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Comment by sam_goody | Hacker News Reader

So, guy who has deployed eye-scanning machines all over Africa and has found that many of them have been hacked and are giving incorrect responses suddenly has a friend with ALS and is willing to fund better quality eye tracking?

Either:

    - Part of the whole world-coin thing was privately trying to get the data to help his friend
    - He doesn't want to say "looking to develop eye tracking tech for my world-coin scam", since most devs won't touch that thing. Conveniently found a "friend" with ALS.

Saying, on behalf of a friend, that he doesn't believe PG.

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I believe you may be mixing up Paul Graham and Sam Altman. Easy to do because they both ran YC at different times, but WorldCoin is from Sam Altman and this tweet is from PG.

Indeed, I got confused!

Although I still wonder, since the two run YC together.

Thank you for correcting me.

Sam Altman hasn't been affiliated with YC for a while now.

> Easy to do

It's not 'easy' to mix up people who you are accusing of lying about having a friend with ALS for profit.

Worldcoin also has nothing to do with eye-tracking, unless you purposefully play with English words. The request is optimizing software & eye tracking. Eye tracking itself is a solved problem, maybe more is needed for disabilities but that is not Worldcoin.

And since the request is for the Bay Area to meet the friend with ALS, what was the game plan here, invite them in and trap them in his lair instead?

I dunno, they seem like pretty different domains to me, despite both looking at the eye. Generating an image of the eye that's consistent across different scans in different environments but different from person to person, is one challenging problem. Figuring out where two pupils are in tandem while handling saccades and different focal depths is a different challenging problem. The former is a detailed static view of an eye. The latter is a less detailed picture of the eye itself (probably pretty easy to look at an eye and identify the pupil) but a complex dynamic algorithmic problem.

He currently has to put up with fakers, dupes that are not picked up, etc.

Once he can require you to focus on a series of letters with your eyes, it will be harder to fake, easier to pick up dupes. Aside for the fact that getting a "typing cadence" with each individual's eyes is probably valuable in and of itself.

this is the funniest HN comment in history so far

What company is it that?

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