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Neighbours with free time ➕ Neighbours who need a small hand, connected together 🤝 in a safe, easy way.
That is Needy, a #FreeSoftware (#OpenSource) “time bank” awarded with one of the #YH4F special prizes and inspired by small Italian towns with many elderly residents.
Ask for help with grocery shopping, small repairs, or appointments. Volunteers earn “reputation hours” for every task completed.
Our next winner could not join us this time. This special #YH4F 2026 award goes to his project Pianove, a piano learning app that anyone can use, study, share, and improve. 🎹
It allows to load any piece from a MusicXML file and practice it on your MIDI keyboard, fully offline, with no account and no subscription.
An alternative to commercial learning apps that everyone can use, study, share and improve: https://mariusangermann08.github.io/Pianove/
The #YH4F 2026 Awesome Hacker Award went to SmartFoodSave, an #AI platform that helps schools cut food waste by predicting leftovers before the food is even cooked. 🍽️
Under an #MITlicense, users can log menus, attendance, and portions, and a machine learning model estimates leftovers. A donation finder points surplus food to people who can use it. 🥕
https://www.smartfoodsave.xyz/
FindMyWeb, developed by @misom@social.techncs.de, won the 2026 Elite Hacker Award! 🏆
A #FreeSoftware project that lets you build your own location trackers instead of buying a sealed commercial one. You build the tag, run the software yourself, and benefit from the huge crowd of phones that already rely on infrastructure like Find My signals. 📍
No lock-in. No vendor device or app. Your firmware, your server, your location data and history. Control your tech. 🔓
#YH4F 2026 first prize, the Ultimate Hacker Award, goes to NumOs! 🥇
It’s a #FreeSoftware (#OpenSource) operating system for a graphing scientific calculator that anyone can study, compile, and modify. You can inspect how each calculation is performed, so “Is this calculator reliable?” is no longer a matter of trust: you can verify it.
Next stop: the NeoCalculator, a Free Software physical calculator with a custom PCB.
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Another one of the #YH4F 2026 special prizes went to a team project: RastiSearch! 🏆
Four German teenagers built a federated search engine that doesn’t depend on big tech’s indexes: 🔍 Independent servers each index content and swap queries and results over #TOR, so anyone can run a node at home with no special network setup.
💻 https://codeberg.org/RastiSearch
#Privacy #SoftwareFreedom
RastiSearch