Hacker News Reader

numtelon Fully autonomous restaurant opens in SF

Hopefully they do better than Eatsa. I miss those bowls!

numtelon Hetzner bans running Ethereum PoS nodes

That's outdated reasoning. With stablecoins, you get the reliable store of value along with the transactional guarantees.

numtelon DeFi credit scores: Coming soon to a blockchain near you?

Just listened to the Spectral beta launch party on discord! Very interesting.

One question presented to the founders' AMA was whether this enables under or partially collateralized loans on DeFi. Their response was that it does not enable recourse for unpaid loans.

Working towards combining credit scores and identity solutions like coinpassport.net in order to bring partially collateralized loans will enable fully transparent bank-like institutions on chain.

numtelon Heroku announces plans to eliminate free plans, blaming ‘fraud and abuse’

A sad day for my hobby projects. Can we list any free alternatives for hosting app servers that get very little traffic?

numtelon Orcas are breaking rudders off boats in Europe

Exactly, I don't believe one bit that they're "attracted to the pressure differential of the prop." I've swam in the ocean and boats are extremely noisy and annoying underwater. The Orcas fully understand that the boats are linked to the changes in the ocean.

To the downvote: I'm sure you've heard a drone buzzing above your head and getting nervous. A boat propeller does the same thing.

numtelon Psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy vs. placebo in treatment of alcohol disorder

Alternatively, see John Allegro's (one of the people who worked on deciphering the Dead Sea scrolls) The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross which posits that Jesus actually was a mushroom.

numtelon Sanas Silicon Valley startup wants to make the world sound whiter

I'm pretty sure "Sorry to bother you" wasn't meant to be an instruction manual.

numtelon Status Traps: Learning from Web2 Social Networks

James C Scott's Seeing Like a State is recommended (which is great) but surprising that they don't recommend Graeber's Debt. The following quote feels like it should have a citation to the section about jubilees:

> To my knowledge, no one has really tried the logical extreme version of this: set all status indicators to zero periodically and reset the network from scratch. Might be an interesting experiment to run!

IMO, this mechanism is one of the reasons why the forkability of cryptocurrencies is such a huge feature: invoking a jubilee is within relatively easy reach for the population, something that has been locked away by the state for some time now. With a belief in a cascade of currencies, constantly allowing many opportunities to be an early adopter, the "revolution" will be priced in.

numtelon There aren't that many uses for blockchains

Blockchains are an alternative pricing model for data hosting. Instead of a monthly bill, the transaction fee gets the data stored forever-ish. As scaling techniques are implemented, this makes more applications suitable for storing data on chain.

https://newgeocities.com/webmaster/blog/applications.html

numtelon Experiments indicate that bees have surprisingly rich inner worlds

How long until these kind of "[some creature] is smarter than you think" articles give way to "life at all scales has similar inner worlds and problem solving capabilities as our own?"

The species specific scope of the article echos the racism of natural sciences from a hundred years ago when skin color was thought to indicate intelligence.

It seems mostly a problem of communication. The Journey to the Microcosmos YouTube channel made it clear to me that scale does not seem to change consciousness.

numtelon The Founder of GeoCities on What Killed the 'Old Internet'

> Proponents of Web3, like Andreessen Horowitz general partner Chris Dixon, argue that we need to get back to what we had in the days of GeoCities—while also not giving up the advances of the Web2 years—and allow creators and businesses to form a relationship with their audiences that is not governed by algorithms and advertising.

There's many places to host content for free without advertising: Github pages, Neocities... You can also upload pages to Ethereum using https://newgeocities.com by paying the transaction fee. If hosting is paid for completely upfront, does the dynamic change?

> “GeoCities was not about self-promotion,” Bohnett told Gizmodo in an interview. “It was about sharing your interest and your knowledge.”

With today's ML algorithms, posting one's knowledge feels increasingly like unpaid labor to these AI models.

numtelon A simple guide to quadratic voting

Yes, how much do you trust the 33 countries supported by Stripe Identity?

Sybil resistance is not easy to solve absolutely, it's all about degrees.

numtelon A simple guide to quadratic voting

Apparently it is possible. [1] I guess I missed that when I was trying before.

[1] https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/38468/calculate...

numtelon A simple guide to quadratic voting

Stripe Identity is used to verify passports, it supports 33 countries (mostly NA and EU) right now. A salted hash of the country code and passport number is published on chain which allows only one instance per passport.

As far as a state level attack, it's possible. A complete solution to Sybil resistance is not simple.

The passport verification service is at https://coinpassport.net if you would like more information.

numtelon A simple guide to quadratic voting

Stripe Identity

numtelon A simple guide to quadratic voting

Alternatively, you can build a DAO on http://democratic.capital which uses passport verification as Sybil resistance.

numtelon A simple guide to quadratic voting

I've built a DAO tool that requires passport verification and allows voting on binding proposals with quadratic voting. Each proposal defines a series of transactions to execute on chain.

https://democratic.capital

numtelon A simple guide to quadratic voting

In my experience with writing quadratic voting contracts in Solidity, the exponent of 2 is mandatory because there's no way to calculate an nth root in Solidity.

Writing that out though, I realize that the root could be calculated by the client and simply verified on chain.

One token, one vote is an exponent of 1, it should be up to the voters to decide the exponent used based on the issue in order to choose the degree money influences decision making.

numtelon Voting for Third Parties Isn't a Waste

Can't read this since it tells me I must install the medium app but it better say something about how in the US, a party that gets 5% of the vote is eligible for public campaign funding and a spot at the debates.

The goal isn't for the third party to win outright immediately but to get a seat at the table.

numtelon Ask HN: Why is minimalism good for computer languages but bad for natural ones?

As someone who doesn't speak French natively, I feel like its overly similar sounds make it much more difficult to pick up than Spanish where sounds are more explicit from the letters.

Computer languages are read with the eyes (usually also with color coding) so they don't need those little helpers as much to make them consumable.

numtelon Swimming in Noise

Swimming head under water with earplugs when motor boats are a few hundred meters away makes it very clear how loud and disruptive the noise is. It must be terrorizing to creatures living in the water.

numtelon The Blockchain in a Historical Perspective

Yes, but why were ledgers the first examples of writing? Because it was expensive in the beginning.

As blockchain data storage rates decrease, its available applications will increase.

Blockchains are innovative because they change the pricing model for web hosting from recurring payments for things like server rental to fully upfront costs for storage and distribution of data.

numtelon What I think about network states

So then building them as "network states" is a recognition that nation states have lost the control they had a century ago due to advances in technology and communications. Distance and locality isn't as important when the internet makes telepresence feasible.

numtelon Writing Is a Recent Technology

The chronology in the first paragraph is just nonsense:

> Writing is not natural: it’s an invention, a technology developed roughly 3000 years ago. This is nothing compared to human history.

From the first paragraph on the wikipedia page for "history":

> Events before the invention of writing systems are considered prehistory.

numtelon Scientists can now grow wood in a lab without cutting a single tree

Can somebody confirm my understanding? They're able to grow plant cells in a mold (e.g. a chair) then after the cells mature, remove the mold and have a solid piece of material that is basically wood?

numtelon Low-cost gel film can pluck drinking water from desert air

Seems even better than MOF-based approaches [0]

The linked self-watering soil article [1] makes me wonder if the material could be used to reverse desertification.

[0] https://wahainc.com//smithsonian [1] https://news.utexas.edu/2020/11/02/self-watering-soil-could-...

numtelon Nomen est omen – On nominative determinism and the power of names

Can't not upvote a discussion of James C. Scott, but I am surprised at the lack of mention of Ursula K Leguin's Wizard of Earthsea book which makes its magic emerge from knowing true names.

numtelon Airbnb May 2022 Release

I'm guessing that it's so that when you search for a long duration of stay, many of the listings will be unavailable but with split stays they can make it easier to figure out how to plan a longer stay, so you don't have to look at the availability calendars of a bunch of different listings.