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npilkon Seedance 2.5

To play devil's advocate: couldn't people generating AI image/video take the time to consider what they want to generate, decide how to prompt it, ask for edits to have subjects pose certain ways, and specify lighting and color grading (or tweak it afterwards with the same tools digital photographers use)? Wouldn't that give them an 'essence' in the same way?

npilkon Show HN: I mapped every US golf course

It turns out people have even mapped individual greens, fairways, bunkers, etc on OpenStreetMap! So you can use that data to generate a yardage book for each course: https://npilk.github.io/openyardage-web/

npilkon What happened to TheNumbers.com

What if you aren't motivated solely by making money? There will still be new free content created by hobbyists, passionate creators, altruists, etc.

(Agree with you more generally.)

npilkon AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt

It's cute they think 'retail investors' are reading balance sheets in the first place.

npilkon Does creatine make you smarter?

Interesting. I had heard that chess players burn a crazy amount of calories during tournament matches, but when I looked it up just now it seems like that isn't true: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/30/its-sapols...

npilkon Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day

I appreciate the sentiment but can't quite tell who the author is targeting. Is it people who don't even know what HTML is, or those who are technical enough to have considered tradeoffs between web hosting options?

For complete beginners, I made https://weejur.com , which is designed to make it easy for even a complete beginner to paste in HTML and get it hosted on GitHub Pages for free. (And is also hosted itself on GitHub for free!)

npilkon Silent speech with ultrasound

I'm very eager for subvocalization tech to take off - this, AlterEgo, etc.

I have never liked talking aloud to Siri or similar, but I could see using "voice" as an interface for so much more if I could speak silently to my device.

npilkon Turn your site into a place people can bump into each other

Haha, I guess having a troll posting nonstop racial slurs is just part of that old web feel...

npilkon GPT-5.5 hallucinates 3x more than MIT-licensed GLM-5.2

I think it implies they are more likely to hallucinate if they don't know the answer. So a big model will return the correct answer more often than a small one, but in the cases where it doesn't, it will be more likely to make something up instead of saying "I don't know".

npilkon The AirPods Effect

This will be even more interesting when AR glasses finally go mainstream in a few years, further increasing this effect.

npilkon The 2-Year Apartment Rule

IMO people in this thread have missed the point. I, too have moved about every two years as an adult (even though I've never had mold problems). Or when I haven't moved, I've made a job change.

Perhaps there is something in my nature that gets complacent after a couple of years and looks to make a change. It seems like that's what the author was trying to grasp towards.

I expect this tendency might go away as I get older, have a family, etc.

npilkon macOS needs its grid back

I feel like Arc nailed this perfectly with the vertical tabs and multiple "spaces", and since almost everything happens in-browser these days, this was 99% good enough. I can't understand why more power users don't find this setup ideal. I'm hoping Zen Browser can become a solid replacement.

npilkon Chipotlai Max

They make custom chips with a model's weights and parameters "hard-coded" which allows for much, much faster inference.

npilkon The dead economy theory

Human-slop is a new one for me. How would you define it? Low quality work written by a human? Human writing that sounds like an LLM? Something else?

npilkon Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage

Love chatting with an agent via iMessage for the right use case - it feels very natural and human. I hacked my own together with an old laptop and BlueBubbles.

How would you compare your offering with Spectrum (https://photon.codes/)?

npilkon DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

I've been using DeepSeek Flash to replace Sonnet once the subscription stopped working. Haven't really noticed a difference, although I don't usually have it doing anything very complicated.

npilkon Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

Do you have an example of a 4th grade problem in mind that isn't "American-style"?

npilkon Power Tools Got Worse on Purpose. Who Owns DeWalt, Craftsman, and Milwaukee?

Yep, clearly written by AI. Seems like an SEO-type play where they just have AI do deep research and write these reports on as many categories as possible to get traction.

Pretty smart business idea as I imagine people love ragebait about why products aren't as good as they used to be.

npilkon Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)

I'm trying to make it easier for non-technical folks to publish websites: https://weejur.com

82 sites published so far, with a really weird and wide range of content.

Working on a simple WYSIWYG website editor to go with the current functionality.

npilkon Am I Meant to Be Impressed?

I admittedly didn’t take the time to read all 10,000 words of him shouting into the void in detail. But the capex complaints seem trivially misguided?

Current revenue is being generated from capex investments in the past; the most recent capex hasn’t begun to pay off at all. That’s expected.

Now, I don’t know if those investments ever will pay off and there are reasons to be skeptical. But if you assume the capex doesn’t lead to any revenue, then you’re just assuming the conclusion that the investments are bad…

npilkon Am I Meant to Be Impressed?

“I’m ending this with a rant” made me laugh. What was the rest, then?

npilkon Using “underdrawings” for accurate text and numbers

Still missing 49 - humans are safe, for now!

npilkon Becoming a father shrinks your cerebrum (2022)

https://archive.is/7LHeN

("This is your brain on kids!")

npilkon Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey

I'm surprised people have been getting it to reliably guess names. I have a really hard time getting it to give a specific name (perhaps for privacy reasons?) - maybe I'm not prompting effectively.

Interestingly, it is able to reliably determine my age from my writing. I suppose this is a mix of stylometry and references in the text itself that date the author (me).

npilkon Show HN: A free tool for non-technical folks to easily publish a website

Basically as you see on the website - “Connect to GitHub and publish”, “GitHub Pages is a free service to host websites”, etc.

I do think the target user for this would probably have needed to heard of GitHub to really “get it” - but maybe they just know it’s something developers use, and not any more than that.

npilkon Show HN: A free tool for non-technical folks to easily publish a website

Sweet, didn’t know about this - yes, this is very similar.

npilkon Show HN: A free tool for non-technical folks to easily publish a website

Sure, Lovable/v0 free tier is a good option, although I’m not sure how many non-tech people use them for things like personal sites or to quickly publish something they want to share. It feels like they’re going more after “builders”, and regular folks would be more using ChatGPT free tier, etc.

Mainly it’s always bothered me that Squarespace etc can charge so much for simple static sites. I just don’t think most people realize you can host websites for free if you don’t need a database.

npilkon Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1860/

npilkon Claude Design

There's an "export to Canva" button in Claude Design, so perhaps they're hoping this will be another entry point for new users, or that they'll be able to "lock in" as the default design software for Claude users.

npilkon Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

It's not "sci fi" but you should read Borges' short stories, particularly from Ficciones.

You may have already read his story The Library of Babel: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...