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eswat

1,646 karma · joined May 27, 2009

Startups + Travel + WiFi Money

Building Reorient, discover your next nomad retreat in Asia: reorient.guide and my nomadic digital product studio ntrpd.com

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eswat··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
I helped co-host a popup village in rural South Korea last week. Mix of co-working, co-living and local activities like trail running and bird watching.

Post-event feedback showed everyone loved it. But personally I think we could have done better organizing on the co-working side so people has a more predictable schedule to lock-in.

So I’m planning what the next iteration of this event could look like if the co-working aspect was stronger. Especially in the area of everyone sharing their personal and/or professional intentions with each other. So they're more likely to accomplish those intentions with the help of other participants.

https://protoville.xyz

eswat··on Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame
IIRC he has a supportive partner that took care of being the breadwinner during that development period though.
eswat··on I can't upgrade to Windows 11, now leave me alone
Sad to look back years ago when the first mobile apps started adopting this "Remind Me Later"-only dark pattern and is now festering everyday drivers like your OS.

Between these and services that suddenly suffer from amnesia and spamming me with marketing notifications and emails after months or years of silence, it’s becoming more tiring to use any service that grows significantly enough where they don’t need to care about what their users actually want.

eswat··on Anthropic: You can't change your Claude account email address
One of the reasons "aged" account marketplaces got more popular. People buy from vendors that farm a ton of these accounts and wait to sell them, or those reselling compromised accounts (especially with EDU accounts before institutions actually implemented security controls).
eswat··on Let a thousand societies bloom
> I don't mean in a non-participatory sense.

This is the issue I've seen in new communities. Although my framing is from seeing mixed digital nomad and local communities. But ones that have the ambition to start a tribe or even a hub, if we’re going by Vitalik's terminology.

If you allow in more “non-believers”, just anyone that can join a group chat and physically go to a Google Map pin, more often that not most people will be non-participatory after their first contact. This makes it harder for a core team to get things off the ground if they have bigger ambitions than just a weekly meetup.

I think the crypto community took that to heart in particular due to DAOs having very few successful examples, and many of these new crypto-adjacent societies are using a different model that’s more similar to building a startup.

eswat··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)
Last week I spun up a HN clone for digital nomad news.

Since I was researching DNS and global mobility, and wanted to share links with others, figured I'd just spin up a link site (though I'm still the only user).

One unique difference is I have a field for English Title, since I consume a lot of Korean & Japanese articles and want to share these, but don't want to have people translate the titles before they understand why they should read them.

https://news.reorient.guide/

eswat··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
Still working on my digital nomad event and workation aggregator.

But now with travel and visa guides to help remote workers become productive in Japan and South Korea ASAP and give them visa guidance if they want to stay a bit longer.

https://reorient.guide/

eswat··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)
Started working on digital nomad event and workation aggregator two months ago. https://reorient.guide/

That main usecase is done. I’m now focusing on travel guides for remote workers. Goal is to help those new to a country to become as productive as they would be at home within 2-3 hours upon landing at the airport. I completed 80% of a guide to South Korea.

I started working on these guides after my friends in Tokyo commented during our last co-working session on how fast I got to our favourite spot (Tokyo Innovation Base) from Narita Airport; they thought I was already in-town.

eswat··on Starbucks in Korea asks customers to stop bringing in printers/desktop computers
Seoul is similar. Many Twosome Places have study desks and some of the chains known for small footprint also have bigger locations for meetings and work (Ediya Coffee Lab).

I never understood why people who are frugal would go to Starbucks in Korea to work, when local chains are beside them, have cheaper drinks and their desk/chair setups are less hostile to working.

eswat··on Samsung CEO Jong-hee Han has died
Pretty sure he lived a life past just having “to show for it is an inheritance and obituary.” He wasn’t an IC drone and this probably makes more sense if you’re in Korea.

Some people die sooner than expected but that doesn't mean their yardstick should be measured in quantity of years. What about quality?

eswat··on Exodus Bitcoin Wallet: $490k swindle
North Korea mostly focuses on large game: smart contracts with a lot of Total Value Locked, or other nation states and large companies that would contribute to those states economies

Much of the social media scams are done in south east asia by trafficked people: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/hundreds-thousand...

eswat··on "Fake Chinese income" mortgages fuel Toronto real estate bubble: HSBC bank leaks
> this creates an interesting situation for virtually no risk whistle-blowing

Not so risk-free unfortunately

> A June 2023 email from the bank’s personnel department says “we hereby demand that you [the whistleblower] immediately and permanently delete any and all HSBC information on any personal email accounts.”

> “If you do not comply with these obligations,” the email warns, “HSBC also reserves the right to bring this matter to the attention of relevant law enforcement agencies.”

eswat··on YouTube is loading slower for users with ad blockers yet again
Not sure if coincidental, but YT has been slower for the last few days. But I do have Premium + uBlock Origin running in Firefox (I don’t want ads + all the other crap YT has on their page).
eswat··on Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
Also Eritrea… uh but only at 2%.
eswat··on TODO apps are meant for robots
Not sure if it's still popular now, but I've seen many write todo lists to themselves in WhatsApp and delete messages as they complete items.

Kind of clunky but if a proper chat + todo + llm hybrid was made, then that would be something worth exploring.

eswat··on Ask HN: Laid off –> solo founder. Do I look like I'm trying to hide something?
What's wrong with working on a side project if you have the financial means to do so without other obligations? I’m sure level-headed hiring managers would agree and those that don’t are probably shops you’d want to avoid anyway.
eswat··on Ask HN: Anyone else Bitwarden account being attacked
Never got this.

Depending on your threat model, I suggest using a unique email address to register your password manager account. Harden that email account and set up email forwards if it's separate or just give the password manager a unique name for your catch-all email address (I believe iCloud offers something similar to this as well).

eswat··on Ask HN: Rescue of SVB was a mistake? sign of worse things to come?
Last year Celsius and BlockFi crumbled and are domiciled in the US.
eswat··on Ask HN: Is Instagram “Dying”?
Likely depends on the circles you’re in. Sharing IG handles is still the most popular way of connecting I get from people I meet for the first time.
eswat··on Against risk-based authentication (or, why I wouldn't trust Google Cloud)
I had a similar issue with PayPal a few months ago.

I’m not sure if it was a bug or its risk-based authentication being inane. But my 2FA options were limited to SMS for several weeks, even though I had software and hardware token 2FA enabled on the account.

This seemed to have resolved itself recently and I can use all my 2FA methods again. But it was certainly annoying and I wonder if it was PayPal pushing too hard that it didn’t consider software and hardware tokens legitimate methods of verifying my identity under certain conditions.

eswat··on Richard Bartle explains Web3's flaws at a Web3 conference. It doesn't go well
Do we know that most of the people at this Crypto Circle conference are techies though?

From the brief description it just sounds like your run-of-the-mill cryptocurrency enthusiast conference and mostly for “investors”. It’s not a builder conference where it's mostly hackers or technical leaders, and those do exist.

I’ve been to both types of conferences and I’m not surprised Bartle got the cold shoulder by most of the audience if the conference is of the former. People are usually there to seek alpha or cut deals, not talk about how to improve the tech or processes. Could be argued that having tech people a the helm could make things better in this case.

eswat··on Richard Bartle explains Web3's flaws at a Web3 conference. It doesn't go well
You're unlikely to get healthy debate about JS at a conference where's predominantly investors that care more about ROI than the tech itself.

Same thing with the web3 conference described in the OP where it seems it was predominantly for cryptocurrency investors, not hackers.

Most of the hacker-focused web3 conferences I've been to have had a healthy amount of debating and criticism over things that are not working in the space. I can't deny them looking very much like a cult though…

eswat··on Do not rug on me: Zero-dimensional Scam Detection
If we’re talking about Uniswap specifically, it actually does a decent job of adding guardrails (only listing curated tokens from the Token Lists standard) and warning about unsafe actions (confirmation prompts when you are adding an unlisted token to swap).

So uneducated users would really have to go out of their way to get scammed through there. Like having to go out of their way to follow up on a solicitation from something caught in a Gmail spam filter.

eswat··on Do not rug on me: Zero-dimensional Scam Detection
No. Uniswap will display the Uniswap Labs default list from Token Lists[0], which covers a lot of the legitmate tokens. Token Lists has additional lists from other protocols if you want to expand the listings. Unless a token is playing a long con (FTT I guess) it’s unlikely to be listed in these.

If you want to trade an unlisted token by adding the contract address manually, sure you can do that. But then it’s on you if you get scammed, like if you follow through on a solicitation from a spam email.

[0] https://tokenlists.org/

eswat··on Japan to reopen to independent travelers and lift daily arrival cap
If a passport allowed visa-free entry pre-pandemic, this change allows that again. Otherwise you will have to apply for a visa.
eswat··on EA announces kernel-level anti-cheat system for PC games
A bit old but there’s this writeup on bypassing BattlEye: https://secret.club/2020/07/06/bottleye.html
eswat··on Ask HN: Credible sources to learn more about Web3 / Decentralized Governance?
A lot of commentary on governance relates to DAOs. So start with DAOs with newsletters or forums that get into their own governance (Shapeshift, Maker, Optimism) or cover the state of decentralized governance in general (BanklessDAO, Forefront)
eswat··on Ask HN: IT Security Checklist for Startups?
MDM doesn't have to be a heavy-handed thing and solutions exist for macOS at least. Even something that just makes sure the OS and critical apps always have the latest security patches - and ideally pushes those changes when it’s not disruptive to the host – can go a long way.
eswat··on AirTag leads to arrest of airline worker accused of stealing from luggage
I freaked out a bit the first time I went to a Starbucks in Tokyo. I was told by the staff to save a seat by leaving my bag where I wanted to sit and come back to order after, and much of seats were on another floor.
eswat··on Goodbye Zachtronics
Although it was never promised, I enjoyed Eliza and was hopeful of another visual novel through Zachtronics + Burns. Hopefully something in a similar spirit comes out in the future.
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