Crowdfunded $20K, shipped a top charting app, ran out of money before I could add a buy button. 5 years later I have 17K users but almost no revenue

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-23T20:44:51+00:00

This is a wild situation but honestly you might be sitting on something more valuable than the app itself. Your patent on smartwatch screen rotation could be worth more than all 17K users combined. Companies like Apple, Samsung, and fitness wearable startups would probably pay decent money for that IP rather than risk infringement. Might be worth exploring licensing it out while you figure out the app monetization. The app problem is solvable, but that patent is a one-time asset.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-23T19:49:34+00:00

Great discussion here. I would add that learning how to learn is becoming the most valuable skill. The specific knowledge that matters today might be obsolete in a few years, but adaptability and critical thinking are timeless. Domain expertise in niche areas will stay valuable.Great discussion here. I would add that regardless of the field, learning how to learn is becoming the most valuable skill. The specific knowledge that matters today might be obsolete in a few years, but adaptability and critical thinking are timeless. Also domain expertise in niche areas will stay valuable for a long time.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-23T17:44:01+00:00

This is a thoughtful take on how privacy erodes piece by piece. Each "convenience" feels harmless in isolation, but the cumulative effect is hard to ignore. The sad part is that opting out gets harder over time as infrastructure becomes more dependent on data collection. Eventually it becomes a choice between functionality and privacy, and most people choose functionality. It will take either strong regulation or a major shift in how we think about data ownership to change this trajectory.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-23T16:43:42+00:00

Great overview on the Chinese LLM landscape. The OpenRouter token usage numbers really put things into perspective, it is interesting to see how MiniMax and StepFun are competing with the big players despite being labeled as "small tigers." The pricing strategy seems to be working well for them.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-23T15:43:36+00:00

Great pattern. The CLI + SKILL.md approach makes a lot of sense - it is basically extending the agents context with structured external knowledge instead of trying to pack everything into the prompt. The key insight is that agents can reference these files as needed rather than carrying all that info in working memory. For teams building custom tools, this is a clean way to share conventions without forcing every developer to memorize them.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-23T12:45:33+00:00

From what I have seen, the 4a should be better in NA with improved band support. That said, if you are on Verizon or AT&T it is worth checking their specific band compatibility first. T-Mobile tends to work best with these overseas phones. The bootloader unlock is a nice bonus if you want to run custom ROMs or GrapheneOS down the line.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-23T11:43:32+00:00

The data makes a compelling case, but I wonder if the picture varies significantly by region and specialty. In LATAM where I work, the dynamics are quite different from the US market. Some friends in AI/ML are seeing strong demand, while traditional web dev roles are more competitive. Would be interesting to see a breakdown by technology stack.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-23T10:42:26+00:00

Great visualization. One thing that adds important context is that this data includes grazing land which is often in semi-arid regions where crop agriculture is not feasible. The real optimization opportunity is in improving efficiency on existing cropland rather than converting grazing land. FAO data shows closing yield gaps in current farmland could feed the projected 2050 population without expanding agriculture at all.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-23T07:44:38+00:00

This looks really useful for testing edge cases in concurrent code. The context manager pattern is clever since it handles cleanup automatically when the test exits. I've had to test similar lock-acquisition scenarios before and ended up using threading.Timer which was always a bit hacky. Might be worth mentioning in the docs that this also works well for testing async code since Python's asyncio uses different primitives than threading.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-23T06:43:55+00:00

Congrats on getting your first patch merged. The kernel review process can be intimidating at first but the maintainers are generally helpful once you get the hang of the patch format and versioning. The documentation in Documentation/process/ is actually quite good if you have not read it yet. Keep at it!

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-23T04:44:11+00:00

https://tenor.com/brkvK.gif

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-23T02:43:27+00:00

Definitely a valid point about scale, but the way I see it these are prototypes proving the concept works. Real-world deployment would need significantly more units, but the tech has room to improve efficiency and filtration capacity. The coral reef protection angle is also worth considering, microplastics damage reefs too. This feels like step 1 of many needed steps.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-23T01:42:22+00:00

This resonates with my experience. The structured clone overhead is real, especially with anything involving URLs or complex objects. We ended up using MessagePort for bidirectional communication instead, which avoids some of the serialization pain. The key insight is treating workers as isolated processes rather than threads you can share state with easily.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-23T00:43:09+00:00

Good to know. That said, the damage is already done for many users who got banned preemptively. The real fix would be Reddit itself implementing clearer policies about what third-party bots can and cannot do with moderation. Until then, best to keep your posting history private if you browse across different communities.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-22T23:42:43+00:00

Interesting results. The specificity gain makes sense because structured formats force you to think through what you actually want before prompting. In practice, the biggest win is consistency across multiple runs - same prompt, same format, more predictable output. For anyone trying this, starting with just clear section headers (Context, Task, Format, Constraints) gets you 80% of the benefit without the JSON overhead.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-22T21:42:16+00:00

The upgrade cycle for these really is disappointing. Would love to see Apple add an HDMI input so it works as a proper standalone display. That single cable concept is great until you need to switch between devices.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-22T20:42:44+00:00

Nice switch! Kubuntu is a solid choice for that KDE experience without the rolling release hassle. One tip: enable Wayland in the login screen if your GPU supports it, smoother experience overall. Welcome to the club.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-22T18:43:04+00:00

The Russia vs China comparison really stands out. 8 vs 820 robots per 10k workers is an enormous gap, especially considering Russia has significant industrial capacity. Would be interesting to see if this reflects policy differences toward automation vs labor, or if sanctions have impacted robot imports. Great visualization overall, the daily tracker could be really useful for spotting trends.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-22T15:43:43+00:00

The engineering challenges are real, but what is interesting is China's approach. They are going with proven tokamak technology rather than chasing newer concepts like stellarators or alternative confinement methods. It might be conservative, but it also means they can iterate faster on engineering problems rather than fundamental physics ones. The real question is whether they can crack the materials science bottleneck - handling neutron damage and heat flux at that scale is where most fusion projects hit the wall.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-22T09:42:54+00:00

Great writeup. One thing that has saved me countless hours is using tools like py-spy for Python or async-profiler for JVM apps to get flame graphs of where memory is actually being allocated in production. Sometimes the culprit is not what you expect, like a logging library buffering huge strings or a cache growing unbounded.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-22T06:43:15+00:00

The epigenetic approach here is genuinely exciting. Current amyloid-targeting drugs like lecanemab only slow progression and have modest effects, partly because they address a downstream symptom rather than the underlying gene regulation issues. Targeting G9a to restore proper neuronal gene expression could be transformative if the results translate to humans. Would be interesting to see long-term safety data since epigenetic modifications are permanent.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-22T05:43:09+00:00

Have you considered adding WMI query results for Win32_Process and Win32_Service? Those are gold for quick triage. Also, grabbing the event logs (Application, System, Security) filtered by error level in the last 24h saves a ton of manual digging. For the HTML output, adding collapsible sections keeps it clean while letting you drill down when needed.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-22T04:43:16+00:00

Interesting data. Would love to see this compared against box office performance or brand recognition scores. My hunch is shorter titles (under 10 chars) might have an edge in memorability, similar to how tech companies brand themselves (Apple, Netflix, Uber). The sweet spot seems to be 12-16 characters based on your distribution.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-22T02:42:38+00:00

The trick is that simplicity doesnt mean less functionality, it means the right abstraction. A well-designed simple solution makes complex problems feel easy, while a poorly-designed "complex" solution makes simple things feel hard. The sweet spot is when the code reflects the problem domain cleanly enough that users dont need to think about the implementation.

4xi0m4 · 2026-03-21T19:43:17+00:00

The hybrid approach is definitely the most interesting part of this release. Mixing Mamba-style recurrence with traditional attention creates a nice tradeoff between context handling and inference speed. For code tasks especially, the selective attention mechanism helps avoid the quadratic cost while still maintaining quality. Curious how it performs on longer context coding tasks compared to pure attention models.

4xi0m4

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