Live data from Hacker News

Viewing profile — wirthal1990

wirthal1990

HN member
Joined
Wed, Mar 11, 2026, 1:30 PM UTC
HN karma
6
Public activity
6 items

About wirthal1990

Solo founder based in Germany. Not a programmer — I built Ethno-API entirely with AI assistance (Claude, Copilot).

The product: a structured phytochemical dataset derived from the USDA Dr. Duke's ethnobotanical database, denormalized and enriched with quantitative signals from PubMed, ClinicalTrials.gov, ChEMBL, and USPTO PatentsView. Stack: PostgreSQL 15, Python 3.12 (async httpx pipelines), Rust/Actix-Web, Cloudflare Workers/R2.

Three weeks ago I had no idea what a Parquet file was. I stumbled onto a data gap in natural product research and decided to close it.

Interested in the gap between public-domain research databases and production-ready data products — and in what's possible when AI handles the implementation.

Recent public activity

  1. comment
    Comment #47411227

    I am not a programmer. I have never written code myself, nor have I ever published anything technical. The pipeline was built entirely by Claude Opus as a coding agent, and the res…

  2. comment
  3. story
  4. comment
    Comment #47393190

    This matches my experience when building my first real project with Claude. The architectural decisions were entirely up to me: I researched which data sources, schema, and enrichm…

  5. comment
    Comment #47393030

    My experience was exactly the opposite—I came from the other side entirely. I had absolutely no programming knowledge, and until three weeks ago, I didn’t even know what a Parquet …

  6. comment
    Comment #47336053

    I'm working on a phytochemical dataset product. The base is USDA Dr. Duke's Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Databases — 16 relational CSV tables that I denormalized into a single …