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vishnumohandason Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?

Thanks a bunch for the feedback!

We chose a cross-platform framework to keep the team small, longevity is important for a company like Ente.

Also, we understand moving to native is inevitable. We should have sufficient engineering bandwidth to invest in a rewrite towards the end of 2026. Hopefully you will give us another shot then :)

Thanks again!

vishnumohandason Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?

Hey, one of the folks working on Ente here, thanks for supporting us!

Are there any interactions that you find annoying within the app? It'd be great if you could specifics, we'd like to explore what is feasible within the bounds of Flutter.

Thanks again!

vishnumohandason Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

> This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs...

I wish they had closed this announcement with more optimism.

vishnumohandason Show HN: Ente Photos – v1.0

Thanks!

Please note that the initial import from an iPhone might take a while due to Apple's restrictions on background tasks: https://help.ente.io/photos/features/background#ios

Subsequent backups for newer photos will happen seamlessly.

vishnumohandason Show HN: Libredesk – Open-source customer support desk. Single binary app

Looks amazing, great demo!

nit: it'd be nice if we could resize the sections

vishnumohandason OpenAI launches o3-mini, its latest 'reasoning' model

dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42890627

vishnumohandason Machine Learning at Ente – On-Device, E2EE

Repost of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42421128 that was down-weighted in favor of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42419469.

vishnumohandason They see your photos

Embeddings (and other derived metadata) will sync across all your devices e2ee. So you could use our desktop app[1] to import and index your existing library. Newer photos will get indexed during upload on respective clients.

Search is yet to be implemented on web and indexing is turned off by default on devices with < 4gb of RAM. You can opt-in from Settings > General > Advanced > Machine learning.

[1]: https://ente.io/download/desktop

vishnumohandason They see your photos

Hey, one of the folks working on the said photo service here.

Ente has reasonably good search[1] powered by on-device machine learning[2].

[1]: https://ente.io/blog/machine-learning

[2]: https://ente.io/ml

vishnumohandason Two upstart search engines are teaming up to take on Google

> Bought tech

Could you please elaborate?

vishnumohandason FLOSS/fund for free and open source projects

Built a GUI[1] to generate funding.json, with help from Claude.

This XKCD[2] is perhaps becoming less relevant.

[1]: https://vishnukvmd.github.io/funding.json

[2]: https://xkcd.com/974

vishnumohandason Mozilla grants Ente- a private Google Photos alternative- $100k

Ente's use of cryptography[1] has been externally audited[2].

[1]: https://ente.io/architecture

[2]: https://ente.io/blog/cryptography-audit

vishnumohandason Mozilla grants Ente- a private Google Photos alternative- $100k

https://help.ente.io/self-hosting

vishnumohandason Mozilla grants Ente- a private Google Photos alternative- $100k

Ente is fully open source[1][2].

[1]: https://github.com/ente-io/ente

[2]: https://ente.io/blog/open-sourcing-our-server

vishnumohandason Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable

> Apple seems to do a lot less

Not suggesting that this warrants a 30% cut, but unlike payment gateways Apple also provides discoverability and distribution.

vishnumohandason ONNX: The Open Standard for Seamless Machine Learning Interoperability

At this point ONNX is the most mature inference engine for mobile.

Had the joy of playing around with TFLite, Pytorch Mobile, GGML for work and nothing came close to ONNX in terms of stability across a wide array of devices.

Also, model conversions are a breeze.

vishnumohandason How to Preserve Physical Photos

Disclosure: one of the folks working on Ente

I did not know a bunch of things mentioned in the post. We've learned more from this thread. And feedback noted, we'll work on providing more information.

vishnumohandason How to Preserve Physical Photos

The blog post is for informational purposes. But your quote (?) is a cynical extrapolation. There is no fear mongering with a CTA to use Ente.

vishnumohandason How to Preserve Physical Photos

> colorizing and animating photos

Could you share the tool you used for this please? Thanks!

vishnumohandason Mojeek – The alternative search engine that puts the people who use it first

Kagi uses Mojeek's index as well: https://web.archive.org/web/20231105004927/https://help.kagi...

vishnumohandason Self Hosting 101 – A Beginner's Guide

Some ISPs provide static IPs for an additional fee. Also, there are services like Cloudflare[1] and NoIP[2] that provide Dynamic DNS (DDNS) so you can tie your dynamic IP to a static address.

[1]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/operations/dns-records...

[2]: https://www.noip.com

vishnumohandason Self Hosting 101 – A Beginner's Guide

Have you checked out Umbrel[1]?

You can self-host Umbrel on your own hardware[2]. I'm not sure if they allow for multiple nodes to stay in sync. If (/once) they do, it'd solve for disasters / availability as well.

[1]: https://umbrel.com

[2]: https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel

vishnumohandason Ente Auth: open-source Authy alternative for 2FA

No shared etymology, "ente" means "mine" in Malayalam. Felt like a nice name to build a privacy company around. Also the domain was available :)

If you're interested, here's more of the backstory: https://ente.io/blog/ducky/

vishnumohandason Ente Auth: open-source Authy alternative for 2FA

Interesting, thanks for sharing!

vishnumohandason Ente Auth: open-source Authy alternative for 2FA

Thanks for sharing these!

BIMI + VMC seems like an expensive workaround, we'll first experiment with your first two recommendations. We'll also have to figure out a way to reset the score with Gmail. Hopefully they haven't penalized the whole domain, and a new from-address will do it.

Thanks again for taking the time out to share your thoughts, really appreciate it! :)

vishnumohandason Ente Auth: open-source Authy alternative for 2FA

Thanks for the feedback, will reconsider.

vishnumohandason Ente Auth: open-source Authy alternative for 2FA

Yes, you can.

Ente Auth backs up your codes, end-to-end encrypted. You can access your data on any device, at any time with your email address and password (/recovery key).

vishnumohandason Ente Auth: open-source Authy alternative for 2FA

There is no universally agreed upon format for bulk imports. We've adopted one that we found to be used by a few other apps - a plain text file with otpauth:// URIs separated by a newline.

vishnumohandason Ente Auth: open-source Authy alternative for 2FA

Thanks! But this method requires Authy's Desktop client, which is unfortunately unavailable at this point.

Also, if this comment[1] is right, API access has also been broken.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40885456