Hi HN! I’m Ville, CTO of Nuanic, a Finnish company developing a smart ring that tracks stress using Electrodermal Activity (EDA) rather than the more common Heart Rate Variability (HRV). EDA provides a direct measurement of the body’s stress response, making it particularly effective for detecting and managing chronic stress.
EDA has been an underutilized metric in wearables, largely because interpreting the raw signal is challenging - it’s messy and difficult to make sense of. To address this, we’ve developed our own algorithm that transforms the EDA data into an easy-to-understand number from 1 to 100, which we call DNE (Double Normalized EDA). On this scale, 1 represents low stress and 100 represents high stress, making it simple to track stress levels, identify trends, and take action to recover when needed.
The ring measures 24/7, providing real-time feedback around the clock, and all of this is done without any cloud requirement. Continuous monitoring lets you see how your stress and recovery fluctuate throughout the day and night, helping you make informed decisions to improve your well-being - whether that’s adjusting your workload, taking breaks, or prioritizing rest.
Research has shown a strong connection between EDA and burnout, and the ring has been designed to help with burnout detection and prevention. If you’re interested in the details, you can check out our preprint here: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4726455.
This isn’t just theoretical - I’ve experienced burnout in the past, and this technology has been invaluable in helping me avoid it since. It helps me ensure I get enough recovery, which is the key to managing stress effectively. Being able to track my recovery has made a huge difference in maintaining balance and preventing burnout from happening again.
The ring is also being used in long COVID recovery studies, where its ability to monitor stress and recovery continuously is being made use of. While the results haven’t been published yet, the ongoing research highlights the potential of the ring in supporting recovery from complex, long-term conditions.
Would love to hear your thoughts or answer any questions about it!
My last experiment was with bulma css and vanilla javascript (typescript) with web components for components that needed custom/complex interactions. Nice thing with this approach is that you can "just" render the web components with the backend's template engine as if those were your normal html tags. Because of typescript, a build step was required. For this I used esbuild (esbuild itself didn't do the type checking so I ran tsc with --noEmit and --watch next to it).
Didn't get that far with that project to see how it works when the code base scales. I would probably pick the same setup for my next greenfield project.
Regarding the error handling case, I've played around with the idea of implementing a Result type with typescript and hiding the errors behind that. The end result looks something like this
const res = await getJSON('/thingy');
if (isErr(res)) {
// Handle error.
return;
}
It's actually a bit different - VSCode has a 'front-end' process and a 'back-end' process (the extension host).
The extension host is larger than just handling language services - it handles additional functionality, like source control, menus, language configuration - the full protocol is defined here: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/master/src/vs/workb...
We aim to integrate with that back-end extension host process - in other words, to support the `vscode` extension API surface, not just language support.
Because of the ubiquity and popularity of VSCode - the extensions tend to have significant investment and be of very high-quality, so we'd like to be able to leverage that wholesale.
You could try to calculate some numbers on savings or "wasted hours because the corporate support is slow and wont fix our problems fast enough" to turn their heads around. Another pointer could be that the students could be involved in running some of the systems.
Usually, in situations like yours, turning complaints or proposed solutions into numbers helps a lot.
The problem is that Microsoft are good at selling a product which just works out of the box and is just about sufficient, even if it's not tailored to your use-case. Plus there's so little transparency as to how much they're charging my university, or how many hours wasted there are, so it's hard to make a price-comparison.
Student participation in some of the projects could work for certain modules, but only as experiments -- again we've been specifically prohibited from spinning up our own solutions.
> Usually, in situations like yours, turning complaints or proposed solutions into numbers helps a lot.
I agree that ultimately what needs to happen is that those of us who care about FLOSS need to organise and try to chip away at the corporate one-size-fits-all dependency syndrome at the university. The kinds of data ownership debates happening in Germany seem very far off here. The British university is in retreat. [1]
> You could try to calculate some numbers on savings or "wasted hours because the corporate support is slow and wont fix our problems fast enough" to turn their heads around.
If the UK universities are anything like the US universities this is near impossible to do. Maybe COVID has changed some things but when I worked in the university system (state run) it was more about who could woo what administrator. The amount of waste and nepotism would make your head spin.
How come? GTK works on window, mac, linux (+ BSDs and probably other unix like systems). What else would you be looking for from this kind of software? The platform support is better than win32 and what ever the macos equivalent is.
Thats a bit harsh. Yes, the documentation might be (is) a bit hard to read in a sense that its hard to _find_ something from it, but otherwise I've found if quite complete (when it comes to the standard library). Most (if not all) of your points are about the readability of the rendered documentation and not the documentation (content) it self.
Yes. When you checked a file into VSS it would expand the string $Id$ before actually writing the file into the repo, so it would be in the file you checked out. So if you had a copy of that file, you could know instantly what revision it was from. If you had blah.c on your disk and you had a Git repo it’s far harder to say “what commit did this copy of the file actually come from”?
EDA has been an underutilized metric in wearables, largely because interpreting the raw signal is challenging - it’s messy and difficult to make sense of. To address this, we’ve developed our own algorithm that transforms the EDA data into an easy-to-understand number from 1 to 100, which we call DNE (Double Normalized EDA). On this scale, 1 represents low stress and 100 represents high stress, making it simple to track stress levels, identify trends, and take action to recover when needed.
The ring measures 24/7, providing real-time feedback around the clock, and all of this is done without any cloud requirement. Continuous monitoring lets you see how your stress and recovery fluctuate throughout the day and night, helping you make informed decisions to improve your well-being - whether that’s adjusting your workload, taking breaks, or prioritizing rest.
Research has shown a strong connection between EDA and burnout, and the ring has been designed to help with burnout detection and prevention. If you’re interested in the details, you can check out our preprint here: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4726455.
This isn’t just theoretical - I’ve experienced burnout in the past, and this technology has been invaluable in helping me avoid it since. It helps me ensure I get enough recovery, which is the key to managing stress effectively. Being able to track my recovery has made a huge difference in maintaining balance and preventing burnout from happening again.
The ring is also being used in long COVID recovery studies, where its ability to monitor stress and recovery continuously is being made use of. While the results haven’t been published yet, the ongoing research highlights the potential of the ring in supporting recovery from complex, long-term conditions.
Would love to hear your thoughts or answer any questions about it!