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nerf0

58 karma · joined February 15, 2020

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nerf0··on James Watson has died
What's with the "is dead at"? I'm not a native speaker but it seems a bit disrespectful.
nerf0··on Three Arrows Capital co-founder Zhu arrested in Singapore airport
I work in this area and to me, the tech is still super interesting. In particular, things like zero knowledge proof and related scaling/privacy solutions are at the forefront of cryptography in my opinion.
nerf0··on Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner
Who's laughing now Hetzner? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607728
nerf0··on Auditory illusions with examples from Daft Punk
I want to make this random off-topic comment: For years I've been collecting various audio clips, where "environmental" sound (voice, noise, etc.) transitions into music, or vise versa, in songs, movies and TV shows. I've searched the web and the closest term I can find is "diegetic switch", but not quite. Here's the (short) list:

- https://youtu.be/9j9bVl3rfNk?t=29 In The Defenders, repeated piano note transitions into background music.

- https://youtu.be/isZyX1xd1VQ?t=159 (The Great American Nightmare - Rob Zombie)

- https://youtu.be/pU_mZ1X69Ho?t=364 (Out of Control - Miraculix)

- Justice League the movie where the song "Everybody Knows" transitions into the ambulance siren. Sorry I can't find this footage.

nerf0··on Be wary of imitating high-status people who can afford to countersignal
I had learned a saying recently "cars for the poor, watches for the rich". The idea is that cars have higher utilities so even though cars are higher price in general, watchers show higher status signal.

As it turns out, this was an old Chinese saying a couple decades ago, where "cars" really meant bicycles.

nerf0··on It amazes me how many people are blissfully unaware of the rampant tether fraud
Correct. Here I'm assuming USDC is "stable".

If USDC drops (or if USDT rises, for that matter), you might get liquidated.

nerf0··on It amazes me how many people are blissfully unaware of the rampant tether fraud
Depends on market conditions and the lender you use. Currently around 4% on AAVE. If demand rises this can go up obviously.

Note you do get interest on your deposit so that helps offset it a bit.

nerf0··on It amazes me how many people are blissfully unaware of the rampant tether fraud
Not financial advice. Numbers are just examples.

0: Buy 10000 USDC with $10000

1: Deposit 10000 USDC on AAVE

2: Borrow 5000 USDT

3: Sell 5000 USDT for 5000 USDC

4: Wait for USDT to drop to $0.5

5: Buy 5000 USDT with 2500 USDC

6: Repay 5000 USDT and get back 10000 USDC

7: Profit: $2500

nerf0··on Tether's Troubles in November 2022
If crypto didn't exist, these people would either go to wallstreet, or play poker.
nerf0··on FTX Appears to Have Stopped Processing Withdrawals, On-Chain Data Show
I admit I did panic and tried to withdraw my funds yesterday. They just processed it today. A bit delayed but still processing.
nerf0··on An anonymous donor just sent 299 Ether (equivalent to 393k USD) to redox_OS
I don't see a problem. Of course banks want KYC, but that doesn't stop you from selling the crypto on e.g. Coinbase (also KYC'ed) and sending to your bank.
nerf0··on An anonymous donor just sent 299 Ether (equivalent to 393k USD) to redox_OS
Pardon my ignorance: what does IRS have to do with money laundering?
nerf0··on Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
I built a very simple website [0] for playing poker. The idea was that people can play poker in person without chips or a deck of cards. I had also planned for more features like hand history. But it didn't catch on and number of users is not growing.

I've also learned that if your project has anything to do with the following topic, you can forget about online advertising: poker, blockchain, porn (probably). I did not know this and had incorrect assumptions about promoting the project.

0: https://playcards.live

nerf0··on Show HN: Fantasy trading card game with AI-generated character arts
Not much right now, but see https://etheroes.io/roadmap
nerf0··on Show HN: Fantasy trading card game with AI-generated character arts
Sure! I'm using a network very similar to StyleGAN. After generating a batch, I review the images and weed out maybe 10% of the really bad ones. I was actually surprised at how well it worked.

For training, I spent a lot of time scraping images. I couldn't find any good dataset for this purpose. Controlling for quality is pretty tough, and I didn't spend nearly as much time as I should. And it's evident in the result. Some of the generated arts have pretty low pixel quality if you look at the original image. Luckily, it looks ok on the cards.

nerf0··on Show HN: Fantasy trading card game with AI-generated character arts
You are probably right. I'm familiar with how Lightning network works in bitcoin, but not super familiar with L2 in ethereum. Do you have some pointers that I can read? I'm also interested in how it'll evolve with ETH 2.
nerf0··on Show HN: Fantasy trading card game with AI-generated character arts
Hi HN:

This is a fun project I've been working on recently. The idea of the cards started when I saw how an AI could generate realistic portraits of people. I tried to apply similar techniques to generating fantasy characters, and got amazing results.

The next 2 weeks were spent on designing the card assets, hero traits and descriptions. I borrowed some ideas from D&D (attribute points and alignment). Also threw in a random name generator, of which the names were scraped all over the internet.

Once I had the card assets, the rest all fell in place. It was obvious that the Ethereum blockchain was the best market place for such a collectible game. I spent the next 2 weeks writing the smart contract (based on ERC 721) and various pieces to support trading on the site. Fun fact: ETH price took off right before I was ready to deploy the contract on the mainnet. Due to high gas price, I had to spent a fortune... not fun!

I had a lot of fun working on it. Let me know if you have any questions.

nerf0··on Reflections on Trusting Trust (1984) [pdf]
For anyone who's put off by the visual quality of the pdf, I made a nicer copy of it: https://nerfsoftware.com/reflections.html
nerf0··on Dates and Times in JavaScript – A New API for Dates from TC39
So much this. Not to mention that even within the same language, the implementation can differ (e.g. Firefox vs Chrome).

I recently had to parse a bunch of dates in python, writing them to postgres, and then handle the same dates in javascript. And boy was it a PITA. The worst problem was the handling of "BC" dates. I had to hack my way around the boundary between python and sql. Javascript is no better, it simply doesn't compute BC dates without heavy hackery.

nerf0··on Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?
I made 2 things:

I made a website for friends and family to play poker online. https://playcards.live. No cards or chips required. Works on any devices.

I parsed en.wikipedia using AI and extracted events, time and location: https://whataday.info. Given an event, it shows you what was happening closeby, in spacetime.

nerf0··on Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019
Wikipedia was a text gold mine waiting to be mined. They even publish data dumps themselves that anyone can download. I doubt they had any problem with people "stealing" their data.

Just recently I made a website that extracts information from Wikipedia and presents it in a different way [0].

I think it's a great thing that this is possible.

[0]: https://whataday.info/

nerf0··on Show HN: I parsed the entire en.wikipedia for events, time and location
Thanks! Yup I need to spend more time on it. I had a hard time finding an intuitive calendar UI that works on both desktop and mobile, and finally settled on just relying on search. But I did have a hunch that it's not good enough.
nerf0··on Show HN: I parsed the entire en.wikipedia for events, time and location
Thanks! Mind sharing what kind of project?
nerf0··on Show HN: I parsed the entire en.wikipedia for events, time and location
Thanks! No plan at the moment. The frontend is not very interesting. The backend is basically a "giant" database with all the events. I think the interesting part would be the way I collected the events, with a language model.
nerf0··on Show HN: I parsed the entire en.wikipedia for events, time and location
Hi HN,

When browsing wikipedia, sometimes I find myself asking the question, "when this was happening, what else happened around the same time/location?" After debating whether this was actually useful and researching how it could be implemented, I finally set out to build this tool that allows you to browse and search (almost) all dated events on en.wikipedia. Given an event, it also shows you what was happening closeby, in spacetime.

I don't know how people will use it. I don't even know if anyone will find this useful. But I enjoyed building it.

nerf0··on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
Mine is aws lambda + redis. I rely on extensive testing to flush out bugs early. But sometimes I do question my initial choice :D
nerf0··on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
Took me 2 months of spare time in total. Engine was definitely the hardest. Debugging was also tricky, due to multi-threading.
nerf0··on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
Nice. Looks like yours is much more feature-rich. Very impressive that you built it on your own. Good job!

How long did it take you to ship it?

nerf0··on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
I made a website for friends to play poker.

https://playcards.live

It was conceived before the quarantine. I built it so a group of people can play face-to-face without poker cards or chips. So I optimized for mobile use.

It seems that people are now using it on desktops playing remotely because of the quarantine.

nerf0··on Show HN: Play poker with friends. No cards or chips needed
Thanks! It doesn't have tournament mode yet. But looks like this is the most requested feature so far. I'll consider adding it soon.
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