ckwalsh

> As someone who lost 8 figures in crypto in 2017 ...

You could afford to lose 10+ million without your life being detrimentally impacted (at least I would assume, based on how calm you are about it). Most people can't. Most people can't imagine that amount of money.

I'm not a crypto fan. While the technology is interesting and has some intriguing use cases, it feels like all the big coins far away from actually becoming a legitimate currency, and most of the optimistic posts I read miss that.

Crypto is not stable. I think that's why so much money is flying into it. If the price of bread or milk goes up 10%, people get scared. In crypto, going up or down 10% is called "Wednesday". I'm aware of stablecoins, but the biggest ones (Tether, etc) all seem to A: be centralized, and B: be run by shady groups with whispers they could disappear at any moment. A breaks the promise that crypto is supposed to provide, and B only provides stability at a glance, until the whole house of cards tumbles apart (as it has).

The bigger problem is that crypto is unforgiving. OP's story is all about this. Sure, that's fine for techies who can afford mistakes, and banks or other who might have extreme security procedures, but Mom and Pop on a farm in Iowa are neither of those. When they get a phone call from the "IRS", they are happy to go buy Walmart gift cards and read off the codes, or set up a money transfer. Sometimes that money can be reclaimed, sometimes it can't. With crypto, there is no chance. The financial institutions that exist now are certainly rigged towards the bigger players, but Mom and Pop have a (slim) shot of seeing the money again.

Crypto is a fine gamble for those who can afford it, but I honestly doubt it will ever be an every day currency, because I can't see any concerted effort focused on solving those two problems. People can't afford to not know what everything costs at the grocery store, or that they could lose their entire savings by making a mistake when buying a Christmas gift. I don't think it's a great store of value either long term, because at least traditional stores of value (land, precious metals, commodities, etc) have uses to the entire population - blockchains provide no value to 73 year old grandma.

I don't know about Instagram, I don't really use it, but the FB page was definitely locked, not removed.

They never left. When he was banned, the accounts were left visible, but the ability to post to them was indefinitely restricted.

No ascii/spacing tricks, but picking up on the number tricks:

"Haiku Amulet\n1,000,029.\nRefrigerator"

Uncommon - d5537c8974703230d5e5e92b10f459e3a0ed377208192c522e388888325beb72

"Tootsie Roll Pop licks?\n531!\nNever ask the bird."

Uncommon - dd379c5ff831df352a48f5a2a9122d116c3c1b8f3845f488888fbc69a5eeacca

Find friends, the less familiar with the space the better. Ask them to write down facts about the product, in the order that they learn them. After each navigation, ask them to summarize what the product is and what problems it solves.

That’s basically the approach I took when writing that up.

I think the unfamiliarity is the most important part. It’s incredibly easy to be blind to what you know and others don’t. It also simulates a non interactive cold sell for the product, as opposed to trying to convince your competitor’s customers to jump ship.

I have to echo everyone else here that the homepage could be much more effective.

My first impressions without scrolling:

* Calendso has something to do with calendars, based on the name.

* It has a popular paid competitor called Calendly.

* It's open source, and there is a hosted version as well.

I do not yet know what problem it is solving for me or its existing customers.

Scrolling down slightly further, I see the testimonials, and see people find it when looking for a "scheduling & booking platform". I assume that's what it is, but I don't know why I need a "scheduling & booking platform".

When I scroll further or click "Features", I am jumped down the page, and I find out it is easily customizable, and has a bunch of integrations. I don't entirely understand what I can do with it or how I can interact with it as a user.

I have never heard of Calendly, and thus head over to their website. The first thing I see is "Calendly helps you schedule meetings without the back-and-forth emails". Clicking their "Features" link, I find claims they are "The best automated scheduling software" and without scrolling I learn it "automatically check[s] availability and help[s] you connect with your best contacts, prospects and clients".

Based on my glance at Calendly, I'm not a potential customer or user, but I only learned that from your competitor, and I only learned about your competitor from you.

Hot off the press, it's official now:

https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/137123558771858227...

In prod it's not a great idea, but in a test environment, perhaps handling simulated or shadow traffic, it's great.

My ISP gives me a dynamic IP. I could turn off my router for a few minutes and be someone "brand new". Or I could use IPv6 (if my ISP actually invested in it), and have every web request use a different IP.

The only surefire way to curb abuse is to make sure the abuse is not cost effective for the abuser. For spammers trying to make a buck, make it so it costs them more to send their spam than the value they reap from it. For non economic spammers (politics, trolls, etc), it's a lot harder, but there's always some price that it becomes not worth it for their influence/"fun". This was the approach Bernstein was trying to do, but based on the article it sounds like he underestimated the cost of storage as technology improbed.

The hard part is adding this cost in such a way that does not drive away or punish real users. An email system that costs $10/month isn't going to be used by many spammers, because any reasonable administrator will ban obvious spam and they won't get their $10 to cover costs before being shut down. But it also limits the customer pool; most people are not going to pay $10 a month of email when free services are available.

Phone numbers are definitely not perfect, but they are trying to solve the problem of "What do most people have and would not invoke any additional cost on them, but would invoke additional cost on spammers?" Yes, phone numbers are relatively cheap, but there is still some backtracing/ownership checks that can be performed, and ones from more "trustworthy" blocks will still cost a buck or so. Suddenly spammers need to make at least a $1 from the account or they are losing money.

Domains are another way spammers are often dealt with: if it costs $10 for a domain, you have to make $10 from the domain before it is blocklisted, or again, you are losing money.

I can't think of any myself, but if you have any ideas for a model with comparable high costs to spammers but low cost to real people, that fulfills your privacy expectations, I'm all ears. However, costs generally are better enforced in a more centralized model as opposed to a federated/privacy respecting model, so I suspect it will be incredibly difficult to find a solution that actually enforces the appropriate economic goals.

DefCon sets up its own wifi networks, it doesn't use the hotel's wifi

Fun fact: FB Chat was originally implemented in Erlang

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/chat-sta...

Yes, and the php7 typing system is heavily influenced by Hack. However, Hack goes further with support for more typehint features + a typechecker daemon

Agreed, but it sounds like this project was for fun and to make users happy, not to actually guarantee true randomness.

I would wager the amount of wear on the dice, and small flaws in each individual die, produce a non negligible bias to the rolls that could be avoided by using cryptographicly secure random sources.

If they start using these dice to generate cryptographic keys, I'll run for the hills, but so long as they are only used for playing board games over the internet, this is really cool.

No, The CA only signs the public key, the private key never leaves your machine.

What am I supposed to learn from these numbers? They are interesting to look at, but I don't have enough information. Exactly what version of php is running, and how is it configured? What does the "Index" field signify? Where can I find the code?

While fun to look at and calculate, it also doesn't mean a lot for most applications. I would argue that data fetching from DBs or caches will be the majority of execution time.

I work with phpBB, and felt a little awkward stepping forth and saying this, so I'm glad somebody did.

phpBB3 has had a couple tiny problems, but nothing that could be used to attack users of a site or propagate an issue.

Just put up the latest results

https://spreadsheets1.google.com/ccc?key=tth_jhM8vyBAuogqHll...

I don't have the time to build a site at the moment (curse you schoolwork!), but if you'd like to help maintain/update the docs I'd love the help.

I also put together the full game stats: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2220667