HN user

kauffj

1,742 karma

I run lbry.com. Previously, I founded usetopscore.com. I pretend to blog at kauffj.com [edit: I don't even pretend anymore].

I live in NH as a member of the http://freestateproject.org/

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/kauffj; my proof: https://keybase.io/kauffj/sigs/HnABU5n3dQfJWWFm2HiryKMuXlnV4AC2AL39YsAg8Qo ]

Posts21
Comments176
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github.com 5y ago

Show HN: aioupnp, pure Python alternative to miniupnpc with more device support

kauffj
3pts0
reclaimthenet.org 5y ago

Google stifles YouTube competitor LBRY, banning it for pedantic reasons

kauffj
131pts34
github.com 5y ago

MetaMask replaces MIT License, claims ownership of all forks

kauffj
45pts17
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: What's the best guide for text formatting best practices?

kauffj
6pts1
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Brand and company are being hurt by Facebook scammers. What can we do?

kauffj
3pts0
www.newsweek.com 6y ago

When Photographs Lie (1990, shortly after Adobe Photoshop)

kauffj
1pts0
reason.com 6y ago

Oregon Tried to Silence This Engineer's Research. Now Experts Say He Was Right

kauffj
2pts1
news.ycombinator.com 7y ago

Ask HN: Before We Spend Millions, What Do You Think of This Blockchain Use Case?

kauffj
67pts86
pedestrianobservations.com 7y ago

The Fish Rots from the Head

kauffj
1pts0
reich.hms.harvard.edu 7y ago

Five Corrections to The New York Times

kauffj
107pts58
github.com 7y ago

Is This an Image? Or Is It a Gun?

kauffj
16pts3
medium.com 8y ago

Is Buying Tokens the New Venture Capital?

kauffj
2pts0
spee.ch 9y ago

Spee.ch: blockchain-based image sharer being built in real time starting 6pm EST

kauffj
4pts0
www.bloomberg.com 9y ago

America’s Legal Pot Economy Is Forced Underground

kauffj
3pts0
siliconangle.com 10y ago

Google is manipulating search results in favor of Hillary Clinton

kauffj
30pts21
medium.com 10y ago

On Wine. A Tragedy

kauffj
3pts0
blog.lbry.io 10y ago

The DMCA's Chilling Effect on Research and Innovation

kauffj
4pts0
popehat.com 10y ago

Twitter Takes a Side in the Culture Wars and Lies About It

kauffj
4pts0
usetopscore.com 10y ago

TopScore (YC 200Never) Is Hiring an Enchanted Ungulate

kauffj
4pts0
blog.lbry.io 10y ago

Testimony on HB552, to Legalize Bitcoin for Payments of Taxes and Fees

kauffj
2pts1
blog.lbry.io 11y ago

As Reddit Burns, It Powers the World

kauffj
5pts0

Many people didn't want to send email in the 1990s either.

A blockchain is the only technology that allows a simultaneously decentralized and coherent view of what exists on a network along with local control over identity.

I think blockchain sucks in many ways and is a big hassle. We try to hide it as much as possible. It's still the right solution to this problem.

A blockchain retains a complete, coherent, censorship-resistant listing of what's available on a network in a way that local or federated key-pairs can not.

There is no search all of PeerTube. There is search all of LBRY.

LBRY is the best YouTube alternative because it is the only one that fundamentally changes social video in a way that YouTube cannot copy.

LBRY uses a public blockchain to allow creators to retain complete control over their publishing identity. It also has a beautiful consumer app experience at https://lbry.tv, which was used by about 4M people last month (P2P apps at lbry.com/get).

You can read more in our IEEE paper here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9126007

Or dig into the specification and APIs at https://lbry.tech

Variolation 6 years ago

There is no amount of money that can be paid to someone where there is non-zero risk of dying or having long-lasting damages to your brain, heart or lungs

This is trivially false, as people accept money for health risk every day (see: working in medicine, transportation, mining, leaving your house, etc.)

However you feel about this, Twitter did it in pretty much the worst way possible.

1. They had someone with a clear history of strong anti-Trump and anti-Republican sentiment take the action (https://twitter.com/LevineJonathan/status/126545757821512499...)

2. Twitter chose a prediction rather than a factual statement to fact check ("Mail-In Ballots will be..."). Why not start with a truly factually wrong statement about the past?

3. They picked something that is actually debatable! A bipartisan committee concluded it carried some risks in 2005: https://www.wsj.com/articles/heed-jimmy-carter-on-the-danger...

The notion that a company can ever be trusted to "fact check" (aka determine objective truth) is just completely laughable. The closest we can come is labeling agent beliefs about truth ("X says Y is false").

Doing nothing would be better than doing this. Even better would be building solutions that allow community-based (and ideally personalized) derivations of consensus (this is what we're doing at LBRY).

If you think the idea of trusting giant social media corporations with the levers to control our speech is outrageous, so does everyone working on LBRY.

We are working hard to design systems that have the same user experience as the traditional web, but fundamentally redesigned so that this kind of behavior is outright impossible. LBRY allows for local control of the publishing experience, and layers identity, discovery, and payments on top of a distributed data network.

P2P desktop client: https://lbry.com/get

Web-version: https://lbry.tv

Tech documentation: https://lbry.tech

Almost 100 people contributed to LBRY last month, and more than 2 million people used it.

Come join us, and escape YouTube :)

Yes yes yes. I am saving this comment I can quote it again in the future.

The development of any number of now widely accepted truths went through periods where they were viewed incredibly skeptically.

It's inconceivable to me that anyone could even want to _have_ the argument of wanting a central censor again. Haven't we already had this battle enough times? Is the evidence not incontrovertible that societies where people are free to speak and exchange ideas are better than societies that are not?

It's rational, I think, to want our software to offer warnings and controls that let us, _as individuals_, choose to hide, filter, or shrink-wrap certain information. Completely surrendering that trust to someone else is utterly insane.

P.S. I'm the CEO of LBRY, and this stance is pretty core to what we do. Email me at jeremy@lbry.com if you want to say hi.

Crypto Fund II 6 years ago

If anyone is interested in the intersection of Web 3.0 and Creator Monetization, you might like LBRY.

The core idea of LBRY is to make YouTube-like experiences possible without Google (alternatively, to fix the discovery, incentive, and legitimacy problems of BitTorrent).

https://lbry.com (consumer portal)

https://lbry.tech (tech portal)

https://lbry.tv (web app)

We were also just mentioned on HN in Andy Baio's article on Deep Fakes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23011445

So your business model is built on the presumption of possessing an inviolable license to simulate the likeness of others?

No. It's based on people desiring a publishing platform that does not allow interference from intermediaries ala YouTube, Facebook, or Amazon.

Challenging the idea that someone can’t control the reproduction of their likeness full stop is settled in the general sense in law.

You're commenting on an article that says this content is probably legal. If you think it's not, it'd probably make more sense to comment on the top-level thread.

I agree with pc86 on the ethical issues.

On the pragmatic ones:

- If the lawsuits ever become unbearable we can always choose to simply stop existing. One beautiful part of LBRY is that it does not depend on the company to work.

- It's not so much that we want to be thought of as the deep fake place, so much as we want to be thought of as a place for people who want to make their own choices. I think supporting this supports that goal.

CEO of LBRY here. These videos are welcome on LBRY.

We'll have to get a real (i.e. not me commenting on HN) legal opinion should we get a take down request, but prima facie I don't see why these would be illegal.

(If they are illegal and we are notified, we would put them on the company maintained blacklist, as we cannot remove anything from the network itself.)

Edit: I wrote a rap on our perspective.

If you're having deep fake problems / I feel bad for you son

We got 99 deep fakes / And Jay-Z ain't taking down one

https://twitter.com/LBRYio/status/1255273319739293703

If you are outraged about this, please consider using or contributing to LBRY.

All of our tech is open, we've been growing incredibly quickly, and we have a great roster of creators who are fed up with YouTube.

LBRY for n00bs: https://lbry.tv

Private, P2P desktop app: https://lbry.com/get

Recent progress blog post: https://open.lbry.com/@lbry:3f/progress-at-lbry:0

Contributor's guide and source code: https://lbry.tech/contribute

One-click YouTube sync: https://lbry.com/youtube

IEEE accepted whitepaper: https://open.lbry.com/@kauffj:f/lbrywhitepaper

At least to me, the discontinuities in things like TANF, Medicaid, CHIP, etc. are some of the greatest signs of political dysfunction.

There's nothing remotely partisan about these being a bad thing. _Everyone_ should agree that these make no sense and mis-incentivize behavior. Yet these flaws remain for decades despite being known and discussed for approximately the entirety of their existence.

I think this is one of if not the most important issue in the entire world.

We currently have two primary forms of government: dictatorship and democracy.

Almost everyone prefers democracies. But many, if not most, living in democracies also take major issue with the way their countries are run. The best defense of democracy is Churchill's: democracy is the worst form of Government except for all the rest.

A framework in which we can experiment with other forms of societal organization, especially one in which minimizes or eliminates externalities, has the potential to produce massive benefits if it discovers better forms of political organization.

- There's no need to take on credit card debt while making $10/hr

- Proper diet and exercise is far more important to your health than health insurance. Health care has little influence on health outcomes (see the Oregon Medicaid Experiment and the RAND Health Insurance Experiment).

- A substantial minority of jobs in the US that pay <= $10/hr require strenuous physical labor.