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.<p><a href="https://100r.co/site/mission.html" rel="nofollow">https://100r.co/site/mission.html</a><p>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 (<a href="https://github.com/hundredrabbits/awesome-uxn" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hundredrabbits/awesome-uxn</a>)
I wrote over 300 ideas down<p><a href="https://github.com/samsquire/ideas" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/samsquire/ideas</a>
<a href="https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2</a>
<a href="https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3</a>
<a href="https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4</a> (incomplete)<p>I've emailed them and I am interested in donating to see what interesting projects people shall come up with.<p>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.<p>Ideas4 has data structure ideas.
Our project was a recipient of a similar microgrant - <a href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/01/openbenches-is-a-recipient-of-a-microgrant/" rel="nofollow">https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/01/openbenches-is-a-recipient-...</a><p>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.<p>There was no complex application process and no auditing. That certainly opened it up to me as I hate filling in forms.<p>I hope one day I'm in a position to help others in a similar way.
> (1) Building a self-hosted compiler or interpreter.<p>> (2) Prototype an experimental browser.<p>> (3) Make your computer express emotions.<p>$100-$500 is a drop in the bucket for projects of this scale.
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.<p>My government can give a approx $15000-$20000 grant but it has to be MVP for a business kind of thing.<p>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.
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.<p>Num is free open source software that uses `awk` to calculate many typical statistics on the command line.<p><a href="https://github.com/numcommand/num" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/numcommand/num</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Or it might not, it's a worthy experiment.<p>Props to the sponsors for doing this, I look forward to seeing what comes of it!
I was going to be mean, but the numbers actually work.<p>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.<p>I would absolutely say however that their advised projects are toned down slightly.<p>1. <a href="https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Greater-Denver-And-Boulder-Area/" rel="nofollow">https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Greater-De...</a>
The amounts are actually not that bad for someone who is working on something in POC stage.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>Advertising has distorted and rendered the open web far less useful in this regard.<p>Funding small one time projects without strings is something that DARPA used to do. It's been missed.<p>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.
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.
I'm shameless, so I applied with my LLC ( <a href="https://www.adama-platform.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.adama-platform.com/</a> ). At this point, it's less about the grant and more validation and marketing.<p>I love the idea, and this could have helped a younger version of myself when I was poor.
I want to build a screen-<i>less</i> 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).<p>A system akin to <a href="https://screenl.es" rel="nofollow">https://screenl.es</a> or <a href="https://dynamicland.org/" rel="nofollow">https://dynamicland.org/</a> that can be assembled from existing parts as much as possible and extended to the needs of the user.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Just one of those projects that probably won't see the light of day because it's not capitalist enough.
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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.
> (1) Building a self-hosted compiler or interpreter.<p>Aren't every compiler or interpreter self-hosted, because they run on your own machine?
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.