Hacker News Reader

cypherpunks01on A 6-Hour Time-Stretched Version of Brian Eno's Music for Airports

Deconstructing Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports:

https://reverbmachine.com/blog/deconstructing-brian-eno-musi...

It's a must-read! It has analysis of all Eno's tape loops and an interactive note randomizer. Mentioned in the article's related content but it's worth an extra shout.

Fun to play around with for anyone who likes the album or ambient music in general.

cypherpunks01on Shared DNA in Music

Wow this is super cool!

They primarily used the genius.com API, which I didn't know existed. Anyone built any other cool projects with it?

Is there a "discovery" player that plays your own Spotify library, but shows you all related tracks by sample, interpolation, cover, etc from the Genius API that you can explore? Kind of like a wikipedia rabbithole, but for music?

cypherpunks01on New funding to build towards AGI

They might need to throw a little more funding into TTS training.

Play it and first thing you hear is an enthusiastic "Today we’re announcing new funding - 40 bi-dollars at a 300 bi-dollar post-money valuation!" Hah.

cypherpunks01on Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

Speaking of, I just bought a brand new M4 Air. The thing is amazing, except I swear that Command-Tab does not work consistently sometimes, it just does nothing and I have to press it again. It's baffling, has anyone had this before? Never had this issue on any computer in the past 20 years, it's strange.

cypherpunks01on A love letter to the CSV format

Any recommendations for CSV editors on OSX? I was just looking around for this today. The "Numbers" app is pretty awful and I couldn't find any superb substitutes, only ones that were just OK.

cypherpunks01on So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

cypherpunks01on Roald Dahl on the death of his daughter (2015)

Came here to post this as well. A truly inspirational book.

cypherpunks01on The “strategic reserve” exposes crypto as the scam it always was

The best case is an argument similar to the reason the US gold reserve exists. While the gold no longer directly backs the currency, gold is a neutral asset and wouldn't go to zero during wars/depressions, so could be sold strategically if needed to fund government in a dire situation.

The claim is that BTC is also a neutral asset, meaning it's not linked to any one government or economy, and it has certain properties similar to gold. And that the US should not let China or other countries stockpile this reserve asset first.

It's obviously not "necessary" for any government to function, but the claim is that the reserve properties would be strategically beneficial to weather the worldwide crises in the coming decades.

cypherpunks01on Why are QR Codes with capital letters smaller than QR codes with lower case?

My favorite QR code visual explainer:

https://qr.blinry.org/

cypherpunks01on Bybit loses $1.5B in hack

It's the second largest crypto exchange by volume globally, behind Binance. Specialized in derivatives but they have lots of regular retail products that you might find at Coinbase. Basically like a bigger version of Coinbase from Asia.

cypherpunks01on Bybit loses $1.5B in hack

A huge problem with signing EVM transactions using hardware wallets is that is common to be blind signing messages. The device has no knowledge of the SAFE EVM contract functions or any other context, it just asks you to sign an gobblygook opaque binary message so you may have no idea what's being signed, is my experience using multiple different vendor HW wallets. Not sure if that's what happened, but possible this type of problem contributed to the exploit. BTC TXs are simple enough that all HW wallets can basically display what's happening, but with turing-complete arbitrary computations in EVM this becomes very difficult.

cypherpunks01on Bybit loses $1.5B in hack but can cover loss, CEO confirms

Wow it must have been really musked then, huh?

cypherpunks01on Dose-dependent effects of LSD in double-blind placebo-controlled study (2020)

> Sixteen healthy subjects

> Six participants had previously used LSD

> The sessions were conducted in a calm hospital room.

> Standardized lunches and dinners were served at 1:30 p.m. and 6:00 p.m

> The subjects were never alone during the first 16 h after drug administration

> The study included a screening visit, six 25 h test sessions (each separated by at least 10 days)

I understand the concept of informed consent, but the study design sounds bad to me, to be honest. According to S1, seven of the subjects had never taken any psychedelic (LSD/psilocybin/MDMA). The study confined them for their first LSD experience, and likely multiple followups, in a hospital room, with a stranger who was not on LSD. And six sessions? LSD should not be used multiple times within 1 year, in my opinion, let alone 2 weeks apart, I think multiple rapid use unnecessarily increases the low-ish risk of psychosis. No matter how nice the room, this seems unethical to me for a few reasons. People shouldn't be experiencing their first psychedelics in a hospital room unless they can't physically leave a hospital bed. I just don't think the basic dose-response curve gains us much new science, this is exactly what most people would draw who have experimented with LSD doses between 25-200ug (though the BDNF effects are interesting as another commenter mentioned).

I guess this is a general problem for all psychedelic studies, though. There's no way to place all the necessary controls around the subject, without keeping them indoors and making them feel like a trapped mouse. The inability to change your own setting during a significant psychedelic trip can definitely induce or prolong major anxiety, much more for someone experiencing novel effects for the first time.

cypherpunks01on No Bitcoin ETFs at Vanguard (2024)

The killer use cases of crypto are not visible to HN readers living in relatively stable North American or European countries. Take a look at the the "Global Crypto Adoption Index Top 20" [1] for the past years and ask yourself, "do Vietnamese people love trading monkey gifs? Are Ukrainians especially susceptible to Ponzi schemes? Is Venezuela laden with techbros?" [2]

No. It's that people in many of the countries in the top 20 live under unstable governments and monetary systems, with extreme debasement, inflation, inability to store value without seizure, transfer value without controls, accept remittances, etc. Crypto absolutely has use cases in these situations, and these extremes inform the means.

"If you’re in a developed country, and you’re happy with your banking system, and you’re not a sex worker, and you have zero concerns about your country being taken over by fascists, you probably don’t need cryptocurrency and shouldn’t worry about it. If other people say they do need it, don’t call them liars and say you know with certainty that nobody has ever used crypto for anything besides Ponzi schemes and monkey pictures. Just let them use it!" [2]

[1] https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2024-global-crypto-adoption...

[2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-im-less-than-infinitely...

cypherpunks01on No Bitcoin ETFs at Vanguard? Here's why

Guatemalan dev Rafael Cordon made a project called Simple Proof that leverages OpenTimestamps for election security.

It was used in the Guatemalan 2023 elections to timestamp tally sheets in different election districts around the country, so they can't be manipulated at a later time.

cypherpunks01on Subway Stories

Metrocards were not phased out yet, they definitely still work.

The trick did work on regular cards that you could just pick up off the floor - but at some point they fixed the general glitch. It's interesting that it continued to work on only certain types of cards though!

cypherpunks01on Subway Stories

Anyone remember the Metrocard bending trick that worked in the '90s til sometime early-mid 2000s?

You'd just have to find an empty value Metrocard (that wasn't previously bent for this trick), make a partial vertical bend in the magstripe track in a certain area, then swipe a few times and the turnstile would let you in on the swipe following display of the "Swipe again at this turnstile" message.

I think it had something to do with causing difficulty writing to the magstripe track, and the system generously allowing entry if it couldn't determine the last write state of the card, before the whole card got revoked? Or something along those lines.

cypherpunks01on Passkey technology is elegant, but it's most definitely not usable security

Anyone know what adoption rates for passkey looks like now? I think they are cool too, but the constant prompting to create them and invisible/variable UI everywhere is a problem. It presents as inconsistent as compared with the standardized username/password form that grandmas understand.

cypherpunks01on A kid made $50k dumping crypto he'd created – then came the backlash

Flagged and removed, within minutes

cypherpunks01on A kid made $50k dumping crypto he'd created – then came the backlash

So all Wednesday stories about Bitcoin reaching 100k/2T market cap were flagged immediately off frontpage for not being relevant, yet this story is considered interesting content?

I'm sure I'll get down voted, but it's sad that the topic is widely considered off-limits for actual conversation here, except for stories where the stupidest stuff like this is shown. HN is where many folks originally learned about bitcoin because of its extremely niche tech audience at the time.

cypherpunks01on Bitcoin is over $100k

There's utility in being able to move both small and large amounts of value fairly easily. Moving value has high utility for criminals and non-criminals alike. There's utility in remittances, in protecting value from unlawful seizure, and protecting value from incompetent bureaucrats hyper-inflating your national currency.

cypherpunks01on Bitcoin is over $100k

Bitcoin's not had to file for bankruptcy so far. And CEO never assassinated. But you never know, crazier things have happened.

cypherpunks01on Bitcoin is over $100k

Because people on the site don't like the topic

cypherpunks01on [dead]

https://archive.is/Nz4ut

cypherpunks01on The Salvadoran government has 5,940 bitcoins worth $582M

It's a P2SH-P2WSH 3-of-5 multisig

Supposedly https://mempool.space/address/32ixEdVJWo3kmvJGMTZq5jAQVZZeuw...

cypherpunks01on Americans see their savings vanish in Synapse fintech crisis

Right, a lot of "neo-banks" that tried to attract young unbanked customers used them, 100 fintech clients with a total of about 10 million end users affected. Almost included players like Mercury too - Mercury held approximately $3 billion in deposits in Synapse, which they held for an ungodly number of startups and their own customer bases, prior to pulling out a little before the collapse.

cypherpunks01on How public key cryptography works, using only simple math

This is great, thanks!

Do you mean an explainer for ZK proofs? I found this primer by Matthew Green very helpful in understanding the basics: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/11/27/zero-kno...

cypherpunks01on IMG_0416

https://github.com/wonga00/astronaut

I remember looking through the code awhile ago, it's nice and simple!

Uses socket.io w node.js + express, a crawler script searches YT periodically to keep the videos fresh. The server iterates randomly through the video list, telling all clients through socket.io which video is next, and when to switch.

cypherpunks01on Jump Trading, Virtu and the 'hidden optical fibre cable' under an Ohio field

Ericsson blog wrote:

In a vacuum, electro-magnetic waves travel at a speed of 3.336 microseconds (μs) per kilometer (km). Through the air, that speed is a tiny fraction slower, clocking in at 3.337 μs per km, while through a fiber-optic cable it takes 4.937 μs to travel one kilometer – this means that microwave transport is actually 48% faster than fiber-optic, all other things being equal.

cypherpunks01on HBO Documentary Suggests Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Is Peter Todd

I think the most positive benefits are people using it to protect themselves in countries under authoritarian rule and/or economic collapse. Low-fee remittances are a lesser but still very positive use-case. There are genuine large benefits to people in these situations.

See also: Why I'm less than infinitely hostile to crypto

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-im-less-than-infinitely...