Ilia's Corner

Google to require developer verification to install and sideload Android apps

Starting late 2026, every APK you install—from F-Droid to your own nightly builds—must carry a verified developer signature. This isn’t a new Play Store fee; it’s the end of Android’s “wild-west” era. For devs, it means one extra hoop up-front (upload an ID once via Play Console) and dramatically safer installs for your users forever. If you distribute outside Google Play, start migrating your release pipeline now to avoid last-minute scrambling.

Hacker News · 2 min read

Standard Thermal: dirt-cheap energy storage that outprices even natural gas

Forget lithium. Standard Thermal stores weeks of heat in plain dirt for under $0.10 per kWh_thermal—500× cheaper than batteries. Early pilots are going to industrial plants that need 24/7 process heat; the same tech scales down to campus micro-grids and data-center waste-heat reuse. If you build energy dashboards or IoT monitoring, start prototyping against their open specs today.

hackernews · 3 min read

US kills the $800 duty-free loophole—your swag, samples, and merch now hit customs

July 30, 2025 marks the end of easy international shipping for stickers, t-shirts, and dev-boards. Every parcel to the US now needs full customs paperwork and duties paid. Startups that rely on conference giveaways or Kickstarter rewards should pivot to domestic 3PLs or digital-only perks.

hackernews · 2 min read

Base: a native SQLite editor for macOS that doesn’t suck

Stop tabbing between DB Browser and the terminal. Base gives you schema graphs, inline editing, and diff exports in a single native window—perfect for debugging Core Data or React Native apps without spinning up Docker.

hackernews · 1 min read

DeepWiki turns any GitHub repo into a Q&A wiki

Paste a repo URL, ask “how does auth work?”, and get a paragraph with line-number citations. It’s like having a senior dev walk you through the code in 30 seconds—ideal for onboarding to unfamiliar micro-services or evaluating OSS before you clone.

hackernews · 2 min read

LlamaFund – crowdfund your own open-weight model for the price of a pizza

Pool $20–$30 with other devs and commission a fine-tuned Llama that beats GPT-4 on your niche task. Early campaigns already shipped a SQL-first code model and a privacy-focused medical summarizer.

cost-sharing custom LLMs

Python · 72 stars

WiFi-3D-Fusion – turn any router into a Kinect

Open-source firmware plus a $20 Wi-Fi card gives you millimeter-level 3D human pose—no depth cameras required. Drop it into home-automation or security prototypes today.

motion sensing

C++/Python · 60 stars

April – voice-first AI assistant for your inbox and calendar

“Hey April, decline anything before 10 AM and move design reviews to Friday.” Built by YC S25, it’s the closest thing to a human EA for $20/mo—perfect for makers who hate context-switching.

productivity automation

TypeScript · 45 stars

Microsoft VibeVoice drops an open 1.5 B TTS model

Generate studio-grade speech in 15 languages from a single checkpoint. The MIT license means you can ship voices in your app without per-character fees.

speech-synthesis · Microsoft Research · 2 min read

InternVL3.5 matches GPT-5 reasoning at open-source cost

By chaining a small “guardian” model that rewrites prompts before the main forward pass, InternVL3.5 hits SOTA on MMMU while slashing inference cost 40 %. Docker images available today.

multimodal-llm · OpenGVLab · 3 min read