Sina Habibian

30 Days of Silence: My Journey into Meditation

I recently did my third 10-day silent meditation retreat. This is a piece about my learnings on the path inwards.

The Tokenization of Real Estate

Security token platforms need to bootstrap two sides of a marketplace by onboarding high-quality assets and retail investors. To succeed, they need to navigate a set of challenges around data infrastructure, adverse selection, liquidity, and user acquisition.

Blockchain

Identity and Reputation in Web 3

Identity and reputation are important primitives in Web 3. They turn protocols from one-off games to iterated ones, and are a necessary building block for many blockchain applications like sampling, pricing strategies, governance, lending, security tokens, and airdrops.

Blockchain

Truebit: the marketplace for verifiable computation

Decentralized applications hold promise for the future. They operate in a transparent, tamperproof, unstoppable manner. They leverage incentives and solve coordination problems on a global scale.

Blockchain

Enter the Rabbit Hole: The Doge-Ethereum Art Project

Two years ago, a handful of anonymous crypto hodlers funded a bounty for the development of the Doge-Ethereum bridge.

Blockchain

The arc of the internet is bending back towards decentralization.

I recently attended Blockstack Summit 2017. Here are some notes and ideas as inspired by the conference. On the Benefits of Decentralization What are cryptocurrencies uniquely suited for? Balaji Srinivasan’s answer when

Thoughts

Thought Evolves from Technique

I came across an interesting idea in the new book I'm reading. Norbert Wiener, the prominent mathematician, made the fascinating point in the mid 1900's. It goes: "The thought of every age

Thoughts

The Elements of Eloquence

I finished reading The Elements of Eloquence today. Over the last couple of weeks, this book provided a pleasant respite from the day-to-day rush of life, and grew into being one of my

Music

Interactive Art

Ryan Holladay, a friend who I got to know better during the last week in Joshua Tree, showed me a recent project he and his brother have been working on. Ryan and Hays

Thoughts

Back to the West

My 5 weeks in New York are up. Time flies. Especially in a city like this. There were days and nights of heads-down coding with my partner. We pushed our secret project further.

The Hustle

How Much Should You Raise?

I listened to the Masters of Scale episode on raising money yesterday. Reid Hoffman makes a strong case that entrepreneurs should raise more than they think they need. The core of the argument

Business

The Secret Menu

My girlfriend recently went though a design challenge to design an app for In-N-Out Burger. She took the opportunity to do some live “user testing” by going to the In-N-Out in Fisherman’s

The Hustle

Contrarian Beliefs Lead to Outsized Returns

It's easy to follow trends and chase the latest shiny object. In tech over the last few years, industry hype has followed anonymous messaging apps to blockchains to chatbots, with many others in

Data Science

How to Prevent Overfitting

Suppose that you are using a machine learning model to fit a feature set and predict outcomes. Training the model on your full data set is a bad idea as it could result

The Hustle

Reasons to Join a Coworking Space

More people are switching over to the gig economy and working as freelancers, contractors, or building their own businesses. This has led to an increased need for non-traditional work spaces and a proliferation

Writing

Why You Should Write

Ideas often start taking shape as disordered insights coalesce over time. Since we are used to our internal monologues, it is possible to confuse personal opinions and unvalidated theories with facts at this stage.

Project

How I designed an algorithm that mixes playlists of bands coming to your town

This is a retrospective on funkavinci.com, a web project I worked on last summer. It was a series of weekly computer-generated playlists showcasing the best upcoming concerts in town.

Project

The Programmer's Guide to Booking a Concert

About two months ago, a friend and I decided to organize a concert in San Francisco. We had no prior experience promoting shows, but we both loved live music and felt up to the challenge.

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