<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: nibnalin</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nibnalin</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 20 Oct 2026 23:38:11 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=nibnalin" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: Botscent – Library to Detect Agents on your site]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hi HN, sharing a weekend hack: Botscent, a library to detect agents on your site<p>* Detects Instinct, Muse, Dot, Grok Bot and many others<p>* Works with ~all TypeScript and Python setups<p>* Tiny (5KB), 0 deps, starts in 5ms<p>Try it in your project to hide ads, change prices, log agents, simplify pages or just block agents entirely.</p>
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<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49998240">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49998240</a></p>
<p>Points: 2</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 07 Oct 2026 20:18:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://botscent.nibnalin.me</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49998240</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49998240</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nibnalin in "How Delhi cut electricity loss from 50 to 5 percent"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was curious if the price per unit of electricity has also changed over this time period, looks like that's been pretty much flat: <a href="https://ibb.co/8DLPn25D" rel="nofollow">https://ibb.co/8DLPn25D</a><p>(I assume consumption per customer has probably gone up)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:09:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49894660</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49894660</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49894660</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nibnalin in "AI is different"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What or whose writing or podcasts would you recommend reading / listening?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 16 Aug 2025 06:35:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44920786</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44920786</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44920786</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nibnalin in "Show HN: Zordle – Wordle but with zero-knowledge proofs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hey HN,<p>I recently learnt about Halo 2 and PLONK zero-knowledge circuit design and built a Wordle clone that creates ZK proofs of the grid you share afterwards. This was mostly a fun intro project for me and I wrote up my notes introducing Halo 2 and my circuit design in specific in the README that would be interesting to folks here!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 14 Jul 2022 17:56:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32099374</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32099374</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32099374</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: Zordle – Wordle but with zero-knowledge proofs]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://github.com/nalinbhardwaj/zordle">https://github.com/nalinbhardwaj/zordle</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32099342">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32099342</a></p>
<p>Points: 25</p>
<p># Comments: 5</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 14 Jul 2022 17:54:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://github.com/nalinbhardwaj/zordle</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32099342</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32099342</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nibnalin in "Exgrasia: RPG-style sandbox game where every tile is a player-made contract"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That’s a fair criticism - I like to think a blockchain is akin to a shared computer we all have access to (via programs/contracts) which makes it really convenient to use blockchains in such ways. Besides, the perpetual machine properties of a blockchain allow code to exist independent of an individual creator/entity - exgrasia cannot go the way of club penguin for instance.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 May 2022 16:48:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31329302</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31329302</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31329302</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nibnalin in "Exgrasia: RPG-style sandbox game where every tile is a player-made contract"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hey folks,<p>Creator here, thank you for sharing this here - it seems there’s a decent bit of misunderstandings in the comments (particularly around the security model/monetary cost) so I’ll clarify some things:<p>- Your main wallet is never exposed to the game tiles, only a burner proxy wallet created for in-game interactions. This limits any attack surface area significantly.<p>- Frontend plug-ins are decently sandboxed and cannot learn things like “what’s your private key?” or make transactions on your behalf unless you explicitly approve it.<p>- This runs on a testnet L2 (Optimism Kovan) so it’s free to play - this is just meant to be a proof of concept exploration. Anyway, transaction costs are on the order of 1/100th of a cent on such L2s, so it’s really not prohibitively expensive to play the game even if it was with real money!<p>I’m a bit disappointed that most of the comments here pose rather shallow understanding of what’s interesting about exgrasia/blockchain as a data layer for games - I’d think nothing would excite fellow programmers more than the ability to build their own systems and mod it into a “world” without any limits/permissions on it :(</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 May 2022 16:41:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31329180</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31329180</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31329180</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nibnalin in "Show HN: StealthDrop – Anonymous crypto airdrops using zero-knowledge proofs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The only work adjacent to this I’m aware of is MetaMask Snaps[1], a plug-in system that allows for arbitrary code execution in wallets.<p>I know some teams in the 0xPARC community[1] are interested in it and have been looking into using it, but nothing publicly shareable on that yet.<p>[1]: <a href="https://0xparc.org/" rel="nofollow">https://0xparc.org/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Feb 2022 04:37:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356414</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356414</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356414</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nibnalin in "Show HN: StealthDrop – Anonymous crypto airdrops using zero-knowledge proofs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>See 0xPARC’s recent blog post[1] on this topic (in particular, see the section “What can we do with zk-ECDSA?”)<p>[1]: <a href="https://0xparc.org/blog/zk-ecdsa-1" rel="nofollow">https://0xparc.org/blog/zk-ecdsa-1</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Feb 2022 04:33:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356389</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356389</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356389</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nibnalin in "Show HN: StealthDrop – Anonymous crypto airdrops using zero-knowledge proofs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thank you!<p>Those papers are some of the densest ones, so maybe as a starter I would recommend Vitalik’s blog posts on ZK[1].<p>If folks are interested in a complexity theoretic introduction to ZK proofs, incidentally, in the interest of being self recommending, I authored one myself I’d be curious to hear thoughts on :)[2]<p>[1]: <a href="https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/26/snarks.html" rel="nofollow">https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/26/snarks.html</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/a-succinct-story-of-zero-knowledge.html" rel="nofollow">https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/a-succinct-story-of-zero-knowle...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Feb 2022 04:30:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356374</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356374</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356374</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nibnalin in "Show HN: StealthDrop – Anonymous crypto airdrops using zero-knowledge proofs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Using a community chest to reward front-runners for submitting claims is clever. Would the ETH reward still need to be at least as large as the transaction cost to incentivize front-runners? Or is there still a cut of the token being taken, in the hopes the token value will make up the difference?<p>Yeah, it definitely needs to be at least as large as the gas fee (otherwise front runners will just run the transaction locally and notice that it’s not worth rebroadcasting). Our mechanism doesn’t take a cut of the token, mostly because it is hard to put a value to the token as we mention in the post.<p>> It seems like there would still be a basic gas problem any time the receiving account wants to use the (ERC-20) token, eg to send the token somewhere else via a wallet or some other standard UI?<p>That’s certainly true, but if, for instance, your primary use case was as a governance token, most governance happens off-chain(on Snapshot Labs[1], for instance), so that wouldn’t require any funds.<p>[1]: <a href="https://snapshot.org/" rel="nofollow">https://snapshot.org/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 15 Feb 2022 16:55:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349090</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349090</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349090</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: StealthDrop – Anonymous crypto airdrops using zero-knowledge proofs]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hi HN,<p>We (myself, Adhyyan1252 and yush_g) are undergrad students that hacked out this side project last month during Hack Lodge[1] (the ideas and many of the underlying circuits for which came from the 0xPARC community[2])! We’re extremely excited to share this new primitive.<p>Besides the technical challenges building this project that folks here would find interesting (fixing the ZK proof compiler, modifying nodeJS V8 params etc.), we think this is a very novel use case for ZK tech, and ECDSA inside ZK-SNARKs is a starting point that unlocks many other ideas! :D<p>A summarized version of our README, with more thoughts on why you would want to enable this in the first place, is also in this Twitter thread[3]!<p>[1]: <a href="https://hacklodge.org" rel="nofollow">https://hacklodge.org</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://0xparc.org" rel="nofollow">https://0xparc.org</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://twitter.com/0xparc/status/1493363943036923912" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/0xparc/status/1493363943036923912</a></p>
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<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30340648">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30340648</a></p>
<p>Points: 105</p>
<p># Comments: 25</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 15 Feb 2022 00:18:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://github.com/nalinbhardwaj/stealthdrop</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30340648</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30340648</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nibnalin in "Show HN: WordLines  – A zero-knowledge proof-based blockchain puzzle game"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hi folks, I recently made a small game using Zero-Knowledge proofs that awards players Ethereum NFTs for successfully solving a puzzle. Zero-Knowledge proofs are a pretty new crypto idea with lots of cool applications like this one.<p>I've also recently written up a long-form post on the theory behind ZK proofs that might be interesting to folks here: <a href="https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/a-succinct-story-of-zero-knowledge.html" rel="nofollow">https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/a-succinct-story-of-zero-knowle...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 05 Jan 2022 05:38:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29805561</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29805561</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29805561</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: WordLines  – A zero-knowledge proof-based blockchain puzzle game]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://github.com/nalinbhardwaj/wordlines">https://github.com/nalinbhardwaj/wordlines</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29805557">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29805557</a></p>
<p>Points: 83</p>
<p># Comments: 23</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 05 Jan 2022 05:38:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://github.com/nalinbhardwaj/wordlines</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29805557</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29805557</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Zero Knowledge Proofs – From Complexity Theory to Production Circuits]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/a-succinct-story-of-zero-knowledge.html">https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/a-succinct-story-of-zero-knowledge.html</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29790552">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29790552</a></p>
<p>Points: 3</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Jan 2022 02:35:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/a-succinct-story-of-zero-knowledge.html</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29790552</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29790552</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[A Succinct Story of Zero Knowledge – Studying the Theory Behind ZK-SNARKs]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/a-succinct-story-of-zero-knowledge.html">https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/a-succinct-story-of-zero-knowledge.html</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29776383">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29776383</a></p>
<p>Points: 2</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 03 Jan 2022 01:46:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/a-succinct-story-of-zero-knowledge.html</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29776383</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29776383</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nibnalin in "Understanding Zero-knowledge proofs through illustrated examples"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's kind of mind-blowing that the universe allows us to do this at all: Convincingly prove that you have a solution to a puzzle without revealing anything about the solution itself.<p>On the sudoku example, I built out a playable version of zero-knowledge sudoku a few months ago: <a href="https://github.com/nalinbhardwaj/snarky-sudoku" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nalinbhardwaj/snarky-sudoku</a><p>It doesn't use the same strategy as the article, but the underlying idea of non-interactive SNARK based proof is the same (just using the more general circom circuit library to compile the constraints into a ZK-SNARK).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Dec 2021 18:41:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29420443</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29420443</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29420443</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[EfficientZero: Human ALE sample-efficiency with MuZero+self-supervised]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.00210">https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.00210</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29136184">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29136184</a></p>
<p>Points: 4</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Nov 2021 03:03:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.00210</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29136184</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29136184</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Benford's Law in Squid Game]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/benfords-squid.html">https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/benfords-squid.html</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28903433">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28903433</a></p>
<p>Points: 1</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 Oct 2021 08:51:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/benfords-squid.html</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28903433</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28903433</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Does Squid Games Follow Benford’s Law? No, But]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://twitter.com/nibnalin/status/1449920225831370753">https://twitter.com/nibnalin/status/1449920225831370753</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28901587">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28901587</a></p>
<p>Points: 2</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 Oct 2021 02:10:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://twitter.com/nibnalin/status/1449920225831370753</link><dc:creator>nibnalin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28901587</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28901587</guid></item></channel></rss>