Q: Why are we building this?
A: To design better, safer pesticides. The therapeutics industry has seen huge improvements by integrating machine learning models into its drug discovery pipelines; on the other hand, the agrochemical pesticide discovery space has seen almost no improvement, despite the high degree of similarity between the two processes. This is because the agrochemical industry is largely stagnant; fewer than 40 new pesticide ingredients have been developed in the last decade, with most "new" pesticides being just tweaks of existing ones. To solve this, we're using our SOTA machine learning models to find radically better pesticides.
Because this is a search problem, speed is key. This is why we've spent so much time optimizing our models to be as fast as possible, which also allows us to make them freely available without the long queue times or rate limits alternatives like AlphaFold 3 or Chai have.
Q: Who are we?
A: We\u2019re Navvye Anand (Caltech) and Tyler Rose (Wolfram Research), a scrappy duo of engineers who met at the Wolfram Summer Research Program in June 2023. We\u2019re Indo-Chinese founders who both grew up visiting farmlands in our countries. United by our passion for tackling hard problems, we dropped out of college and started Bindwell to transform the archaic agrochemical industry.
We\u2019re joined by Max, a prodigious hacker and open source contributor who dropped out of a math degree at Reed College. Max is relentlessly curious about everything from robotics to philosophy, and like us, his passion for solving challenging problems made him a perfect fit for the team.
We'd love to hear from you, whether it's feedback about our app, questions about our mission, or anything else you think is interesting. You can reach us by commenting on this post, or by emailing us at founders@bindwell.ai."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: Interactive Drug Screening in Your Browser"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://app.bindwell.ai/"}},"_tags":["story","author_niederman","story_43177281","show_hn"],"author":"niederman","children":[43179945],"created_at":"2025-02-25T20:55:28Z","created_at_i":1740516928,"num_comments":2,"objectID":"43177281","points":3,"story_id":43177281,"story_text":"Today, the team at Bindwell (YC W25) is launching a free, unified platform for finding candidate drugs (or pesticides, or herbicides, or anything else that needs to bind to a protein), and visualizing their structure. Unlike AlphaFold 3 and others, we've worked hard to make the experience as interactive as possible by designing and training our own accelerated models, significantly speeding up the candidate screening workflow.
Q: Why are we building this?
A: To design better, safer pesticides. The therapeutics industry has seen huge improvements by integrating machine learning models into its drug discovery pipelines; on the other hand, the agrochemical pesticide discovery space has seen almost no improvement, despite the high degree of similarity between the two processes. This is because the agrochemical industry is largely stagnant; fewer than 40 new pesticide ingredients have been developed in the last decade, with most "new" pesticides being just tweaks of existing ones. To solve this, we're using our SOTA machine learning models to find radically better pesticides.
Because this is a search problem, speed is key. This is why we've spent so much time optimizing our models to be as fast as possible, which also allows us to make them freely available without the long queue times or rate limits alternatives like AlphaFold 3 or Chai have.
Q: Who are we?
A: We\u2019re Navvye Anand (Caltech) and Tyler Rose (Wolfram Research), a scrappy duo of engineers who met at the Wolfram Summer Research Program in June 2023. We\u2019re Indo-Chinese founders who both grew up visiting farmlands in our countries. United by our passion for tackling hard problems, we dropped out of college and started Bindwell to transform the archaic agrochemical industry.
We\u2019re joined by Max, a prodigious hacker and open source contributor who dropped out of a math degree at Reed College. Max is relentlessly curious about everything from robotics to philosophy, and like us, his passion for solving challenging problems made him a perfect fit for the team.
We'd love to hear from you, whether it's feedback about our app, questions about our mission, or anything else you think is interesting. You can reach us by commenting on this post, or by emailing us at founders@bindwell.ai.","title":"Show HN: Interactive Drug Screening in Your Browser","updated_at":"2025-02-26T03:26:51Z","url":"https://app.bindwell.ai/"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"spenvo"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["chai","discovery"],"value":"Earlier this year, inspired by a spate of supply chain attacks (like Mini Shai-Hulud-style worms, which culminated in headlines like Microsoft's Azure tools themselves being compromised), I wrote on my blog about the Kessler Syndrome, applied to software.
Ie: the rising likelihood that, because of how bad actors with agentic AI can do far more damage, more quickly with the secrets they exfiltrate from penetrated networks, we could get into a situation where essentially every network of medium or greater complexity would become permanently "tainted" (never fully clean).
Basically, can a swarm of agents 1) penetrate networks and exfiltrate secrets, 2) successfully install deeply embedded malware/rootkits, 3) move on to the next network, faster than hugops teams can rotate secrets and restore servers cleanly? For basically the entire existence of networked computers, this would have seemed a fantastical notion. But, throw in the current AI-fueled exploit discoveries and the countless servers vulnerable to RCEs across several stacks: I feel like the probability just keeps rising.
Here are excerpts from my blog post, June 10:
"'The Kessler Syndrome is a scenario where the density of objects and space debris in low Earth orbit becomes so high that collisions between them trigger a runaway chain reaction. Each crash generates thousands of new fragments, exponentially increasing the risk of further impacts and potentially rendering Earth\u2019s orbit unusable.'
"Just counting some of the high profile examples of public repos being laced with malware lately: Microsoft just disabled 70+ of their own repos, including Azure building tools. Repos from RedHat, tanstack, axios, Mistral, UiPath, and many other lower profile targets have been hacked. The list is long, and is much longer if you count companies (not just public repos for devs) that have been bitten, including names like GitHub, Cisco, OpenAI, and more.
"...AIs or fancy new systems, probably made with AI appear to have dramatically lowered the amount of time to first utilization of stolen credentials.
"It takes too long to clean an infected system/network (and the malware is getting much smarter/vindictive about detecting its removal, further complicating things), and it takes almost no time for a batch of stolen credentials to be exploited -> new networks traversed, leading to more secrets (that likely compromise more projects, rinse and repeat).
"I think there is the very real possibility that we reach a Kessler Syndrome situation for shared/open source software, where the success of continued credential stealing campaigns permanently compromises medium, large, and even small networks, and lowers trust in shared software to a crippling degree."
In just October:\n> Railway - customer secrets exposure\n> LiteLLM - malicious PyPI + Docker releases\n> Zeabur - infrastructure breached\n> OpenCode - AI API keys exposed\n> OVHcloud CLI - official binaries backdoored\n> Rank Math PRO - malware in official plugin\n> TeamUpdraft - customer data compromised\n> ConnectWise - cloud backup identities compromised\n> Tensorlake - npm package infected\n> PingCap - alleged major breach\n> SubQuery - backdoored npm package\n> GhostAction - GitHub repos with malicious workflows\n> PHP - critical RCE flaws\n> Node.js - security flaws patched\n> eMudhra - certificate authority keys compromised\n> Tailscale - eMudhra incident"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"The Kessler Syndrome (where blowups multiply exponentially) applied to software"}},"_tags":["story","author_spenvo","story_50189771","ask_hn"],"author":"spenvo","created_at":"2026-10-22T00:58:58Z","created_at_i":1792630738,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"50189771","points":6,"story_id":50189771,"story_text":"Earlier this year, inspired by a spate of supply chain attacks (like Mini Shai-Hulud-style worms, which culminated in headlines like Microsoft's Azure tools themselves being compromised), I wrote on my blog about the Kessler Syndrome, applied to software.
Ie: the rising likelihood that, because of how bad actors with agentic AI can do far more damage, more quickly with the secrets they exfiltrate from penetrated networks, we could get into a situation where essentially every network of medium or greater complexity would become permanently "tainted" (never fully clean).
Basically, can a swarm of agents 1) penetrate networks and exfiltrate secrets, 2) successfully install deeply embedded malware/rootkits, 3) move on to the next network, faster than hugops teams can rotate secrets and restore servers cleanly? For basically the entire existence of networked computers, this would have seemed a fantastical notion. But, throw in the current AI-fueled exploit discoveries and the countless servers vulnerable to RCEs across several stacks: I feel like the probability just keeps rising.
Here are excerpts from my blog post, June 10:
"'The Kessler Syndrome is a scenario where the density of objects and space debris in low Earth orbit becomes so high that collisions between them trigger a runaway chain reaction. Each crash generates thousands of new fragments, exponentially increasing the risk of further impacts and potentially rendering Earth\u2019s orbit unusable.'
"Just counting some of the high profile examples of public repos being laced with malware lately: Microsoft just disabled 70+ of their own repos, including Azure building tools. Repos from RedHat, tanstack, axios, Mistral, UiPath, and many other lower profile targets have been hacked. The list is long, and is much longer if you count companies (not just public repos for devs) that have been bitten, including names like GitHub, Cisco, OpenAI, and more.
"...AIs or fancy new systems, probably made with AI appear to have dramatically lowered the amount of time to first utilization of stolen credentials.
"It takes too long to clean an infected system/network (and the malware is getting much smarter/vindictive about detecting its removal, further complicating things), and it takes almost no time for a batch of stolen credentials to be exploited -> new networks traversed, leading to more secrets (that likely compromise more projects, rinse and repeat).
"I think there is the very real possibility that we reach a Kessler Syndrome situation for shared/open source software, where the success of continued credential stealing campaigns permanently compromises medium, large, and even small networks, and lowers trust in shared software to a crippling degree."
In just October:\n> Railway - customer secrets exposure\n> LiteLLM - malicious PyPI + Docker releases\n> Zeabur - infrastructure breached\n> OpenCode - AI API keys exposed\n> OVHcloud CLI - official binaries backdoored\n> Rank Math PRO - malware in official plugin\n> TeamUpdraft - customer data compromised\n> ConnectWise - cloud backup identities compromised\n> Tensorlake - npm package infected\n> PingCap - alleged major breach\n> SubQuery - backdoored npm package\n> GhostAction - GitHub repos with malicious workflows\n> PHP - critical RCE flaws\n> Node.js - security flaws patched\n> eMudhra - certificate authority keys compromised\n> Tailscale - eMudhra incident","title":"The Kessler Syndrome (where blowups multiply exponentially) applied to software","updated_at":"2026-10-22T07:48:05Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"daniel_rh"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["chai","discovery"],"value":"I've always wanted to play Wing Commander with friends, so we could\nfly the story missions together. In 2015, I hypothesized that the full\ngame state fit in the data segment (only 64k), and I could do small\nposition and orientation experiments with vbindiff to discover how the\nmemory was organized. Some fun findings: the camera was in entity index\n0x3D (a "3D" joke?). My brother, Patrick, figured out Borland's overlay\nloader crashed the game until we made our stub look like a real stack\nframe. To play you need your own copy (e.g. the GOG version) and you\ndrag setup.exe into the browser. It's a DOSBox mod: no game files are\nhosted. We reversed the game by hand, but LLMs were used for the\nrecent browser/peer-to-peer WebRTC with voice chat port recently,\nand we continue to use them for ongoing work.
I'll be in the lobby for some hours if anyone wants to fly together."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: Reversing Wing Commander to find the entity table in 64k to add co-op"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://fireflyk64.github.io/wcmulti/"}},"_tags":["story","author_daniel_rh","story_50153873","show_hn"],"author":"daniel_rh","children":[50153942,50154864,50160464,50160823],"created_at":"2026-10-19T15:47:43Z","created_at_i":1792424863,"num_comments":5,"objectID":"50153873","points":4,"story_id":50153873,"story_text":"I've always wanted to play Wing Commander with friends, so we could\nfly the story missions together. In 2015, I hypothesized that the full\ngame state fit in the data segment (only 64k), and I could do small\nposition and orientation experiments with vbindiff to discover how the\nmemory was organized. Some fun findings: the camera was in entity index\n0x3D (a "3D" joke?). My brother, Patrick, figured out Borland's overlay\nloader crashed the game until we made our stub look like a real stack\nframe. To play you need your own copy (e.g. the GOG version) and you\ndrag setup.exe into the browser. It's a DOSBox mod: no game files are\nhosted. We reversed the game by hand, but LLMs were used for the\nrecent browser/peer-to-peer WebRTC with voice chat port recently,\nand we continue to use them for ongoing work.
I'll be in the lobby for some hours if anyone wants to fly together.","title":"Show HN: Reversing Wing Commander to find the entity table in 64k to add co-op","updated_at":"2026-10-22T00:06:23Z","url":"https://fireflyk64.github.io/wcmulti/"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["chai"],"value":"anie_cha"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"New Function of Blinking Identified"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["discovery"],"value":"https://www.psypost.org/scientists-have-discovered-a-previously-unknown-function-of-blinking/"}},"_tags":["story","author_anie_cha","story_40774217"],"author":"anie_cha","children":[40774218],"created_at":"2024-06-24T10:14:41Z","created_at_i":1719224081,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"40774217","points":2,"story_id":40774217,"title":"New Function of Blinking Identified","updated_at":"2024-09-20T17:19:20Z","url":"https://www.psypost.org/scientists-have-discovered-a-previously-unknown-function-of-blinking/"}],"hitsPerPage":50,"nbHits":16,"nbPages":1,"page":0,"params":"query=Chai+Discovery&tags=story&hitsPerPage=50&advancedSyntax=true&analyticsTags=backend","processingTimeMS":12,"processingTimingsMS":{"_request":{"queue":2,"roundTrip":14},"fetch":{"query":8,"scanning":2,"total":11},"total":12},"query":"Chai Discovery","serverTimeMS":15}