Hacker News: ursuscamp

New comment by ursuscamp in "M 7.4 earthquake – 100 km ENE of Miyako, Japan"

ursuscamp — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:39:26 +0000

My brain is so cooked that I saw “M 7.4” and the first thing I thought was, “Which model is that?”

New comment by ursuscamp in "Layoffs at Block"

ursuscamp — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:34:46 +0000

They are heavily invested in Bitcoin and still offer and improve their Bitcoin services. It’s not really “blockchain.” They’re not a crypto company. They are ideologically dedicated to Bitcoin.

New comment by ursuscamp in "Pi – A minimal terminal coding harness"

ursuscamp — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 03:21:41 +0000

MiniMax has an incredibly affordable coding plan for $10/month. It has a rolling five hour limit of 100 prompts. 100 prompts doesn't sound like much, but in typical AI company accounting fashion, 1 prompt is not really 1 prompt. I have yet to come even close to hitting the limit with heavy use.

New comment by ursuscamp in "Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI"

ursuscamp — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:31:54 +0000

They abandoned Swift recently.

New comment by ursuscamp in "Over 36,500 killed in Iran's deadliest massacre, documents reveal"

ursuscamp — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 01:44:20 +0000

This is depressing because we will go to war over this and it’s going to be five years before people realizing they were tricked by “babies in incubators” propaganda.

New comment by ursuscamp in "[dead]"

ursuscamp — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 14:18:11 +0000

This is obviously AI to everyone but the most gullible people imaginable. However, this is becoming more and more common and we should really crack down on it before it completely escapes social acceptability containment.

New comment by ursuscamp in "I wasted years of my life in crypto"

ursuscamp — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 06:15:17 +0000

Cashu is a working chaumian ecash protocol built on Bitcoin. It is quite functional and has some subset of bitcoiners actually using with, with many wallets and mints building on the protocol.

New comment by ursuscamp in "Nostr"

ursuscamp — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 19:36:35 +0000

So, I was part of the Nostr community for quite a while and was the author of a popular Nostr extension for Safari, before eventually giving up on Nostr for various reasons.

I haven't read that entire paper. Mainly, I skipped to the section you mention here:

> The event protocol that drives the system doesn't authenticate public keys, so asymmetric signatures are performative: attackers that can intercept messages (Nostr servers, the presumed adversary of an E2EE messaging system) can just swap out keys and re-sign.

I think you and the authors perhaps misunderstand the Nostr protocol. Nostr is, effectively, an identity system tied to a public key. The cryptography is sound. Your identity is your public key. When you request a user's profile, or their events, you request it specifically by their public key. That is unforgeable (assuming no bugs in the implementation, like what the authors found in Damus).

This does present UX issues that can manifest as security issues, such as "how can you verify that a user with a certain public is who they say they are instead of an impostor". That is a separate issue from whether the cryptography itself is sound.

New comment by ursuscamp in "Ruby Central's Attack on RubyGems [pdf]"

ursuscamp — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 19:17:23 +0000

I've been a ruby user for almost 15 years. I've been to several RubyConfs in that time. I have never found that to be true. It's a thin veneer over rampant toxicity and political extremism. Many of the evangelists in the Ruby community garnered a horrible reputation outside of Ruby, then migrated to insular social media applications which no one uses, causing the slow and persistent decline in the popularity of the language.

New comment by ursuscamp in "Belling the Cat"

ursuscamp — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 16:54:30 +0000

I never looked up the origin of the name before. Interestingly enough, I associate Bellingcat with permanent cold warriors, a group of people who seem determined to fulfill the moral of the tale.

New comment by ursuscamp in "Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo"

ursuscamp — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 19:15:28 +0000

The sales pitch: It's permissionless, but also has baked in compliance. These two things are not compatible. Stripe must comply with US regulation, they aren't going to launch a financial network that is actually permissionless.

New comment by ursuscamp in "[dead]"

ursuscamp — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 15:40:20 +0000

As an avid X user, I think she did an astonishing job keeping the platform afloat at all given that the owner is borderline insane and uses the platform as his personal playground.

New comment by ursuscamp in "Woman's DNA discovered in 20k year old deer-tooth pendant (2023)"

ursuscamp — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:21:56 +0000

The article says that it belonged to a species of deer called “wapiti”. Since I never heard of it, I looked it up and it’s just an elk. Why didn’t the article just say “elk” which is the much more common term?

New comment by ursuscamp in "El Salvador's crypto experiment ends in failure"

ursuscamp — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:16:34 +0000

That really depends in your time horizon

New comment by ursuscamp in "Show HN: Rust Web Framework"

ursuscamp — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 01:39:32 +0000

That’s 1% of an ORM.

New comment by ursuscamp in "U.S. court orders LibGen to pay $30M to publishers, issues broad injunction"

ursuscamp — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 20:42:36 +0000

The greatest and most lasting art in human history was created by artists who were sponsored by the wealthy as their only source of income.

New comment by ursuscamp in "X (Twitter) blocks links to hacked JD Vance dossier"

ursuscamp — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 20:34:48 +0000

>But blocking links to hacked documents regarding JD Vance seems a little suspect considering that, as the article mentions, he was opposed to blocking links to hacked documents about Hunter Biden

Per X, the links were blocked because they included un-redacted personal information such as address and SSN.

New comment by ursuscamp in "Okay, I Like WezTerm"

ursuscamp — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 19:51:36 +0000

One really cool feature of the quick copy mode is that if you do the uppercase version of the letters it will automatically paste the value back into the terminal prompt.

New comment by ursuscamp in "Ask HN: Every day feels like prison"

ursuscamp — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 15:40:17 +0000

This is good advice. Happiness is found through purpose, not hedonistic pursuit of abstract happiness for its own sake. Family is the ultimate purpose, but if not family then find a way to contribute to the greater world: Start a business and employ others, or dedicate your time to a charitable cause.

Purpose frees you, not traps you further, if you embrace it.

New comment by ursuscamp in "On being brought up by libertarian economists"

ursuscamp — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 04:10:59 +0000

I emailed him about his book Machinery of Freedom in my 20s (15+ years ago) and he was willing to engage in good faith debate with a complete nobody on the internet who emailed him out of the blue. He was not remotely pretentious or insufferable.