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vallode

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A fan chiming in. I'm really happy someone someone is tackling this and it's looking good. One thing: can we get a demo instance just for initial snooping? A screenshot or two is fine but to get a feel for features it would be nice to have something (even heavily limited) we can just interact with?

Whoop targets a pretty solid demographic of people who seem to want an auxillary training coach (the app tells you when to go to sleep) and don't want a typical smartwatch experience.

I'm not sure where modern smartwatches stand in terms of accurate readings but if I remember correctly it is still a minefield of inaccuracies. A watch for 50 dollars will _probably_ not do as well at reading your vitals as a watch for 200-500 dollars. Given Whoop markets itself as backed by science and seems to take the lead in studies on accurate heart rate readings[1].

Couple the above with great marketing and a decent kit of software and you have a difficult champion to dethrone. Hardware is expensive, marketing is difficult, a good app is hard to make, and putting together all three at once _while_ fighting a niche market is a struggle!

While 30/month can be difficult to swallow for someone that runs or swims as a casual hobby, someone that already pays hundreds a month for equipment, coaching, gym memberships, can have an easier time justifying it.

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/22/16/6317

I'm not sure how I feel about the take on "disappearing pillars". I think that knowledge and expertise in the different "pillars" the author describes has become easier to access, reducing the moat around the individual pillars and allowing greater overlap between professions. So while you might not need a "sales team", you do need "sales knowledge". Cloud solutions are amazing until they are not and you need "infra knowledge" to understand where you are going wrong and to evaluate potential solutions.

I would argue that at a given size, scale, and growth you would find yourself looping back to the "original pillars".

The example of Neartail[1] competing with Shopify is a prime example of this. Shopify has a large market cap, shareholders demanding profits, a large quantity of paying customers. Neartail has none of these, it may have paying customers and it may have some potential in the future but it is currently all within the sphere of control of a few individuals.

Obviously a lot of what I'm saying is self-inflicted, you don't _have_ to grow endlessly but if you _do_ you need many decision makers and domain knowledge simply starts to reach limits for individuals (even when using AI).

The market for TODO list apps is 1 for every person in the world, everyone has a slightly different subjectivity and therefore has a slightly different optimal experience when it comes to TODO lists. Subjectivity is formed over time and through the course of events, therefore the market for TODO list apps is 1 for every person in the world for a given timeframe.

It's an obvious hyperbole but I think it stands to show that, in a similiar fashion, there is a reader (and by some aggregation readers plural) for everything you might think of writing.

How to get started with web development in 2025? What is ray-casting? How to emulate a piece of hardware in <language>? What I had for dinner tonight!

It may not be that everything is viral or a hit but you should find that most of the content you right will resonate with _someone_ and potentially help multiple _someones_.

Sometimes being satisfied with that 10-100 readers is all there is to it.

The difference here might be the rather huge gap between putting together a solid "blog post" and a solid "paper" on a subject. I agree these "types" of essays are difficult to challenge and given the sheer length of this post, it is also not accessible to _discuss_. I understand the desire to write about a topic extensively and how intimidating it might be to do so in a "scientific" way, this seems to be the middle ground. Maybe it's a seed for the author, or someone else, to develop further.

The abstract mentions the patients cholesterol level is 1000mg/dL which is at least 4 times more than the "highly dangerous" bracket. Evidence seems to show that xanthelasma (the nodules seen on this person) can have a link to a higher risk of atherosclerosis, which is linked to high cholesterol in the first place. This will not be "asymptomatic" for ever.

For what it's worth, I have a bookmarklet with these contents:

  data:text/html,<body contenteditable style="line-height:1.5;font-size:22px;max-width:75ch">type here...
I use this _all_ the time for very quick note taking and writing that will later be copied elsewhere, think one to three sentences and then offload.

Do I understand correctly you chat wıth Claude as a form of social relief or are you talking about drinking beer and chatting with it about work/ideation etc. Either way, just curious!

On topic though, I wholeheartedly agree that this valuation seems rather... unrealistic. I do think "hype" is how we currently handle a lot of valuations, for the worse in my opinion.

I could not disagree more, but I am obviously open to it being a personal preference. I've spent months updating JavaScript codebases that are between 3 and 5 years old, most of them written with vanilla JavaScript. A _few_ of them were written with TypeScript at least partially and those files were the least mentally taxing to upgrade.

Some of the codebases had tests, a good chunk of which could (and were) eliminated simply by using TSC as part of the build process. I think allowing the compiler and tooling like prettier to make choices for you leaves more space for you to think about the problem, not the myriad of problems _around_ it.

Passport Photos 2 years ago

It was fairly random, someone in my network had mentioned that Max was looking for people to take part in the project and I reached out. I was given a date and time slot and that was that.

Passport Photos 2 years ago

I'm not sure anyone tried to actually use it as a passport photo. Would have been a great touch though.

Passport Photos 2 years ago

Oh! Something I took a part in on HN. That's a first. Almost everything there was practical. Highly recommend checking out all of Max's work, beaming with creativity.

The slides from the Spark AI 2020 summit [1] helped me understand this a bit. If I get it correctly, the premise is that a specific format is used to organise information into efficient blocks where related column data "lives" closer together, enabling faster read speeds but worse write speeds.

If someone has more resources on the topic, I'd be very interested. There are many applications where sacrificing data freshness for a considerable uptick in performance is alluring.

[1] https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/the-apache-spark-file-f...

I'm not sure how I feel about the content of this entire post. RSS feeds are a more or less stagnant technology, mostly adopted "for fun" or by a niche of people who find them useful. The only way I can see to move forward is to make them as easy and painless to use as possible, the onus falls on both the creator and consumer of feeds (the websites and the clients... the user is completely out of the equation here in my opinion).

This kind of attitude reeks of the "you're using it wrong!" of the Linux world. Are you really telling me you are getting enough RSS feed requests to put a dent on your tech stack? Is your bandwidth overhead suffering that much (are you not caching?)? Make it painless and let's be thankful it isn't all web scrapers masquerading as users.

Mind-boggling problem to be angry about.

Infinitown 2 years ago

No humans walking around makes me sad :( A really cool project, albeit worrying that 50% of the real estate of Infinitown is roads only a couple of cars drive on ;) When zoomed in all the way I wish there was some LOD meshing to provide longer view distance, would make it feel much more immersive in that sense.

Features like this desperately need to be an AI-curated but human-driven operation. i.e an AI can aggregate some headlines from the latest news but a human needs to be the one that says "good to go" or "pass" on each. It's not shiny, but it would work (presumably better).

This just proves (to me) for the umpteenth time that AI can help us with our work immensely but company after company refuses to hire people who work well with it and instead focus on trying to employ it in a myriad of different unsuitable functions.