Well I guess I'm the only one here with a positive review of this app. Kudos to them for trying something different.

It's functional, interesting, and well designed.

You don't need to pay the subscription to use the app so don't know what everyone's complaining about.

Agreed, this app is delightful. The look and feel is exactly where I'd hope design would go from here. It's colorful, the controls are intuitive and give good physical feedback. The exposure mapping is really useful as well as the focus mapping.

Extremely well done app.

There's a general principal that stressing the body and mind often begets strength.

Lifting heavy weights stresses your muscles and you get stronger.

Running long distances or short distances intensely stresses your heart and makes your heart stronger.

Doing something you're scared of (public speaking for example) stresses your psyche and makes you stronger.

So sauna and cold plunge both fall into this category of controlled stress that would unsurprisingly have some benefits.

Some of the best athletes of all time use it consistently in their regimen, including LeBron James (40+ and still one of the best players in the NBA).

Even if the cold water was nothing but a sort of pain-endurance test, that's good for your psyche in a similar way doing scary things like public speaking is good for it.

All these things together, I would bet cold plunge is probably good for you. Definitely that it is more likely good for you than bad for you. What do you have to lose? If there's a cold bath around, I'll jump in.

Cold water plunges or cold water immersion have conclusively shown to reduce anabolic signaling [1].

If you’re training to become fit and build muscles, there is definitely a downside. It has benefits in terms of recovery, but that comes at the cost of anabolic response. It makes sense for athletes who have consistent training and need to perform for games, but not for the average person who just wants to look more fit.

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4594298/

Interesting! Thanks for sharing this, made me revisit the huberman podcast on this topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq6WHJzOkno

He echoes what you said, summarizing: "If your goal is hypertrophy and strength don't do cold immersion until 4 hours or more after your workout".

If we can trust the studies Huberman cites, you can get many benefits from cold plunge and also avoid that post-workout caveat if it's relevant.

I personally would not trust Huberman. Just look at his blatant shilling of questionable products for sponsorship (AG1, being the best example). Look at the studies he cites, I suppose, but there’s plenty of low quality studies that can be cited to try to prove a bad opinion.

This is specifically about cold plunge immediately after strength training, there's no evidence this applies as a tradeoff in a more generic way.

Cold water immersion or whatnot immediately after training or exercise is generally when it’s used. Similarly, if you did it right before exercise it would hamper exercise and increase injury risk purely due to lower blood flow through muscles. Could be mitigated by extra warming up, but certainly a pain.

From a practicality standpoint, cold plunging and such are generally done at the same place (and coincident) where you exercise.

It’s similar to aerobic exercise immediately after strength training. Sure, you can do these things far away from each other (cold plunge in morning, train in evening)… but how much time are you going to dedicate to going to the gym?

I dont understand where your view comes from. I've never seen a gym with a cold plunge. I cold plunge in natural bodies of water or my back yard, and I do it whenever I want - intentionally separated from my strength training.

It's rarer, but it's the same type of amenity for a gym that has a sauna. Not all gyms have saunas either, but a certain type of gym does.

Frankly, I don't understand your view either. The vast majority of folks do not have access to a natural body of water that is cold enough, especially not year round. And having a plunge tank available at your home is a considerable expense, either in recurring ice cost or in the type of machine that can actively cool water.

The lowest barrier to entry is having access to it at an external facility. I lived in an apartment where that had a cold plunge next to the regular pool (which was also next to the apartment gym), for instance.

very well designed! how does this work? in the sense that i didn't have to copy/paste any keys and yet this is offering paid models for free.

Thanks! Right now Chorus is proxying API calls to our server so it's free. This was kind of an experimental winter break project that we were using internally, and it was quicker to ship this way.

Likely going to add bring your own API keys (or a paid version) soon.

Update: just added option to bring your own keys! Should be available within an hour.

if you are not paying... you are the product

As Cory Doctorow has documented, you're frequently still the product even when paying: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

ahah true, but in this case, we're (melty) just paying right now. I wanted to make it really easy to try and didn't implement bring your own keys yet. I probably should ask O1 to fix that

This is interesting, can definitely see the future of talk therapy going in this direction. How do you measure 'quality coaching'? Have you had any users use this for an extended period of time and report good outcomes? Is this supposed to be a replacement for traditional talk-therapy or a supplemental tool?

Nice job, looks quite polished.

Thanks! Great questions. We just launched - anecdotally we've had really great feedback from early users, but we're working with PhDs in the field to design an external validation study while tracking user-reported outcomes. We've also heard from a few providers that have started recommending Pensive to their clients for on-demand support between sessions. We see Pensive as complementary to therapy for some users and a standalone tool for others. Many people who don't need therapy can still benefit significantly from consistent, evidence-based practice. The key is making these proven techniques more accessible. Like physical health, most people don’t need a medical intervention - they need to exercise, but sorting through the research and implementing effective practice is a big barrier. Our focus is on delivering established practices in a convenient format with just a few minutes of guided conversation a day.

What are the tradeoffs to something like this? What attack vectors are still present and what attack vectors does this prevent? Thanks, cool project!

Thank you so much. Now let me break this questions down:

Key Security Benefits:

1. Cryptographic Verification:

- Prevents silent corruption of system state

- Makes tampering with system logs cryptographically difficult

- Provides verifiable audit trails of all system operations

- Enables detection of hardware memory faults

2. Runtime Integrity:

- Prevents invalid memory access patterns

- Ensures filesystem operations maintain consistency

- Verifies process state transitions

- Guards against buffer overflows in key subsystems

Main Tradeoffs:

1. Performance Impact: - 3-5% overhead for memory operations

- 7-9% overhead for filesystem operations

- Additional storage needed for proof chains

- Increased memory usage for verification structures

2. Complexity: - More complex memory management

- Additional failure modes to handle

- Higher system initialization overhead

- More complex recovery procedures

Attack Vectors Still Present:

- Physical hardware attacks (DMA, cold boot)

- Side-channel attacks

- Race conditions (though reduced by verification)

- Attacks that operate within valid operation boundaries

- Core CPU/firmware-level vulnerabilities

Attack Vectors Prevented/Mitigated:

- Memory corruption exploits

- Filesystem integrity attacks

- Unauthorized state transitions

- Historical state tampering

- Many types of privilege escalation

Im actively working on making the other attack vectors disappear as a whole. It's quite extensive as it is, so it's got a lot of things packed on it. ( * ´ ω ｀ * )

www.papertalk.xyz

Made it to the front page of HN a few months ago with a less polished version. Still trying to build consistent traffic and engagement. Any feedback is much appreciated!

Cool design. FYI the "Try now" card looks like it didn't render right, just seeing a blank box around the button.

You meant in the web version? it is supposed to look like a blank box in the rectangle grocery bill shape, but i suppose the design can be a bit better there. Thanks for the feedback.

The current design with that box feels broken

Ok, thanks for the feedback. Will think of something else

The findings here seem extremely concerning. HOWEVER, wouldn't we expect to see the negative effects of these microplastics play out in an obvious way in older generations by now? Plastics became common in the 1950s.

(To be clear I would very much rather _not_ have microplastics in my body.)

But most stuff they drank came out of uncoated pop-cans and glass until about the 80's.

Hey guys, posted this a few weeks ago and made it to the front page. Made a bunch of updates people requested, would love to get more feedback. Thanks!