Hacker News: numtel

New comment by numtel in "Learning from context is harder than we thought"

numtel — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 19:55:40 +0000

There's a Terence McKenna quote about this:

> So, for instance, you know, I’ve made this example before: a child lying in a crib and a hummingbird comes into the room and the child is ecstatic because this shimmering iridescence of movement and sound and attention, it’s just wonderful. I mean, it is an instantaneous miracle when placed against the background of the dull wallpaper of the nursery and so forth. But, then, mother or nanny or someone comes in and says, “It’s a bird, baby. Bird. Bird!” And, this takes this linguistic piece of mosaic tile, and o- places it over the miracle, and glues it down with the epoxy of syntactical momentum, and, from now on, the miracle is confined within the meaning of the word. And, by the time a child is four or five or six, there- no light shines through. They're- they have tiled over every aspect of reality with a linguistic association that blunts it, limits it, and confines it within cultural expectation.

New comment by numtel in "A prediction market user made $436k betting on Maduro's downfall"

numtel — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 19:23:05 +0000

Getting close to Jim Bell's assassination politics

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32790951

New comment by numtel in "I went to all the bakeries in Zürich to find the best croissant"

numtel — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 20:47:34 +0000

I need to see cross section images of the inside of each one next to its exterior photo as well as where it came from!

New comment by numtel in "Formatting code should be unnecessary"

numtel — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 09:00:34 +0000

With how much LLMs do nowadays, I'm waiting for the time when specifying types is unnecessary. Like, it if can write code, shouldn't we also be able to have an AI type checker?

New comment by numtel in "Show HN: I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio"

numtel — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 13:28:40 +0000

Also missed that double clicking the icon in the top left of the title bar closes the window. It does not toggle maximization like clicking the rest of the title bar does.

New comment by numtel in "Show HN: Roll a Dice"

numtel — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 07:00:20 +0000

*roll a die ;)

New comment by numtel in "MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today"

numtel — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 10:58:18 +0000

I think it was a total rewrite, similar to why Winamp 2 was great, fast, not bloated but Winamp 3 was slow, adding extraneous features nobody wanted.

New comment by numtel in "Why quadratic funding is not optimal"

numtel — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 18:01:55 +0000

Generally, QF protocols are paired with a form of Sybil resistance.

For example Gitcoin uses passport.xyz to determine if your account is considered legitimate.

New comment by numtel in "Ancient Dagger Up to 2.5k Years Old W Stars/Moons/Geometric Patterns Unearthed"

numtel — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 12:36:03 +0000

Good journalist not saying "metal detectors found..." :P

New comment by numtel in "Encrypt Images Without a Key Using Visual Cryptography"

numtel — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 06:31:44 +0000

If there's no key, isn't it just encoding?

Seems more like steganography

New comment by numtel in "Ask HN: How do I hide sensitive parts of my JavaScript code?"

numtel — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 06:41:08 +0000

Maybe in a few years...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indistinguishability_obfusca...

New comment by numtel in "Customizable HTML Select"

numtel — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 07:22:34 +0000

You do realize that that was the big problem with IE security in those days: ActiveX. You literally could embed an Excel file in your HTML page.

You could embed any native code and it would just be a small yes/no dialog to download and run it.

New comment by numtel in "A vending machine, on the internet"

numtel — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 12:46:49 +0000

This is the analogy used in the first description of a smart contract in 1997

https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/the-idea-of-smart-cont...

New comment by numtel in "Outlaw Code"

numtel — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 08:38:09 +0000

Smart contracts are a primary example of this: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2019/05/09/control_as_liabi...

New comment by numtel in "Do Kwon pleads not guilty to US fraud charges in $40B crypto collapse"

numtel — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 11:12:22 +0000

It was the same algorithm as Iron finance on Polygon the year before which imploded in the exact same way but on a more expedited timeframe because it didn't limit the apy at 20%.

The terra/luna collapse was simple to see coming as it happened exactly when the terra (stablecoin) market cap met the luna one.

New comment by numtel in "Flying Was Already the Worst. Then America Stopped Using Headphones"

numtel — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 08:11:22 +0000

It's not just flying and it's not just Americans.

Gotta keep "baby goats screaming" bookmarked to fight fire with fire.

New comment by numtel in "Sci-Fi Inspired Antenna Adjusts to Signal Needs"

numtel — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 07:00:14 +0000

The Lexus LS 400 had an antenna that adjusted its length based on the radio station.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TRRXxFWDiY4

@ 6:05

New comment by numtel in "How do I pay the publisher of a web page?"

numtel — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 09:36:20 +0000

You're very close to https://prove.email/

New comment by numtel in "The Future Is Private Compute Through Homomorphic Encryption"

numtel — Sun, 08 Dec 2024 06:33:15 +0000

There's a range of algorithms that support homomorphism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElGamal_encryption

ElGamal is very simple and supports multiplicative homomorphism. If you do it over an elliptic curve, this changes to additive.

Another is NTRU, but it's naturally addictively homomorphic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTRUEncrypt

The values are added modulus 3 though so I'm not aware of any applications for it.

For example, adding cipher texts of the plaintexts [1,2,0,0] and [1,1,0,1] results in [2,0,0,1]

New comment by numtel in "Programming Zero Knowledge Proofs: From Zero to Hero"

numtel — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 21:10:38 +0000

Ah thanks, that's what I meant