I wrote the “ai” for one of the early popular forks of Slime Volleyball. I have a lot of fond memories! Recently I wrote a modern interpretation of the game in pure TypeScript/html canvas. It requires a real keyboard or gamepad - sorry no phones. Some of the single player ooponents are pretty fun. It’s at https://tippycoco.com and it’s all open source.
You’re probably in the process of learning this now, but in case you’re just getting started: effective multiple myeloma treatments are being approved at an astonishing rate. It was a death sentence 20 years ago. Now it’s indefinitely treatable for many people.
A close family member was diagnosed 5 years ago and went through a stem cell transplant at Dana farber and the cancer still hasn’t returned…although statistically by now I believe it should have. But when it does return there is now a massive menu of next treatments for her that will likely hold it at bay.
Things are changing so fast now that I’m not sure the stem cell treatment is the first step.
I wish the availability of those treatments would trickle down regular hospitals in non-US countries as well. I keep reading about all this amazing work being done, and yet my local hospitals in Estonia most likely haven't heard of them, or can't afford to implement it.
What does that mean for someone in Europe with cancer? They have to spend their life savings and sell their house for a trip to a US hospital to get treated?
I think the European health systems simply refuse to buy the relevant drugs at the prices being charged, and the producers refuse to reduce prices for them.
The US health system is criticized for being expensive, but some of that is from the US effectively bankrolling the development of these new treatments, which the rest of the world gets after some delay.
Exactly this. The hospitals will simply say that the treatments are too expensive and that they lack the funds, and you are on your own. In fact it's so bad that even basic chemotherapy is only covered to a certain point, and if you are not cured in that time, you have to pay additional runs of chemo from your own pocket, even though we have "national healthcare free for everyone who pays taxes".
As a doctor, why bother spending your time learning about exotic foreign cancer treatments that aren't available in your country, and your patients couldn't afford if they were?
It would be nice if doctors did anyway, but I can certainly understand why they wouldn't.
What's the best way to get up to date info for specific cancers? A relative has one (bladder) but web search does not seem to suggest anything effective for his version apart from bladder removal.
Thank you! This makes me feel good. He is going for the stem cell viability test in January, at Vancouver General after some chemo so fingers crossed. He heard a story of a friend of a friend who has lived so far 7 years so it gave him hope, initial diagnoses was very scary.
I lost a close relative to MM about a year ago, but he lived an almost normal life with it for about 16 years. It seems like the recent advancements in car-t therapies are even more promising than some of the stem cell treatments, so there are lots of options out there and more are coming online rapidly. Sending good vibes to you and your dad.
> It was a death sentence 20 years ago. Now it’s indefinitely treatable for many people.
Wow. That's great to hear. 25 years ago I was in the midst of losing a close family member to multiple myeloma. I'm glad that the prognosis has improved so much since then.
I'd been waiting/hoping for someone to make something like this. Well done. A few ideas that will not clutter the UI but you might consider:
- when a user changes the score slider, encode that in the URL with a hash tag, so they can bookmark the page with their preferred settings
- a left button allowing me to step back to yesterday's news
- to simplify newsletter signups, just accept an e-mail address right on that page
- your **advanced** options:
- have GPT score each news story across common labels: science, politics, entertainment, news, etc. Then allow these as a filter. If I want to see the top science stories of the day, that should be easy.
- have GPT write a 2 sentence summary of each story as a lead-in after the headline title
- a user/saved whitelist/blacklist of news sites
- any advanced setting should be shareable. For example, if someone puts the effort in to make a page with just Australian news sources, focused on sports, with a minimum score of 5.0, they could save that with a title that can be shared for anyone.
All great suggestions — will try to add them soon (wasn't really ready for the unexpected launch on HN, but glad it went this way, got a much clearer vision for the future)
According to GPT-4, and I think this is a good summary: A "Foundational Model" in AI programming refers to large-scale machine learning models that serve as a basis for a wide range of applications and tasks. These models are pre-trained on massive amounts of data and can be fine-tuned or adapted for specific tasks, domains, or applications.
One of the most well-known examples of a foundational model is the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) series developed by OpenAI. GPT models, like GPT-3 or GPT-4, are trained on large datasets containing diverse text from the internet, which enables them to generate human-like text, answer questions, translate languages, and perform various other tasks.
Foundational models are significant in the AI field because they allow researchers and developers to create a wide range of applications and solutions without having to train a new model from scratch for each specific task. This approach saves time, resources, and computational power while still providing a high level of performance across different tasks.
Slime Volleyball directly inspired it! I mention that on the about page, https://tippycoco.com/about . And ~20 years ago, I actually programmed one of the popular Slime Volleyball bots.
I say this because investors sit on boards and work alongside these lawyers once they invest. They learn pretty quickly who is great and can often give very direct recommendations: a specific lawyer, not just a firm. At the startup stage you should choose the lawyer, not the firm.
FYI - at least one friend-of-a-friend large scale investor reached out after this article to note he'd almost hired this same person.
Don't assume someone coming in through a reference has had the level of due diligence you need. Always do your own due diligence. It catches things that will otherwise slip through because everyone assumes everyone else checked.
As an example of the magic referred to in the post, here's some encrypted text that could be read by `pg` here on HackerNews: https://pastebin.com/raw/bxRaymaB . As explained in the article, the unlocking step trusts HackerNews at one step in the process.
P.S. I'm the blog post author. BEGIN KEYBASE SALTPACK SIGNED MESSAGE. kXR7VktZdyH7rvq v5weRa0zk7RUjCs bLeGBWHRNe047t1 63n5tVSjvbZwtwt nQVqdDHEZIR4kgD PpRDesKecb1Y4U2 jcnOUuLfKvsiGZY PP7SbO79zoRFEuv e8gXRm44Brjfdym iwy2mGXI9VW5PDf WMxwJdTflgruGMK SUkEhjqwUOEc8KR AC6aF8iJadgq3bz oGMLpY750H1Deus EGPgtQQVIeh05mx HY7K3oFOn3SjeS3 cL1duil9YgmZi1y zKu3bfFSbjelgzc 5UMZ42xTJJs0gT. END KEYBASE SALTPACK SIGNED MESSAGE.
This article isn't just misleading; it's entirely false, and the title is both highly damaging AND false. Someone below threw out the word "libel" here. I don't know about that, but it's incredibly frustrating to read this title on HN right now.
* THERE IS NO BACKDOOR HERE. Neither the especially scary kind suggested by the title (everyone assumes encryption breaking!), nor the coerced attestation kind suggested in the text.
* Put simply, KEYBASE HAS NOT BACKDOORED its apps and cannot coerce them into signing someone else's Stellar address into a profile.
Further, THIS USER VOLUNTARILY GENERATED A STELLAR PRIVATE KEY. What follows is the flow for generating a Stellar wallet and attaching it to one's profile. The author of this post went through this flow on Feb 4, 2019:
1. Visited the "wallet" tab in the app
2. read a brief description of Stellar in a modal.
3. Saw our disclaimer in a modal (not hidden - printed out front) about how scary cryptocurrency is, how it's permanently attached to your identity, and how it's important to backup your private key if you plan on leaving Keybase.
4. Only once they accepted that, then their client app (not our server) generated a Stellar private key. The app signed the public Stellar address into his sig chain. And the Stellar private key counter-signed, proving bidirectionally. The stellar key was then encrypted in a way so their devices could gossip them to each other.
So to be clear (1) this writer did in fact have that Stellar Key. And (2) we, Keybase, did not. And (3) they knew they were doing it. I encourage anyone curious to go try it out -- the flow has not changed.
I don't understand what their agenda is here. Offering some charity, perhaps they went through this flow late at night and forgot. (Looks like they generated their Stellar account well after midnight in Europe.) But the claims in the post are just false.
I accept some people don't like the opinionated cryptocurrency partnership Keybase has formed. We do like Stellar. However, that doesn't change our security story. Nor does it force users to set up Stellar keys, and something like half of our users have not. Actually - we spent a great effort building around the fact that many users wouldn't be interested in the cryptocurrency side of things.
For those who generate Stellar keys and then change their mind, not wanting them, we'll add the feature to delete all of them.
Reading the article, I took sympathy with the Keybase team. As a dev working at a relatively large software company, I commonly see the smallest issues causing users to knee-jerk and claim conspiracy to harm them. Of course, this headline is shocking, and many probably upvoted it without reading the article, or having any context into your software.
Is there any precedent to getting posts like this (blatant lies) removed from HN? I will report the post, but this article has the potential to be highly damaging to your business, even if it has zero truth to it.
This appears to be legit. I got the email about free Lumens, but I don't have a Stellar key signed by my private key. Granted, I haven't signed into my account from any of Keybase's mobile apps, but it seems unlikely that they would backdoor _only_ the mobile apps.
THERE IS NO BACKDOOR HERE. Neither the especially scary kind suggested by the title (everyone assumes encryption breaking!), nor the coerced attestation kind suggested in the text.
I agree with this. It is very sensational & I was expecting something totally different when I clicked on it then what I found.
I think a moderator should change this title.
This is done without any user interaction or consent, violating the fundamental principle of Keybase’s product until now: the user controls their keys.
I am confussed by this. Pre- stellar accounts have to opt in to a wallet... and after you get one you can easily find the private key in the settings.
Where? Your comment, and now this reply, are the only occurrences of that word on this page.
It's really irksome when someone tells me I consent to something that I don't. I'm the authority on whether or not my keys were used improperly—no one else.
You used my keys in a way in which I did not want. That's the beginning and the end of it.
I hope you got paid a lot for it.
Here are dozens of other users who made it all the way to GitHub and provided feedback in an effort to resolve the same issue:
Creating a wallet (generating a keypair offline) and signing+publishing an attestation using a non-wallet keybase key to publicly associate that wallet on your profile are two different things. Adding cryptocurrency support is fine; using my private keys without my consent to publish an implicit endorsement of that cryptocurrency is not, especially when it can't be removed. It's a dark pattern that enables paid advertising designed to look like an endorsement/user engagement.
Furthermore, there is a way to remove/revoke every other type of attestation/claim on a keybase profile - except for the permanent, paid ad for Stellar.
> So to be clear (1) this writer did in fact have that Stellar Key. And (2) we, Keybase, did not. And (3) they knew they were doing it. I encourage anyone curious to go try it out -- the flow has not changed.
1) I have never seen the private key you claim I "in fact have".
2) I have no way of verifying this information, but I will accept your words on their face.
3) I did not. Your own description of the UX flow says nothing of using the keybase (not Stellar) device key to sign an attestation/proof. That was the unwanted bit, the use of my keybase (again, not Stellar) key to publicly state that I wish to use Stellar.
I'll make a screencap video of the flow if necessary to illustrate how sketchy it is.
The Stellar private key is easy to find in the wallet settings on all of the clients.
Also, I made a test account from scratch to test out the UX flow. Here's what I found (Note, this is the Android version, not iOS).
1) I created a new username and entered the new account on mobile client.
2) I created a password so I could log into the web client.
3) Out of curiosity I went ahead and clicked the wallet tab in the burger menu.
4) I'm then presented with a brief (full screen) 'Welcome' message and have to click a button that says 'Open Your Wallet' to continue.
5) once that button is clicked you are presented with a more lengthy, full screen, disclaimer that takes a minute to read.
Here is what point #3 says
3. CRYPTOCURRENCY ISN'T REALLY ANONYMOUS. When you sign your first of "default" Stellar address into your signature chain on Keybase, you are announcing it publicly as a known address for you. Assume that all of your transactions from that account are public. You can have as many Stellar accounts as you like in Keybase, but whenever you make one your default, that one is then announced as your. Consider that data permanent.
6) I then clicked 'Not now' button. Instead of 'Yes, I agree' button.
7) I log into my web client to see how my new account looks, and in fact, there is no Stellar wallet or address.
Seems to me like you have to explicitly opt into creating a wallet, and the disclaimer is very clear about signing it into your signature chain and announcing it publicly.
So unless the iOS client does not have the same disclaimer and wording, which would surprise me, I'm still not understanding what the problem is. The developer also said they are working on the feature totally remove your default Stellar wallet, so I imagine in the near future you can delete it.
Nope, that's not the case, in fact you'll get the Lumens automatically within a day or so. If you want to _continue_ after the first month, you'll need to click the button in the app saying you want to. But you have a month to do that.
I don't see any details on this in my keybase, it's a big confusing to say something has already happened and I'm wondering if I was included or not... I've verified my HN and GitHub.
Perhaps it's still being rolled out, can't complain :)
I had to fully quit the app and launch it again before the "airdrop" button appeared. Still unsure myself about the first airdrop. I used my account regularly, was able to join the airdrop so meet all the criteria, but havne't had any Lumens added to my wallet.
Not a dark pattern, an accidental leftover string from our testing. Any account registered before today qualifies. I'll deploy a fix to that shortly. Update: deployed, although you may need to restart your app to update the text.
Sucks you had the sign up date prior to the announcement. When I read the announcement I immediately signed up for a keybase, HN and Github account and then find out I cant be included because I signed up on 9/9/2019. You would think that would be the incentive to at least give a little buffer for people to join in that were not aware.
