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Announcement reads
Announcement posts on Yomu, summarised newest first.
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- 20 companies
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Announcement posts
Announcing Intercom’s new program for venture-backed startups
Intercom announces a startup program aimed at fast-growing, venture-backed Seed and Series A companies, working with venture capital, accelerator, incubator, and technology partners. The program provides its main customer communication solutions at no cost in the first year, 50% off in the second, and 20% off thereafter, covering tools for bots and content, in-product messaging, onboarding, and conversational engagement. It extends Intercom’s early-stage program, which offers a 95% discount and has helped thousands of pre-seed startups, while focusing more closely on companies scaling with venture backing. Intercom says more than 5,000 startups from leading incubators use its products and cites Spendesk, Notion, Monzo, Frame.io, and Aircall among startup customers; it also plans webinars and events and invites partners to apply.
Welcome Stable-baselines3 to the Hugging Face Hub 🤗
Hugging Face announced an official integration with Stable-Baselines3, a popular PyTorch library for training and testing Deep Reinforcement Learning agents across diverse environments like Gym, Atari, MuJoco, and Procgen. The integration enables researchers and developers to host their saved reinforcement learning checkpoints on the Hugging Face Hub and download pre-trained community models. Interacting with the Hub requires installing the huggingface_hub and huggingface_sb3 packages, which supply helper methods for authentication, downloading, and uploading. Practitioners can retrieve checkpoint zip files using the load_from_hub function by providing the target repository identifier and filename before loading them into Stable-Baselines3 algorithms. Furthermore, users authenticated via CLI or notebook login can train policies such as PPO and publish their saved zip files to the Hub using push_to_hub.
Supabase Beta December 2021
Supabase announced a series of platform updates, educational content, and community milestones for December 2021. PostgreSQL instances now include the pg_sodium extension, enabling users to perform encryption, decryption, hashing, and cryptographic signing directly within database queries and functions through the Supabase Dashboard. The release details educational video guides demonstrating remote procedure calls from JavaScript, invoking external HTTP endpoints from database functions, and setting up triggers to run SQL on table modifications. In addition to ecosystem updates featuring new Python library releases and integrations with Divjoy and n8n, the project surpassed 26,000 GitHub stars and opened fully remote job positions across engineering, marketing, and human resources.
Free Postgres Databases
Fly.io announces that Postgres is now available at no cost for small projects, addressing the storage cost that has kept persistent data out of its existing free tier. The offering adds 3GB of persistent volume space through LVM block devices as small as 1GB, alongside the free VM and RAM allowance. Production deployments use intentional two-node Postgres clusters with data on two isolated NVMe drives and volume snapshots, while a free setup begins as a single Development node and becomes a leader-replica cluster when scaled. The volumes are not limited to Postgres: applications can mount up to 3GB for SQLite or other uses. A credit card is still required for free services, which the post says helps deter cryptocurrency-mining abuse of free VMs.
Cloud, Load, and Modular Code: What 2022 Looks Like for Shopify
Shopify’s 2021 BFCM four-day event exposed the scale its commerce platform must absorb: peak app-server traffic exceeded 32 million requests per minute, load balancers surpassed 34 million RPM, and a flash sale used more than 20% of total computing capacity. The post frames larger, spikier sales, mobile and social commerce, and expanding buying environments as enduring engineering challenges for supporting millions of merchants. Planned work includes evolving the large Rails codebase into modular components, moving storefront rendering out of the monolith, expanding Spin cloud development environments, and making in-house load testing part of product development. The storefront split and refactoring produced four-times-faster cache fill rates and five-times-faster page rendering, while YJIT ran 31% faster than interpreted CRuby and 26% faster than MJIT; Shopify also remains committed to Rails and React Native.
Self-service account deactivation: why it’s harder than you would think
Fly.io introduces a self-service UI for deactivating accounts, replacing the previous requirement to email support. The difficulty is preventing a “delete everything” action from accidentally destroying infrastructure, because users may own apps, share organizations, and administer shared applications. The workflow first addresses app deletion and resource cleanup, then points migrating users toward certificate and DNS changes, while reminding organization administrators to delete or transfer organizations. Rather than embedding every task in one action, the UI guides users to the relevant pages and usually requires deleting only the apps they own. Automatic deactivation still cannot handle accounts involved in shared organizations or organizations administered for others; those cases require help, and the UI identifies the blocking organization step.
Nerd Out on 10 of Our Favorite Posts From 2021
Shopify’s year-end roundup curates ten favorite engineering posts from 2021, spanning Ruby, storefronts, data analysis, databases, search, GraphQL, CI, APIs, and mobile development, while also noting several older reader favorites. The selection includes tutorials on building a web app with standard Ruby libraries, exploratory data analysis, GraphQL, Apache Beam for search, and React Native App Clips, alongside technical accounts of Hydrogen, YJIT, MySQL upgrades, and GraphQL rate limiting. YJIT was merged upstream and included in Ruby 3.1.0, while the CI team reduced the p95 of Shopify’s core monolith from 45 minutes to 18 minutes. The roundup also describes query-cost-based GraphQL rate limiting, rollback-testing roadblocks during a MySQL upgrade, and an App Clip effort that used a fail-fast, iterative approach.
Gradio is joining Hugging Face!
Hugging Face has acquired Gradio, the open-source machine learning library designed for building and sharing interactive model interfaces. Gradio originated in 2019 when its founder struggled to share a medical computer vision model with a physician collaborator who did not write Python. Co-founded alongside Ali Abdalla, Ali Abid, and Dawood Khan, the project expanded from computer vision into text, speech, and video modalities. Over 300,000 demos have been built using Gradio, allowing interdisciplinary industry teams and researchers to debug models internally and showcase them externally to non-technical users. The acquisition unites Gradio with Hugging Face to broaden browser-based machine learning accessibility and expand hiring efforts across the joint team.
Holiday Hackdays Winners 2021
Supabase organized the Holiday Hackdays 2021 hackathon following their launch week and announced the winning and runner-up community submissions. Selected winners include Swappy.one by Zernonia, the realtime polling platform rtPoll by Emilio and Federico Schepis, Santa Banter for holiday jokes by Andy Keogh, and the wishlist app the get list by glowdexapp. Recognized runners-up include Chivel for YouTube channel landing pages, the end-to-end encrypted e2ee-chat, a Flutter-based Holiday Sweater voting app, and a greeting card platform built by high school hackers. Winners receive limited-edition gold medal shirts, while runners-up earn silver medal shirts. All project submissions were made available for viewing on madewithsupabase.com.
Supabase Beta November 2021: Launch Week Recap
Supabase celebrated its third Launch Week and one year in beta by rolling out several major infrastructure and tooling updates. The company open-sourced its Dashboard for self-hosting and integrated Logflare to provide searchable database and API logs directly in the interface. For database querying and APIs, Supabase introduced a Postgres extension that resolves each GraphQL request with a single SQL statement to minimize network IO overhead, while upgrading its default hosted database to PostgreSQL 14 and deploying PostgREST 9.0. Security capabilities were expanded by enabling Row Level Security policies across the Realtime API to restrict streams and subscriptions on a per-user basis. Additional releases during the week included faster media file delivery, an open-sourced launch methodology, and a free course combining Next.js, Stripe, and Supabase.
Perceiver IO: a scalable, fully-attentional model that works on any modality
Standard Transformer architectures scale poorly in compute and memory because pairwise dot-product self-attention depends quadratically on input size. Perceiver IO addresses this constraint by computing self-attention across a small set of latent variables rather than directly on high-dimensional inputs. Inputs and outputs interact with the model via cross-attention operations, decoupling compute and memory costs from input and output dimensions. Integrated into Hugging Face Transformers via the PerceiverModel class, the architecture supports diverse data types using optional preprocessors, decoders, and postprocessors. Experiments demonstrate competitive performance across text, multimodal video classification, 3D point cloud classification on ModelNet40, and StarCraft II reinforcement learning in AlphaStar.
Five more things
Supabase announced a series of platform updates, technical releases, and community initiatives to conclude its Launch Week. The team open-sourced pg_graphql, an in-progress PostgreSQL extension that keeps schema generation, query parsing, and resolvers natively on the database server. Supabase also enabled a global CDN spanning over 250 cities, delivering edge caching with a default one-hour cache time for storage assets alongside TLS 1.3, HTTP/3 over QUIC, and Brotli compression. While Supabase Functions is not yet released, two public RFCs were opened to explore architecture options, leaning heavily toward container-based execution. Finally, the update introduced a free SaaS development course with egghead.io and launched the ten-day Holiday Hackdays hackathon.
pg_graphql: A GraphQL extension for PostgreSQL
Supabase has open-sourced pg_graphql, a native PostgreSQL extension written in C and SQL that enables in-database GraphQL schema reflection and query resolution. Because free-tier virtual machines lacked memory headroom for standalone GraphQL processes like Hasura or Graphile, the team designed an in-engine solution to eliminate extra runtime overhead. The extension parses, validates, and transpiles incoming GraphQL operations into single SQL statements that aggregate data into JSON responses. This architecture avoids N+1 query problems, enforces existing row-level security policies, and maps GraphQL requests directly onto PostgreSQL transactions. The public SQL function can be queried directly or exposed over HTTP via PostgREST remote procedure calls.
Kicking off the Holiday Hackdays
Supabase has launched Holiday Hackdays, a ten-day virtual hackathon running from December 3rd to December 12th. The event invites participants to build open-source projects using Supabase features, following the recent introduction of row-level security for the Realtime API. Teams of one to five developers may build applications using any programming language or framework provided the code and design elements are created during the hackathon. Submissions will be evaluated on criteria such as inventiveness, technical execution, visual polish, and Supabase integration, with prizes dedicated to Realtime API usage and holiday-themed concepts. Members of the Supabase team will also take part by developing an open-source advent calendar showcasing community content.
Supabase acquires Logflare
Supabase announced the acquisition of Logflare, a realtime log ingestion and analytics platform. Modern database architectures encompass APIs, authentication, storage, and CDNs, requiring unified observability to diagnose slow queries and trace user requests effectively. Built with Elixir—the same language powering Supabase's Realtime Engine—Logflare automates schema adaptation for streaming inserts and enables developers to construct APIs from SQL queries via Logflare Endpoints. The integration roadmap includes embedding log querying with SQL directly into the Supabase Dashboard, maintaining existing integrations for Vercel and Cloudflare, and transitioning Logflare toward a fully open-source implementation with multiple backend storage engines. Over the coming months, existing Logflare users will be migrated to the Supabase platform under matching pricing tiers.
Introducing Snowball Fight ☃️, our first ML-Agents environment
Hugging Face has released Snowball Fight 1vs1, its first custom Deep Reinforcement Learning environment created using the Unity Machine Learning Agents Toolkit. The game enables players to shoot snowballs against a trained agent and is hosted on Hugging Face Spaces. This release marks the beginning of an effort to build an ecosystem for Deep Reinforcement Learning researchers and enthusiasts using Unity ML-Agents. The initiative focuses on building open-source environments, hosting models and training environments on the Hugging Face Hub, and deploying interactive demos via Spaces. Future plans include publishing technical tutorials, releasing additional environments, and developing a Snowball Fight 2vs2 version that utilizes the MA-POCA algorithm to train cooperative team behaviors.
Realtime Postgres RLS now available on Supabase
Supabase updated its Realtime server to enforce PostgreSQL Row Level Security (RLS) policies when broadcasting database changes over websockets. Previously, Realtime operated as an opt-in beta feature that sent all replication changes to every client regardless of user authorization. To enforce RLS per subscriber without heavy performance overhead, Supabase introduced WALRUS, a security engine colocated inside PostgreSQL. For each replication change, WALRUS looks up active subscribers, assumes their identities, and evaluates row visibility using prepared statements queried by primary key. This in-database evaluation avoids external network round trips and single-query planning overhead while returning an authorized subscriber list to Realtime.
Supabase Studio
Supabase has released Supabase Studio, making the web dashboard used on its hosted platform available for local development and self-hosted environments. The dashboard originally existed within a single internal monorepo alongside cloud infrastructure, but managing split repositories and code synchronization significantly slowed down production release cycles. To streamline development, the team unified the frontend into a single open-source codebase modeled after Sentry's shared architecture strategy. Built with Next.js, Tailwind CSS, Supabase UI, and MobX, the application works directly with existing deployments across Docker and the Supabase CLI. The open-source release focuses strictly on database management features, including SQL editors, role policies, and extensions, while excluding cloud project administration.
Community Day
Supabase kicked off its Launch Week by showcasing integrations, ecosystem updates, and community contributions across its open-source stack. The platform announced that all hosted projects are upgrading to PostgREST 9, introducing inner joins, functions with unnamed parameters, and PostgreSQL 14 compatibility. Through community contributions, Supabase expanded authentication options to include Slack, Spotify, and MessageBird alongside existing providers. Updates to the Python ecosystem include package renaming to supabase, synchronous operation support in postgrest-py, and a rewritten gotrue-py matching JavaScript feature parity. Additionally, Supabase partnered with GitGuardian to automate secret detection and remediation across development lifecycles, protecting sensitive database service role keys.
Introducing the Data Measurements Tool: an Interactive Tool for Looking at Datasets
Hugging Face released an open-source Python library and no-code interface named the Data Measurements Tool to calculate metrics for responsible dataset curation. In AI development, scraped data often enters training pipelines without detailed analysis of representation or downstream model influence, partly because querying raw datasets typically requires complex coding. Built using Hugging Face Dataset and Spaces Hubs alongside Streamlit, the tool provides descriptive, distributional, and comparison statistics. It computes missing values, vocabulary sizes, duplicate counts, label distributions, and Zipf's law adherence to identify unnatural language patterns or markup artifacts. Additionally, it offers embedding clusters via a Sentence-Transformer model and normalized pointwise mutual information metrics across gender and sexual orientation identity terms.
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