I wanted to share my latest project, which is a book that I wrote and self-published. The book is called Behind the Ivy Curtain: A Data Driven Guide to Elite College Admissions, and the link is http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013YFIQ30. Let me give you some backstory. I went to a fun high school but it was really easy and fun and I was a pretty big slacker. Around sophomore spring I decided I wanted to leave Florida, and the best way to do that was to get a scholarship to a good school. I had no idea how to do that so I spent a bunch of time reading…
2015
- 14AL
I've spent most of my career in marketing, which for the last few years has meant building consumer personas for campaigns. I wanted to see if I could make these real, living in real neighborhoods, had real weather, real budgets, real Saturday lunches. I always wanted to build a world, not a segment. This is that. 140 people so far, split across Vancouver (100), San Francisco (20), and Tokyo (20). Each one is about 1,000 lines of profile — family, finances, daily schedule, health, worldview, media diet, the channels you'd actually reach them through and the ones that will explicitly never…
Apr 2026 · brasilia-phi.vercel.app
- 15IL
I am a 50-year-old who left a FAANG Engineering Manager job to build a sci-fi game. I just released Outsider, a sci-fi narrative game with multiple endings. If you want to support my work, the game is now 15% off (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/). I've always wanted to create a game. I moved from Brazil to the US to work at Big Tech, but after a career of customer focus, mission alignment and 360-degree feedback, I wanted to experience solo game development. While FAANG can be soul-crushing at times, I had a great manager and an amazing team. The pay and…
Nov 2025
- 16PP
Hello! I just wanted to drop in to let you know about a new platform I’m developing that I think could benefit you. I was finding that the mediums I was searching to find freelance work (Twitter, freelance job sites, etc) weren’t really providing me with projects that matched my interests or skill set AND it is a lot of work to find projects through these mediums. My vision is to create a freelance job market that will make it easy for freelancers and people looking for some freelance work to find the perfect partnership by adding a human element to the process (that isn’t you combing…
2016
- 17AM
Hi HN, Today I'm launching the Net Worth Tracker by Flow Finance, a beautiful and minimalist Excel template that allows individuals to track their assets, liabilities, income, and spending on a monthly basis. The focus of this template is understanding long-term trends in the incoming and outgoing expenses for an individual—always with a focus on maximising insights while minimising user inputs. This project was created because the alternatives, frankly, are completely overwhelming. A friend of mine introduced me to the FIRE Movement and, after doing deep dives through Reddit, I tried to…
2023 · getflow.finance
- 18FA
Hey everyone, I'm Fabio, a very long time lurker here. Today I want to celebrate and share with you, again, a game that I conceived more than 8 years ago. I shared it last week with all its history (if you're curious) [1], but it just stayed in the "shownew" and never reached the main "show" page, hopefully this time it'll do better (:crossed_fingers:)! What changed since last week? Today I've also published the mobile apps for both iOS and Android (last week it was just web), which are also my first mobile apps ever. So I believe it's still a worthwhile post and something to show :) I'd…
2024 · fiftygame.com
- 19PO
Progress.org must be one of the oldest sites on the Internet, and quite likely the oldest site that has continuously advocated for economic justice. A few years ago, I took it over and gave it a new facelift (thanks, Webflow!) So today, it’s my great pleasure to announce a next chapter for Progress.org Earlier today I transferred stewardship of Progress.org into the capable hands of Floyd Marinescu, a man whom I deeply respect and admire. Floyd is a successful entrepreneur and the founder of UBI Works (https://ubiworks.ca), Canada’s preeminent basic income advocacy organization.…
2022
- 20FE
Hey HN, We explored how decision-making happens under severe information asymmetry and used career exploration as a test subject. In practice, people converge on a small set of highly legible default paths, with little visibility into credible alternatives. That’s why we’re building Fig, a tool for reasoning about career paths when the next step isn’t obvious, given the dependence on fleeting personal preferences. Most existing tools respond by collapsing uncertainty into a single recommendation or by modeling careers as linear trajectories. That works reasonably well at the recruiting…
Jan 2026 · figcareer.com
- 21BF
Excited to announce my new project, Rally! It’s a useful community for early-stage startup founders, inspired by Y Combinator’s Bookface. Site: https://rally.socap.ai/ We think many problems that founders have can be solved 10x better through other founders, but there’s no tool/place to do that well and at scale. For example, instead of googling how to launch on PH, reading blog posts, etc., you could ask for an intro to a famous hunter who’ll explain all that and hunt your product. We're building this place + software to make it work really well. What Rally is: • A…
2024 · rally.socap.ai
- 22IC
This project started with me wanting to find a nice place to live with my partner. I'm a data scientist by day so I thought I'd approach it systematically. When I showed it to my friends, many said they wanted to try it too, so I made it into an app and put it online. (-> MIT licensed) The app is German, but it's translator friendly :) Instead of a single "best place" ranking, it scores ~0.5 km2 hexes across Germany based on user preferences on a dozen or so liveability layers like rent, commute time, recreational potential, noise level, and many more. User preferences are reflected on the…
Jul 2026 · wohnortatlas.de
- 23TT
Interesting to see that the entrepreneurs from more recent years tend to be doing well relative to years prior. Some interesting future directions could be: - Expanding search to be global and include more competitions, like biology and chemistry - Improving search so less unknown results - Showing insights, like trends over the years Kudos to Perplexity Computer for making this
Apr 2026 · perplexity.ai
- 24M2
Hello Dear HN Folks. I would like to share with you my journey from testing to software engineer in test, then build engineer, DevOps engineer, cloud engineer, and software engineer today. It took me from 2004 to 2024 today. It was quite the ride and I tried to write down my experience during this journey. I still have doubts, fears and everything. I wanted to inspire those who also wished to embark on this journey that it's not impossible. It is hard though. Not gonna lie. And I had some luck along the way for sure. But with passion and stubbornness and determination one can go to places.…
2024 · skarlso.github.io
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