HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

liamzebedee

419 karma · joined October 13, 2012

Age: 21, Programming since 11. Built the first non-finance blockchain product in Australia. Interests: comsci, fun.

https://liamzebedee.com

submissionscomments
liamzebedee··on Terrain Diffusion: A Diffusion-Based Successor to Perlin Noise
I wonder if you could use this to generate the fractal terrain by the ocean like in Sydney. We already have "artificial reefs". We have built beauty in the build environment (architecture), some in the natural environment (gardens, forests), but comparatively less when it comes to the ocean.
liamzebedee··on RoboCrop: Teaching robots how to pick tomatoes
They are doing this now actually for plant breeding! "Engineering crop flower morphology facilitates robotization of cross-pollination and speed breeding" covers one example by breeding flowers to be more easily pickable by robotics.

[1] https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(25)00840-2

liamzebedee··on A DIY ‘bionic pancreas’ is changing diabetes care
I posted a thread here in 2019 for anyone curious on the technical walkthrough for setting one of these up (+ HN discussions) [1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20606230

liamzebedee··on Forking Chrome to render in a terminal
This is freakin' amazing! Such a glorious hack.

It'd be fun to build a pure CLI-based OS around this. Imagine opening apps by running `/www/github.com`

liamzebedee··on I found my house through 6 degrees of separation
It seems we disagree on 6dos. I think it's a useful concept to anchor on, since you can predict the structure of your domain (social networks, renting) based on the size of the network, and then optimize your routing so you get to a certain node (a nice house to live) quickly. Or even in my case - realising there is a path in the first place.

I hope this translates more clearly into engineering terms. The original audience of this post was non-technical.

liamzebedee··on I found my house through 6 degrees of separation
The challenge is that you might only need 6 hops to find that person you’re looking for (on average).
liamzebedee··on I found my house through 6 degrees of separation
> It's trivial to work backwards through your life and reshape everything as a series of coincidences that got you to where you are.

What if you worked forwards based on this idea of coincidence engineering?

liamzebedee··on I found my house through 6 degrees of separation
Haha, well you're right. The point of writing is to think. I never said it was going to be a scientific theory - and really, life is too complex a landscape to build a falsifiable theory anyways. We can still discuss anecdotes though.
liamzebedee··on I found my house through 6 degrees of separation
Thank you for the linkout, I'll put it on my reading list.
liamzebedee··on I found my house through 6 degrees of separation
Haha congratulations! You got it.
liamzebedee··on On Building My Own Artificial Pancreas
Body Area Network! Hahahaha love it, going to use this :)

The pump is actually just in your pocket usually, with a big cord hanging out ready to catch on things hehe. The CGM/pump sets are adhesive but not as much as you'd want sometimes.

liamzebedee··on On Building My Own Artificial Pancreas
Haha, I'm the OP, I use the insulin pump ;)

> You wake up from hypoglycemia, long before there is more trouble

And this is one of the main styles of diabetic death - not waking up (diabetic comatose).

> And the sensor doesn't post glucose levels for example if it gets detached.

I was more referring to the circumstance when you're lying on your sensor in a funny way, and it begins reporting incorrect levels.

liamzebedee··on On Building My Own Artificial Pancreas
Although I would highlight - there is additional high risk now if the sensor becomes faulty, in which case, more insulin could be delivered for incorrect levels while you sleeping, etc.
liamzebedee··on On Building My Own Artificial Pancreas
Hey Vlad - I added some pictures of what I actually wear day-to-day at the bottom of the post. Hope this helps!
liamzebedee··on On Building My Own Artificial Pancreas
A bit of elaboration on the risks you could encounter here:

- CGM sensors can be faulty, depending on the rate of change of glucose (they’re actually not measuring blood directly, but interstitial fluids, which are generally lagging by about 15mins and can be inaccurate with large swings)

- battery dying out isn’t so bad, since the pump will just default back to its previous basal delivery settings - there are safety maximums on insulin delivery, which prevent among other things, your typical overflow/precision errors

- maximums over time though is a more complex issue, something I haven’t yet dug into

liamzebedee··on On Building My Own Artificial Pancreas
Yes! I think this is fantastic. Tidepool’s employees actually have worked on many of these open-source projects, are funded a lot by the JDRF (one of the biggest T1 Diabetes NFP’s) ans seem to be the most aligned with diabetic’s interests.

Personally I’ve been using their Tidepool software for two years before this and it’s very good. The Tidepool Loop is actually based off of another FLOSS APS called Loop - so it’s likely the efforts will not go to waste. That being said, there’s still possibility that the pump manufacturers have interest to stifle their development - but we’ll see.

liamzebedee··on The Rainbow Network: An Off-Chain Decentralized Synthetics Exchange [pdf]
> decentralized finance, or is that just one angle?

People are grouping under that term, #DeFi.

liamzebedee··on Ethereum: A number of hard forks turn out to be scams
Forgive my naivety, but I feel this is down to the earliness of the ecosystem and infratructure. We are getting more and more validation of relatively simple use cases (CryptoKitties) in combination with the current state of the art in dapp tech (Metamask provider, Ethereum’s 10s block time for finality, centralized exchanges and early decentralized exchange).

Once the blockchain tiramisu becomes less like a delicately constructed interaction of tech and more like a modular/mature stack, perhaps the UX barrier to entry will be low enough to reap the network effect.

liamzebedee··on Show HN: Top PDFs Posted to Hacker News in 2018
Wow, your product is super cool! I was going to post this in an Ask HN but maybe you would like to share instead - what is it like to architect a crawler for social media sites?

With Twitter Music shutdown, I was looking back on their acquihire of WeAreHunted, a music ranking service which at its core was a crawler that indexed torrents/tumblr/soundcloud to find what's up and coming. As I was pondering this, I was thinking about how they would normalise the data.

My main question was, how much difficulty do you encounter indexing a social site? I can imagine Tumblr, Facebook, and other sites have a plurality of new content appearing at arbitrary intervals (posts, comments, etc) - and I don't imagine that there are RSS feeds to diff here. So how would it function?

liamzebedee··on Priority Queue on Ethereum with a 15 ETH Bug Bounty
Forbes just recently partnered with Civil, a blockchain journalism project from Consensys Studios, which is the commercial powerhouse of Ethereum’s cofounder.
liamzebedee··on Yet Another Rant About Blockchains
I’d reframe it in a broader context than a decentralized immutable ledger. I’m lacking the clarity to make a broader statement, so here’s just an example: DAO’s and prediction markets. Both involve in some sense, a form of decentralised governance - where the entity being governed is self-sovereign. A ledger implies we have some functions that apply transactions on rows. A smart contract blockchain (which is a gratuitous interpretation of the author’s referral to blockchain), is more of a collection of self-sovereign entities/systems in the form of programs. While something like a DAO is clearly just a decentralized voting pool, something like a prediction market, which are composed further by other self-governed systems (the validators, the bidders, etc), have micro and macro characteristics for which a ledger-oriented interpretation wouldn’t suffice.
liamzebedee··on Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you remember your study notes
I tweeted about this yesterday, from the article:

> "Students remembered 57 per cent ... written in Sans Forgetica, compared to 50 per cent .... in Ariel"

7% delta retention isn't so much, is it?

liamzebedee··on Half of the Great Barrier Reef Is Dead
I recently watched Google's internal leaked documentary, The Selfish Ledger [1], I think it has a really interesting perspective on this. Halfway through, the user is able to make a choice between two competing products, based on their preference (let's say it's reducing CO2). This is actionable because the supply chain of the product is available through public, transparent ledgers.

This is a faint idea, but what if we could achieve better collective leverage / incentive alignment through something like this? We already have brand boycott campaigns based on similar notions of environmental awareness, but I think there's a finite energy for being aware of these.

On an individual level, we have small economic influence. Collectively, we [can] have leverage. If we are effortlessly aware of both, there is that "visceral" daily experience where the lines are drawn between our basic split-second purchases (meat vs. vegan mince) and their impacts.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUSZfEBTwRc

liamzebedee··on Cognitive Distortions of People Who Get Stuff Done (2012) [pdf]
We had a thread a couple weeks ago "What interesting thought did you read on HN but couldn't find later?" - I'm wondering if anyone can help me rediscover this Wikipedia article.

It was a theory on the cognitive bias of depression/anxiety, applied to the locus/worldview of someone, wherein a person interprets with a smaller outlook on the future i.e. the opposite of "looking at the bigger picture".

I've found many anecdotal parallels in people I know, but am absolutely teething to find this article.

liamzebedee··on Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?
Can also vouch. Their uploaded is super fantastic and works with many types of meters/pumps. Data stored their is also openly accessible using their API. Chris (the founder) seems like a good guy.
liamzebedee··on Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?
A question from a fellow diabetic hacker - what prompted your switch to the faster acting insulin and how does it compare wrt basal rates? I became aware of it not too long ago, currently using Novorapid on my pump. Have brought it up once and the endocrinologists were apprehensive of switching.

Forgetting to bolus and accounting for the dawn phenoemenon are pretty challenging in a backpackers routine. :-)

liamzebedee··on Ask HN: What interesting thought did you read on HN but couldn't find later?
Been looking for this on and off for over 5 years, thank you.
liamzebedee··on Ask HN: What interesting thought did you read on HN but couldn't find later?
A paper some time back about performing large-scale host computations through (ab)using the TCP handshake for arithmetic.
liamzebedee··on Inside Telegram’s ambitious $1.2B ICO to create the next Ethereum
> The “TON Blockchain” will consist of a master chain and 2-to-the-power-of-92 accompanying blockchains

> “Infinite Sharding Paradigm” to achieve scalability

> “Instant Hypercube Routing”

> "it will also use 2-D Distributed Ledgers."

There's no doubt that if you want to make a quick buck, this buzzword-laden series of claims will attract many greater fools. But the ongoing crypto-hubris is unattractive to say the least.

liamzebedee··on CES Was Full of Useless Robots and Machines That Don’t Work
The Finns have had something similar to this for decades: dish racks that are cupboards [1]. I wonder why such cheap solutions are not thought of first

[1] https://i.pinimg.com/736x/a8/d0/d5/a8d0d5ce749c4ad9e8dc37a1c...

Page 1 of 4Next →