Tuesday, July 23, 2024

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: I built a Yubikey-based domain controller. Is it sellable?

Ask HN: I built a Yubikey-based domain controller. Is it sellable?
17 by elevation | 7 comments on Hacker News.
I once worked in R&D where our competitive advantage was in keeping our customer relationships and intellectual property private, so we kept everything on-prem. No cloud, no SaaS, no WFH. In my own SMB, I still self-host git, CI, chat, etc. I love the privacy and control, but I also needed to open these services to remote workers without exposing them to the world. So I built an appliance to protect my internal web apps by requiring user/pass+yubikey at multiple layers of the stack: L3 (p2p vpn), L4 (mTLS), and L7 (OIDC). The appliance is self contained (VPN, LDAP, NTP, CA, OIDC), like a classic domain controller, and it keeps servers safe from any users without an authorized hardware key. I'd love to bundle this with an admin panel and sell it, but I forsee problems connecting with the right market: * Clients who have meaningful IT budgets will require inter-operation with their legacy domain controllers. This means I won't have an MVP without major changes and lots of testing. It also puts my own product at risk: if Microsoft doesn't want to support my integrations, they can disable my product with a software update. * Clients who are too small to have lots of legacy IT requirements will have small budgets and require lots of support. Some of these clients will grow larger, but this is a long game. I would love to support these clients but don't want to die for lack of revenue in the short term. How would you sell what I've built?

Monday, July 22, 2024

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: OpenDataCapture an electronic data capture platform for data collection

Show HN: OpenDataCapture an electronic data capture platform for data collection
10 by gdevenyi | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, We're the Douglas Neuroinformatics Platform[1], and we've been working on Open Data Capture, a web-based electronic data capture (EDC) platform for continuous clinical and research data collection. You can use it to administer instruments (like forms and interactive tasks) either in-person or remotely. The platform is based on a fundamentally longitudinal data model. Unlike other EDC platforms, which are centered around the concept of a study with rigid timepoints, Open Data Capture is designed for continuous data capture. Data is associated with a given session, which includes metadata such as date, time, and mode (i.e., in-person or remote). We've designed the system around the core restriction that many hospital institutions demand that data remain on-premise, while clinician-researchers often want to evaluate clients outside the institution with research questions. This has resulted in our innovative gateway concept, where assigned remote assessments are pushed onto an internet accessible service, and responses are encrypted in-place with HPKE[2] until the backend pulls them into the backend database. This makes the deployment firewall-friendly provided you can launch a minimal VPS or VM host somewhere globally accessible. We're also a big fan of making things easy to deploy, so we supply a docker-compose stack which can bring up a demo instance easily to run locally. The platform is free, open source, and written in TypeScript, with a NoSQL database underneath. Users can write instruments in TypeScript using a type-safe declarative form system (with native i18n support built in) or wrap and integrate completely arbitrary interactive tasks written in JavaScript (with optional support for TypeScript and JSX). Under the hood, this is based on dynamic imports and native ESM. There’s a browser-based IDE (the Instrument Playground) with live reloading and full Intellisense where you can try creating your own instruments. We have a local deployment going live at our institution and appropriately-licensed (free) instruments we're deploying here will be integrated directly into the codebase. Our future plans include expanding our instrument types to allow for binary data storage with an s3-like backend, and with abstractions for data types, like actigraphy, and MRI. Check it out on GitHub[3], try the Instrument Playground[4], or see the Live Demo[5]. Would love to hear everybody’s thoughts! Links: [1] https://ift.tt/aIpGRF0 @gdevenyi @joshunrau [2] https://ift.tt/SDTCuxp [3] https://ift.tt/ASKCDG6 [4] https://ift.tt/sqMyxPS [5] https://ift.tt/5k3fGeN

New top story on Hacker News: Boeing-owned Wisk expects to begin carrying passengers 'later in the decade'

Boeing-owned Wisk expects to begin carrying passengers 'later in the decade'
8 by JumpCrisscross | 0 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

The workers have spoken: They're staying home
104 by CrankyBear | 63 comments on Hacker News.