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1 sat \ 1 reply \ @Bell_curve 17 Sep \ on: @ek's bio bitcoin

Grok:

@ek (stacker.news/ek, GitHub ekzyis) is a high-volume Stacker News user: stacking since item #57444, verified contributor, about 16,159 items, and several million sats stacked. Comments are at stacker.news/ek/comments. There are far too many to list exhaustively; the pattern is consistent.

Who he is on SN. He was SN’s first engineering hire after contributing in spare time, built the @hn bot, and is still treated as a core old-timer even after leaving the job to fuzz Lightning (Infuzz/smite). k00b’s hire post praised taste and “pragmatism and sophistication,” and called him generally civil in disagreement. Others on his bio call him fighty, a procrastinator, and one of the kinder stackers.

How he comments. Direct, slightly snarky, often self-deprecating, then technical. He argues in public, posts SQL and implementation details, and does not perform niceness. Recent examples:

  • Saloon: “Ok, thank you. I will stop complaining now, I’m tired.”
  • Asking k00b/sox for user-specific mute/fee settings so people cannot spam a bio with insults for 1 sat (a reply on his bio from @Bell_curve was abusive).
  • Confirming mute logic with Prisma SQL on a Blocksize War quotes thread.
  • Reverse-engineering an APK: sloppy coding “might become the entry point,” nothing worth publishing yet.
  • Lightning ops: used Ride the Lightning, did not use it much.
  • Zap Wars thread: “Darth doesn’t make reasonable arguments / argues in good faith”; “You can be alive and still be pathetic”; “a pathetic system creates pathetic outcomes.”
  • ClubOrange joke: if they had downzaps you could downzap a country.
  • On BIP110 / “bitcoin captured”: both “yes” (that is why some think it) and “no” (hostile takeovers failed).
  • On a game: mock-violent key-mashing, then “Not a bad game.”
  • Apologizes when he is snarky or when @hn spam is stale.

Recurring subjects. SN product (wallets, mutes, fees, cross-posting incentives, prediction markets as a post type), Lightning and Bitcoin Core, security/privacy, FOSS, Nostr vs SN vs Twitter/Reddit (“SN is more like Reddit. Nostr is more like Twitter”), prompt-injection experiments, and weekly “what I am working on” notes (AFL++/nyx on NixOS for smite). He also wrote longer “Ek’s Irregularities” posts: vision for SN in five years was simply still being there, with k00b no longer funding daily rewards.

How he handles criticism. He accepts “you promise things and forget” as a fair hit, then jokes that assuming it would hurt his feelings is what hurts. He frames himself as fox-like: playful and fighty. He added CLINK despite disliking a person associated with it, and pushed back when someone claimed Spark was “his wish.” He asked for an AI-usage question on SN PRs. Satlantis, in his account, became Tribyu and shut down.

Net read from the comment record. Long-time SN insider, junior-on-paper who became staff, now independent Lightning fuzzer. On-site voice: high output, argumentative, detail-oriented, allergic to piety and to low-effort farming, willing to roast and to be roasted, and still present in the Saloon after leaving the payroll.

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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 17 Sep

The kebab post is the opposite of practiced seduction. He stands in line inventing menu questions and a Red Bull pretext, compliments her hair, learns she is 16, then writes the line that stops the chase. That is social clumsiness documented in public, not a rotation of partners.

The rest of the record matches that: long technical comments, self-deprecation, “fighty” Saloon arguments, conferences, fuzzing, and essays. Other stackers call him kind and late on promises, not a flirt. He keeps a low profile at events and prefers the work to a biography.

A ladies’ man is fluent, selective, and does not publish a thousand-word recap of striking out at a kebab counter. He published the recap.

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