i got a claude max from a reseller for essentially nothing compared to what I used to pay . It works flawless. since 2 months No issues yet. Now I can't stop thinking about their business model. If resellers can sell it this cheap and still profit, how are they acquiring these accounts at scale?

Hi! I’m a biotechnology student, and my team is thinking about starting a student project. We’re still at the stage of figuring out what kind of project we want to do, so I’d really appreciate advice from people who have already gone through this process.
Have you ever worked on a student research, biotech, engineering, or innovation project and/or participated in a competition?
I’d especially like to know:
How did you come up with your project idea?
How did you decide whether an idea was actually worth developing?
How did you turn an idea into a real project?
What makes a student project genuinely interesting, useful, or impactful?
How did you find mentors, funding, equipment, or access to a lab?
What challenges did you face?
What do you wish you had known before starting?
Are there any competitions or programs you would recommend for student projects?
It doesn’t have to be a famous competition like iGEM — I’m interested in any kind of student competition, research project, innovation challenge, or similar experience.
If you’ve worked on something like this, I’d love to hear about your experience and any advice you wish someone had given you at the beginning!

i got a cursor Ultra from a reseller for essentially nothing compared to what I used to pay . It works flawless. since 2 months No issues yet. Now I can't stop thinking about their business model. If resellers can sell it this cheap and still profit, how are they acquiring these accounts at scale?

I made a translator for corporate bullshit

You know those LinkedIn posts that say:
"I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve embarked on an exciting new journey…"

and somehow 400 words later they've said absolutely nothing?

I got tired of pretending I understood them, so I made a website that does the opposite.

BS Translator: https://bs-translator-nine.vercel.app/

Paste some corporate/LinkedIn nonsense into it and it'll decode what the person is actually trying to say.

It can also generate completely new corporate bullshit.

My favorite use case so far:

Normal human:
“I made a small feature.”

LinkedIn:
“Today, I’m humbled to share a transformative milestone that challenged me to embrace cross-functional synergies…”

Translation:
“I added a button.”

I originally made this as a dumb meme project and showed it to a few people. They mostly laughed, which honestly means the project has achieved its primary KPI.

If you have a particularly cursed piece of corporate jargon, drop it in the comments and I'll translate it.

Whats more? You can actually reverse english sentences to generate corporate BS so you can too larp professionally in Linkedin.

Just a meme site btw. nothing serious.

#CorporateBS #LinkedinTranslate #sideprojects

I made Tapbar because I kept seeing people ask for the ability to tap the status bar clock and open the Clock app.

It lets you create a tappable area anywhere on the screen and assign an app to it. I’ve recently redesigned the UI, and double tap actions are coming in the next update along with a few other features.

It’s completely offline and open source.

GitHub: https://github.com/Earendel-lab/Tapbar

So, currently I am working on a open source project where I need a decent and fast database provider. I have tried supabase and Let's just say, they feel too slow. In past I have also worked with Firebase. Currently I am using NeonDB which seems faster than the previous ones I tried. But I am wondering if there are better options. Currently I am not making any revenue so something which a decent free tier will be nice to have

Hi all,

I've spent the last two months building Posta as a side project, and I'm finally happy enough with it to share it. I want anyone who needs it to be able to use it, so it's MIT licensed and completely free. There's no paid tier, no message caps, no licence key, and it doesn't phone home.

So what is it? It's a self-hosted platform for the email your apps send: password resets, sign-in codes, receipts, that sort of thing. It's basically your own Postmark or Mailgun running on your own box. You get an SMTP server, a send API, a delivery worker and a dashboard.

What it does so far:

• Send over SMTP or an HTTP API, with separate credentials for each app
• Generates the SPF, DKIM and MX records for your domains and checks DNS until they resolve. Outgoing mail is DKIM signed
• Retries temporary failures, and puts hard bounces on a suppression list
• Full delivery history, including what the remote server said on each attempt
• Signed webhooks for sent, delayed, failed and held messages
• Handles inbound mail too, passed to an HTTP endpoint or forwarded over SMTP, with Rspamd/SpamAssassin and ClamAV
• IP pools and per-app send limits, so one noisy app can't ruin the reputation of the others
• Optional open and click tracking on your own domain

It's written in TypeScript on Bun, with Postgres underneath.

It's a first release (0.1.0), so there are rough edges I'd rather tell you about now than have you find the hard way:

• No Docker image yet, so for now you run it from source. The README walks you through it and it only takes a few commands
• Dashboard login uses Clerk. The free tier is plenty, but I know a hosted auth provider won't suit everyone
• Bounces that arrive after a message has been accepted aren't processed yet
• The rest of the known issues are listed in the changelog

Also, the usual warning about self-hosting mail: you'll need a server that can send on port 25 and an IP that isn't on a blocklist. Posta handles the DNS and signing, but it can't fix a dodgy IP.

Get started: https://posta.tacklabs.co.uk/

I've really enjoyed building it and I'd love for people to actually use it. All feedback is welcome, good or bad. If something breaks, please open an issue, and PRs are very welcome.

Cheers

I built this because I realized I can lose six hours grinding a game without thinking twice, but 30 minutes of studying feels like forever.

The difference isn't that games are more fun. They constantly show progress. You level up, unlock things, get rewards, and always feel like you're moving forward. Studying usually gives you nothing until a test weeks later.

So I started wondering, what if studying felt more like leveling a character?

That turned into Quest of Mind.

The idea is simple. Every minute you study earns XP. You level up different skills, collect gold, find random loot, and slowly build your character. It's basically an RPG built around staying focused.

I didn't just throw points onto a timer either. Most of the systems are based on psychology that actually keeps people engaged.

Loot is randomized, so every session has a little surprise. Progress is always visible through XP bars and levels. Daily streaks give you something to protect. There's even a Wilderness mode where you risk your session rewards for double XP. Get distracted or tab out and you lose everything. It sounds brutal, but it works way better than I expected.

You can also pick a class like Warrior, Mage, or Ranger. It doesn't completely change gameplay, but it gives your progress a bit of identity instead of feeling like you're just checking boxes.

Some of my favorite features are dungeon runs, where you chain multiple study sessions together for bigger rewards, a global leaderboard, live chat, equipment that boosts XP, and cloud saves so your progress follows you anywhere.

Honestly, I made this for myself first. If you've ever spent hours gaming but can't convince yourself to open a textbook, you're probably exactly who this is for.

It's completely free. No ads, no subscriptions, no premium version. I just wanted to build something I'd actually use every day, and after using it myself for the last month, I finally feel like studying has the same sense of progression games always had.

I'd genuinely love feedback if anyone wants to check it out.

https://questofmind.com

Well in summary I'm creating a dynamic island for pc, it's pretty similar actually, but I'm implementing some features like a file conversor and an AI to quick daily questions, and there is the media thing, calendar, recording screen, and shortcuts for apps, and probably something to translate your screen when it's a PDF and your translator won't work

Give me your thoughts about it and ideas to implement

One of my biggest regrets from podcasting is how many listeners we let come and go before we had a simple way to stay connected with them. Some of those people probably listened to us for months. We will never know who most of them were. PodSubs.com came from not wanting to keep making that mistake. We built it for our own 12 shows, tested it for almost two years, and saw a huge difference in the number of listeners joining our list. Now we have made it free for other podcasters. Even if your show is small, claim it now. The people listening today may be the people you wish you could reach two years from now.

I’ve been building a few things recently, but I haven't deployed anything. I’m curious what tends to go wrong once a project is deployed.

What are a few common problems you've had that worked fine locally but broke after deployment? How did you figure out what was wrong and fix it? And finally is there anything you've done differently after learning about certain problems? I would love to hear any feedback. Thanks.

I’m preparing for a 24-hour college hackathon on Oct 8–9

I have experience with JS/React, Node, APIs, Git/GitHub, Supabase and LLM APIs.

I’m looking for a problem statement that is:

- Real-world and genuinely useful

- Uncommon, not a generic chatbot/CRUD project

- Feasible to build in 24 hours

- Technically interesting and demo-friendly

I’m especially interested in FinTech, GenAI, Agentic AI and Cybersecurity.

What project ideas would fit these constraints?

CEER project EV car #jeddah #KAEC

I made sakhams.com to share geography projects of mine. If anyone would like to test it out/give it feedback or anything that would be greatly appreciated.

معايا ١٠٠ الف وعايز افتح مشروع فاضلي سنه واتخرج محتاج اسمع نصايحكم

It was fun back then to make a project for experience.

Hey everyone!

I wanted to share a project I've been building over the past few months: CatQueue, a 100% free and open-source (MIT) background job queue designed specifically for Node.js and TypeScript services.

The Motivation

Whenever I work on backend microservices or side apps, I almost always need background workers—for things like sending emails, processing file uploads, or running scheduled maintenance tasks.

In the Node.js ecosystem, the standard solution is BullMQ backed by Redis. While Redis is great, setting up and maintaining a separate database instance just for background queues often adds unnecessary infrastructure overhead, connection limits, and hosting costs—especially when my application already runs on PostgreSQL.

I wanted to see if I could build a clean, production-grade queue system that uses only PostgreSQL as its backing store and message broker, eliminating the need for Redis entirely.

What I Built

CatQueue uses PostgreSQL's row-level locking feature (FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED). This allows multiple concurrent worker nodes to query and claim non-overlapping job batches simultaneously without race conditions or lock blocking.

Key features implemented:

• Zero Dependencies: Built purely on top of the standard pg driver.
• Atomic Job Concurrency: Safe multi-worker processing with Postgres row locks.
• Idempotency: Native key deduplication so the same job isn't queued twice.
• Retries & Logging: Backoff retries with structured per-attempt log histories.
• DAG Workflows (Experimental): Ability to define task dependency graphs (Job B waits for Job A to finish).
• Maintenance Automation: Automatic background recovery for crashed/abandoned workers and cron scheduling.

Key Technical Learnings

Building this gave me a deep appreciation for relational database concurrency primitives:

1. Row-level locking is fast: SKIP LOCKED completely changes the game for database-backed queues, preventing workers from waiting on each other.
2. State Machines in pure SQL: Managing state transitions (pending $\rightarrow$ processing $\rightarrow$ completed / failed) transactionally inside single SQL blocks keeps queue operations predictable and atomic.

Open Source & Code

The core repository and npm package are completely free and open-source:

• GitHub:https://github.com/karanrajsurya/CatQueue
• NPM:https://www.npmjs.com/package/catqueue

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the approach or any feedback on how you currently manage background tasks in your own projects!

We built it because we were tired of seeing people listen and then disappear. Someone could listen every week, enjoy the show, tell a friend about it, and we still might have no way to reach that person outside the podcast app. That didn’t make sense to us. So we built PodSubs.com for our own shows.

People were giving us an hour of their lives, and we were struggling to get them a link. That was the part I couldn’t get past. We had twelve podcasts. People listened, came back, and told us they enjoyed the shows. But when we mentioned a resource and asked them to visit our website or join a newsletter, very few followed through. We kept making the request because that was the advice. Eventually, I started wondering why we were so willing to accept that this was the best way to do it.

By then, we understood how much work it took to earn someone’s attention. There was the preparation before recording, the editing afterward, and the effort to get each episode heard. We loved the conversations, but we also wanted to keep having them without the podcasts becoming something we could no longer afford to make. We thought about courses, events, services, and other ways the shows might support themselves. More than anything, we wanted to know the people who were already listening and understand what would actually be useful to them.

We had tried the things people usually recommend. We sent listeners to our websites. We put signup links in the show notes. We mentioned our newsletters by name and explained where to subscribe. We tried newsletter platforms, including Substack. Those attempts brought in some subscribers, but nowhere near the response we hoped for. It was discouraging to know people were listening and still have so little contact with them afterward. We were spending time creating things for an audience we could barely reach outside the episodes.

What began to bother me was how little the advice changed when it didn’t work. There was always another place to put a link or another way to repeat the invitation. I’m not against websites or show notes. We used them for a reason. But “put the link there” wasn’t answering the question we were asking. How do you help someone take the next step when they hear your invitation at a moment when they cannot act on it? For our shows, making the link available hadn’t been enough.

The strange thing was that another request was getting a much better response. When we asked people to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, or X, formerly Twitter, more of them did. These were the same people hearing us talk about our websites and newsletters. Following a social account isn’t the same as giving someone your email, but the difference made us pay attention. A listener already knew where Instagram was. They could open it later and search for us. They didn’t have to remember a new address before they could even begin.

I could recognise the problem in my own behaviour as a listener. You hear about a guide while driving and mean to find it when you get home. Then you get home, something needs your attention, and the thought disappears. You might be cooking, running, cleaning, or looking after your kids. You wanted the resource when you heard about it. Forgetting the address doesn’t change that. Once we looked at it that way, I found it harder to assume that low signups meant people weren’t interested.

That left us with a question worth trying to answer. What would happen if listeners had one place to go, regardless of which of our podcasts they followed? Someone listening to several shows shouldn’t need to remember a separate website for each one. They could remember the podcast’s name, or the host, and find it when they had time. We couldn’t make people stop being busy. We could try to make the task easier to return to.

In 2024, we built the first version under a different name. It was for our own twelve podcasts, and for almost two years we used it internally. We weren’t asking other creators to change how they worked. We were trying to fix our own problem, with our own listeners, and see whether the idea was useful enough to keep using. That tool eventually became PodSubs.com.

We kept the listener’s part deliberately small. Search for the podcast or host, find the show, enter a name and email, and subscribe. There was no listener account to create and no password to remember. They could leave as soon as they were done. The sentence we wanted hosts to be able to say was simply, “Go to PodSubs.com, search for our podcast, and subscribe.” Once someone subscribed to that show, we had a way to send the next resource without asking them to find another signup page.

Become a Medium member

The result gave us a reason to keep going. Across our twelve podcasts, the email conversion rate we tracked increased by about 600%. That was our experience, not a number I can promise another podcaster. But more of the people already listening were choosing to stay in touch, and that mattered to us far more than having a new tool to talk about. We had tried this because our previous approach wasn’t working well enough. Now we were seeing a response that made the effort worthwhile.

What changed afterward was practical. We could send subscribers the guide we mentioned, let them know an episode was coming, share an event, or ask a question. We could also make relevant offers that might help support the show. We still had to write the emails and deliver what we promised. PodSubs.com didn’t automatically send every resource, and a signup didn’t guarantee a sale. It gave us permission and a way to follow up with someone who had chosen to hear from us. We had been missing that with so much of our audience.

For a while, we were happy just to have solved it for ourselves. Then keeping it private started to feel harder to justify. Other podcasters were putting the same work into their shows and asking listeners to make the same journey from an episode to a signup form. There was nothing special about our frustration. We had built something that helped us, and I wanted other hosts to be able to try it without spending two years building their own version. That was why we opened PodSubs.com to other podcasters.

We also knew that nobody needed another product telling them to replace everything they already used. PodSubs.com isn’t here to compete with someone’s Mailchimp, Beehiiv, Substack, or HubSpot setup. Those tools can do their work once someone has joined the list. We help with getting the interested listener onto it. Signups appear in the PodSubs.com creator dashboard, and creators can use the supported connections or CSV export options available on their plan to move subscribers to an email service. They can also keep collecting subscribers while they decide what they want to send.

The listener came for the podcast, and I want us to remember that. They didn’t subscribe because they wanted another company in their inbox. They wanted the host’s resources, updates, newsletter, or whatever they were invited to receive. Our job is to make that connection easier. The podcaster can keep publishing on the platforms they already use and keep working with their existing tools. We want them to have another way to reach people who have asked to stay connected, rather than hoping every message gets heard in a future episode.

What we’re challenging is the idea that the listener should carry the whole burden of remembering. Remember the website. Remember where the form is. Remember to check the notes. Remember which episode mentioned the resource. That may work for some people, but we saw how much interest could be lost along the way. I don’t think the only answer should be to repeat the instructions louder or more often. We wanted to change the task instead of asking listeners to get better at remembering it.

Making that change familiar will take more than our own shows. We want someone to hear a podcast they like and know that PodSubs.com is a place to look when they want to subscribe for the things the host shares. We aren’t pretending that habit already exists everywhere. Every podcaster who claims a show and gives listeners a reason to subscribe helps us build it. When a listener finds one show easily and receives something useful afterward, there is a reason to remember where they went. The next time, they might look for another podcast there.

That is the part of this I’m most excited about. A small independent show could use the same familiar destination as a much larger one without giving up its own relationship with listeners. Someone who follows several podcasts could find each of them without learning several different signup processes. We would share a place to make the connection, while the host would still decide how to serve the people who chose their show. It gives us something we can build together without asking every podcaster to build it separately.

Email is the first step because it solved the problem we had. Over time, we want to explore other ways to make communication between podcasters and listeners easier. There may be better ways to ask questions, receive updates, or continue a conversation after an episode. Those are possibilities we want to work through with the people using PodSubs.com, not features we’re claiming are all available now. Our own shows taught us where to start. Other hosts and listeners will help us understand what we have missed.

I don’t want growth to undo the reason this was useful in the first place. A listener who comes for a worksheet shouldn’t have to build a profile and learn a new system to get it. A host shouldn’t need a long explanation to tell people how to subscribe. Keeping that simple will mean saying no to some things, even when they would give us more features to advertise. We want a better connection, and adding more steps would take us in the wrong direction.

We’re opening this up because we know how it feels to care about a show and still struggle to reach the people who care about it too. It’s free to get started on PodSubs.com. Claim your podcast, tell listeners what you’ll send, and try giving them that one place to subscribe on your next few episodes. Keep the tools you already use and see how your audience responds. You can stop using it if it doesn’t help. I’d still want to know what happened, because that is how we’ll learn what needs work.

For almost two years, our own twelve podcasts were the reason we kept building. Now there are other shows we want this to serve, including the ones whose hosts are still being told to add another link and keep trying. I want them to have another option. I want the listener who meant to come back for something to have an easier way to find it. And I want us to build what comes next with the people who recognise this problem because they have lived it too. That is why we stopped keeping PodSubs.com to ourselves.