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nibnalin

Show HN: Botscent – Library to Detect Agents on your site

https://botscent.nibnalin.me

Hi HN, sharing a weekend hack: Botscent, a library to detect agents on your site* Detects Instinct, Muse, Dot, Grok Bot and many others* Works with ~all TypeScript and Python setups* Tiny (5KB), 0 deps, starts in 5msTry it in your project to hide ads, change prices, log agents, simplify pages or just block agents entirely.

( Read More... | no comments | 2 points | on HN )
Re:How Delhi cut electricity loss from 50 to 5 percent on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @11:09AM (#49894660)
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: https://ibb.co/8DLPn25D

(I assume consumption per customer has probably gone up)

Re:AI Is Different on Saturday August 16, 2025 @02:35AM (#44920786)
What or whose writing or podcasts would you recommend reading / listening?
Hey HN,

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!

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.
Hey folks,

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:

- 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.

- 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.

- 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!

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 :(

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.

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.

[1]: https://0xparc.org/

See 0xPARC’s recent blog post[1] on this topic (in particular, see the section “What can we do with zk-ECDSA?”)

[1]: https://0xparc.org/blog/zk-ecdsa-1

Thank you!

Those papers are some of the densest ones, so maybe as a starter I would recommend Vitalik’s blog posts on ZK[1].

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]

[1]: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/26/snarks.html

[2]: https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/a-succinct-story-of-zero-knowle...

> 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?

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.

> 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?

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.

[1]: https://snapshot.org/

Show HN: StealthDrop – Anonymous crypto airdrops using zero-knowledge proofs

https://github.com/nalinbhardwaj/stealthdrop

Hi HN,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.Besides the technical challenges building this project that folks here would find interesting (fixing the ZK proof...

( Read More... | 25 comments | 105 points | on HN )
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.

I've also recently written up a long-form post on the theory behind ZK proofs that might be interesting to folks here: https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/a-succinct-story-of-zero-knowle...

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.

On the sudoku example, I built out a playable version of zero-knowledge sudoku a few months ago: https://github.com/nalinbhardwaj/snarky-sudoku

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).

Re:We Put a Blockchain on Google Sheets on Sunday September 26, 2021 @11:00PM (#28666650)
Ah, looks like HN discovered our Introduction sheet was publicly editable and had some fun there: https://github.com/nalinbhardwaj/shiit-coin/issues/2

<3

Would be interesting to see this dip relative to other tech subfields like javascript/react or even data science and other such keywords. Does anyone know of a public LinkedIn dataset?

The author disables tweet replies so I'm not sure where they get their numbers from.

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