Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)

On https://laboratory.love/faq you say: "We never accept funding from companies whose products we might test. All our funding comes from individual contributors." On https://laboratory.love/blog you say: "If you're a product manufacturer interested in having your product tested, we welcome your participation in funding."

Bit confused as to your position on funding.

1. An example result is "https://laboratory.love/product/117", which is a list of chemicals and measurements. Is there a visualization of how these levels relate to regulations and expert recommendations? What about a visualization of how different products in the same category compare, so that consumers know which brand is supposedly "best"? Maybe a summary rating, as stars or color-coded threat level?

2. If you find regulation-violating (or otherwise serious) levels of undesirable chemicals, do you... (a) report it to FDA; (b) initiate a class-action lawsuit; (c) short the brand's stock and then news blitz; or (d) make a Web page with the test results for people to do with it what they will?

3. Is 3 tests enough? On the several product test results I clicked, there's often wide variation among the 3 samples. Or would the visualization/rating tell me that all 3 numbers are unacceptably bad, whether it's 635.8 or 6728.6?

4. If I know that plastic contamination is a widespread problem, can I secretly fund testing of my competitors' products, to generate bad press for them?

5. Could this project be shut down by a lawsuit? Could the labs be?

This is actually a topic I'm interested in

What bugs me is that plastics manufacturers advertise "BPA-free", which is technically correct, but then add a very similar chemical from the same family that has the same effect on the plastic - which is good - but also has the same effect on your endocrine system

Where can I subscribe to pay $20/mo to whatever happens to be the current leader unfunded product?

It's sad that it's come to this on needing to test these things, but amazing initiative! Would love something like this where I am.

First of all, really cool initiative!

It's interesting that a bunch of the funded products have been funded by a single person.

Do you know if it's the producers themselves? Worried rich people?

this looks so cool! I wish it told me if the levels found for tested products were good/bad - I have no prior reference so the numbers meant nothing to me

I think this concept has legs to be much bigger than just foods. There are lots of influencer types who focus on testing.

For example, there are two individuals who own the same $100k machine for testing the performance of loudspeakers.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php

https://www.erinsaudiocorner.com/

Both of them do measurements and YouTube videos. Neither one has a particularly good index of their completed reviews, let alone tools to compare the data.

I wish I could subscribe to support a domain like “loud speaker spin tests” and then have my donation paid out to these reviewers based on them publishing new high quality reviews with good data that is published to a common store.

FYI: DocuSign’s moat/USP is trust, not software.

DocuSign customers buy trust.

For a weekend, this is incredibly well done.

agree.com is free though

Dude hell yeah

As a bio hobbyist, this is fantastic! I don't do enough volume of PCR to think of it as expensive, but your use case of high-volume/automatic sounds fantastic! (And so many other types of reagents and equipment are very expensive).

Some things that would be cool

  - Along your lines: In general, cheap automated setups for PCR and gels
  - Cheap/automatic quantifiable gels. E.g. without needing a kV supply capillary, expensive QPCR machines etc.
  - Cheaper enzymes in general
  - More options for -80 freezers
  - Cheaper/more automated DNA quantification. I got a v1 Quibit which gets the job done, but new ones are very expensive, and reagent costs add up.
  - Cheaper shaking incubator options. You can get cheap shakers and baters, but not cheap combined ones... which you need for pretty much everything. Placing one in the other can work, but is sub-optimal due to size and power-cord considerations.
  - More centrifuges that can do 10kG... this is the minimum for many protocols.
  - Ability to buy pure ethanol without outrageous prices or hazardous shipping fees.

cool!

That sounds really cool. I wouldn't agree you can't make money off this, you can make money off anything, just find people who need this and it seems you did find it.

Anyhow good luck. Would love to follow if you do anything with this in the future. Do you have a blog or anything?

Looks great!

That’s so great, good luck with your project!

A simple comment, but wow I really like the look of Bonsai! The lighting, shading and shapes are really beautiful, I think a game made in this would feel really unique

wow, this is so cool Jesse :)

Wow, that looks fun and probably get to learn a lot about algorithms.

I don't have any feedback, but rather a question, as I've seen many repositories with people sharing their algorithms, at least on GitHub for many different languages (e.g. https://github.com/TheAlgorithms), what did you find that was missing from those repositories that you wanted to write a book and implement hundreds of algorithms, what did you find that was lacking?

Great idea. I had been thinking about pretty much the same but perhaps targeted at executives and perhaps including AI/Cloud.

I usually feel to many people wildly through around terms they hardly understand, in the belief they cannot possibly understand. That’s so wrong, every executive should understand some of what determines button line. It’s not like people skip economics because it’s hard.

Would love to perhaps contribute sometime next year. Stared and until then good luck - perhaps add a donation link!

That's a cool project!

I feel like the presentation of Lomuto's algorithm on p.110 would be improved by moving the i++ after the swap and making the corresponding adjustments to the accesses to i outside the loop. Also mentioning that it's Lomuto's algorithm.

These comments are probably too broad in scope to be useful this late in the project, so consider them a note to myself. C as the language for presenting the algorithms has the advantage of wide availability, not sweeping performance-relevant issues like GC under the rug, and stability, but it ends up making the implementations overly monomorphic. And some data visualizations as in Sedgewick's book would also be helpful.

Nice to see that you are still around with this after your https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45448525 was flagged because of LLM slop issues of your work. How are you addressing those?

i am working on something pretty radical in this space. it is a book of algorithms that derives all the algorithms without telling what the algorithm is. for example for binary search your book quickly went into the low + high / 2 = mid thing. my method is radically different. i take an even sized array then try to actually find it step by step , then take an odd sized array , find it step by step, derive a general hypothesis and then create the formula from it for that algorithm. this is going to be orders of magnitude above any data structures and algorithms books and courses when it comes out. pinky promise

I love this as someone who used to work on max-weight matchings and now works on LLMs :)

Very neat. As a heavy user of recordlinkage, this is definitely on my radar.

This is very cool! Thanks for sharing.

Cool project!

I see you saved a spot to show how to use it with an alternative embedding model. It would be nice to be able to use the library without an OpenAI api key. Might even make sense to vendor a basic open source model in your package so it can work out of the box without remote dependencies.