rabbyte

Thanks. I did not notice the repo with the wiki, tho I'm still not sure if this constitutes a spec or a user manual.

I think BlockchainID is a step in the right direction but is it even alive still? The only specification I know of is a draft that's now 9 months old and leaves the question of security up to users having a strong password. Beyond that I thought it was just proof of concepts.

As someone building an identity system on Ethereum, I'd like to remain interoperable, but I don't know where I would find info unless I dig through blog posts.

In the future, we might not want you talking about us.

I'm investing and developing a product on Ethereum, not affiliated with the project or developers, so I'll give my sense of things. We're in an era of rapid experimentation. It feels a bit like a shared developer box without any libs or tooling so people are busy working out the best way to approach common problems.

I know it sounds like marketing but it does remind me of the early days of the web, like 95, before the web was serious business. It's all toys and gizmos, the hacker equivalents to water ripple effects, with frameworks coming in to help people build more interesting and production-quality things.

Very basic questions persist such as how to best store large data files (ipfs looking like the clear winner), how to reference them, how to design a currency, how to avoid designs that are too stiff or get stuck in a state where they can't be easily updated, how to express an application model in smart contract form, how to best represent a user account, etc. If that sounds fun, jump in, if you were wanting something that matched the hype, wait a few months. Apps on Ethereum can be as expressive and polished as the apps you use today, and can even be designed just as centralized as the apps you use today, but with properties you would typically think of only belonging to Bitcoin.

Implying that the presence of a woman at a tech conference is unexpected then insinuating they are cheap sexual property while addressing them in the third person is at the very fucking essence of violence. Jokes don't justify violence, oppression does.

I wasn't responsible for that. I believe honesty and respect are both possible in the same response so I'm advocating for more of that.

As far as I can tell (I opted out of election cycles), Bernie Sanders is the second leading candidate for the Democrats. Let's not feign surprise that there are people who find him exciting and be respectful.

Pinterest is probably the worst offender for that. You get progressively blocked the more you try to read.

I quoted the article where it concedes the point. Usually a system is only coherent within a set of assumptions, in this case the assumption is people can't easily rejoin or see their placement. That maybe doesn't hold for physical lines but the example the article goes into is an internet service where people have no control or awareness over their place in line.

In any case, I'm just reiterating what the article says about this point, not sure what there was to disagree about.

It's a quote from the article.

> It could be open to manipulation, with people leaving the queue and rejoining from the back in order to get served more quickly.

Toxic work environments scare away smart people. Cynicism trumps innovation. Noise obscures signal. So, yes, meanies have a measurable impact on the health of a community. If every post on HN was toxic vitriol, would you be here? This isn't a thesis. I'm not suggesting this is Bitcoins only problem but that it's a very serious problem hackers tend to overlook.

Just want to counter some of the negativity here to say I enjoyed the article and agree with many of the points. Bitcoin is a difficult subject for a lot of hackers to get right because when you're deeply embedded in the tech stack it can be difficult to remember humans are part of the software. Our emotions are part of the network.

The purest metric for Bitcoins decline can be found in the hundreds of spiteful, insulting, censoring, excluding conversations that are replacing the hope and optimistic tinkering that started it all.

Well, it's only negligible within context. Nothing is just automatically negligible at scale but within the context of active users for a single day, I agree, it's negligible.

Since we're all totally guessing here, I feel like I should point out that we're talking about FB scale here. Negligible minority for FB would be many products entire user count.

Decentralized currency requires decentralized governance. Unfortunately, currency is the easier problem to demonstrate a solution against. If this really is Satoshi, s/he would be a fool to think Bitcoin was a failure. It spawned countless efforts to decentralize governance and many of these options look promising. The problem Bitcoin is facing is 100% a cultural problem, the technological solutions are already here.

Best of luck to you, I'm sorry for where the system has gotten in the way. If I could, I would offer.

Agree. I'm assuming it's because dealing with technical difficulties meets reasonable expectations when diving into a black market. As the pieces come together and the experience improves, it'll fade I hope.

Because it's not Bitcoin. As far as I can tell, this is the number one piece of evidence that a cryptocurrency is a scam. I've been following Ethereum almost entirely because I'm a developer and I'm interested in using the technology for projects, and I can tell you the atmosphere is maddening. I'm accustom to welcoming communities that care about the tech, not cynical communities that care about pushing their particular interests because they have investments. The cryptocurrency space is awful and polluted with unhelpful attitudes but the tech is too important to be pushed aside for that reason.

Ignore the FUD, Ethereum is not a scam. It's actual open source software with multiple popular implementations successfully delivered from a toxic environment with an impressive level of care toward getting the technical aspects right while being as transparent as possible. It's not perfect, about as perfect as any startup I've watched. Don't dump money into anything you don't understand.

EDIT- just as an illustration, I think it's interesting to use the Bitcoin Talk forum search tool. There are 464,000 results for "scam" and 484,000 results for "currency". Spend 5 seconds on the forum to find the word used like it's the coolest slang around. Everything is a scam, because evidence.

So it's not possible to encourage signed commits and add verified badges to combat the issue?

If this article is a case study, it's only conducting research on the business challenge and ignores the societal impact. Reddit community members are treated as incidental targets for advertisers and the study observes the difficulty in marketing a brand to an environment hostile to brand messaging.

The article serves the intended readership well, and I found many of its points interesting, but it feels hollow to not mention that there is more to learn here. I'm left feeling like the take away is that creating a safer environment for advertisers is the same as creating a safer and healthier community but that necessarily excludes a kind of community; one that exists regardless of what Reddit does and one that is largely unserved by the corporate web. Communities that avoid mainstream, are suspicious of money's affect on authenticity. It's unruly, bad behavior too, but there are several ways you can slice that. Shaping it to fit a neutral channel that is friendly to advertisers is only one way.

I disagree but I understand. I have family that feels similar about me.

This is jawsome. I feel like you're cheating on the "no server" bit with some AWS semantics but you're not the first so, whatever, nice job.

While it's probably well known from a command line perspective, I doubt it's well known from a web service (GitHub) perspective. I have a healthy distrust of git logs but trusting a photo and username on GitHub is a pattern reinforced by every other social app.

The code of conduct seems to agree with the stance that all gender is self-perceived. The idea can easily be reduced to: respect people enough to address them the way they want to be addressed.

The problem is whenever an attractive male engineer is on an ad, people say they're advertising to engineers which happen to be mostly men; and whenever an attractive female engineer is on an ad, people say they're advertising for men which happen to be mostly engineers. The values "embedded" in advertising comes from an understanding of the observer and the observer here is a male engineer, always.

Native emulation has been a goal of the web from the beginning. I can recall several efforts as far back as '96 to create websites to replace desktop apps and we arguably achieved that around 2005 with apps like Google Maps or Writely. Two years before the iPhone was released we were chasing the tail of "native". The web vs native debate skips over the idea that these two worlds actually inform each other and are largely populated by the same developer community.

As an industry, I think people are starting to place more value on the comprehensibility of software over its capability and that's where I think PPK hits home here. When you're building to satisfy immediate needs it makes sense to eventually stop and revisit your implementation to make sure (1) those needs are still relevant and (2) your implementation adequately satisfies them. That's what I see this as, not a call to stop chasing native, but a call for replacing the patchwork with comprehensible design. I think that's perfectly reasonable and I would go so far as to say we should build it in as a cultural value to pause every 10 years to both celebrate what we've accomplished and refine the result.

We're glad you're here to set us all straight. How did you achieve total knowledge?

imho, the distinction isn't relevant because it's not about the justification. diplomacy and bombs can both end wars but the culture that glorifies bombs is always going to be morally suspect to the culture that glorifies diplomacy because it's possible we forgot why we needed bombs.

Is it sidestepping an issue if a person needs a gym membership before they'll exercise? I really don't see a difference here. Environments play into disciplines directly and everyone has their own idea of the perfect space for any given activity.

Going without internet can be a great way to dim the lights and regain focus. It also eases your dependency on convenience and encourages you to plan ahead.