HN user
"One family member in West Virginia told APBP they paid more than $400 in three weeks for tablet usage."
Access to a tablet and messaging outside the prison is hardly a "basic resource" and it's likely an avenue for exploit.
Should we treat prisoners like humans? Sure. Should they be comfortable? Not so much.
To all the 20 year olds, libgen.rs
Sounds like a skill issue. /s
Available in prisons, god forbid it be available to the public!
It sounds like you spent 4 years building a product before you even knew if anyone would use it. That's a terrible idea, but a good learning experience.
I wouldn't give up (perhaps you need to give up on your current product though).
What you need to do is evaluate _why_ the product isn't selling. Who's the ideal customer? Can you get on a call with some of them and put it in their hands and get actual feedback? Figure out if you need to abandon the product or not. Stop building. Focus entirely on marketing and sales.
Next time, don't go so deep on the building phase until you have people handing you money.
For reference, I recently came up with a new product idea. I did some searching to figure out if any competition exists and I found none. That's horrifying. I almost immediately gave up the idea entirely on the spot.
However, I randomly met someone that was an ideal customer (while dropping my kids off at school) and they immediately said they would pay $200/month for that and asked when they could try it. Not only that, they said they knew 2-3 other people that would as well. I ended up meeting two other ideal customers that said the same thing and one even asked if they could invest in it.
I'm still not entirely sure-- but those are strong signals that people will put up money for it, but it doesn't mean they will. I am still nervous but decided to go ahead and build an mvp and see if the idea has legs.
What kind of signals are your ideal customers giving you?
I'll be blunt.
1. Take all of the side projects that are too niche and/or unsellable and polish up the code then open source it (add it to your portfolio/resume).
2. Take the projects that are sellable and publish them in places people can find them (app store, on the web, etc) then put it on your portfolio/resume.
3. With your beefier resume/portfolio in hand, find a job.
Maybe some day we'll have a PIR-based[1] search engine-- but then you couldn't harvest data on your users and sell personalized ads, so maybe not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_information_retrieval
It came after the first wave of SPAs and if we listed every SPA framework (or "library") we'd be here all day.
Coding is quite subjective. When I examined the early bitcoin code (the one Satoshi wrote and shared). The C++ code looked pretty sloppy and amateur-ish.
The comments were odd and not standardized (randomly using four //// sometimes, etc). The use of 4-6 random new lines between sections of code was awkward. The way the code was organized, folders named, etc.
The code itself was a mix of hungarian-isms. It felt very academic-y to me... like someone that did most of their coding in university as a teacher or phd candidate (little real-world coding).
There's a podcast (name slips my mind...) where the host asked Bram Cohen if he thought Len was Satoshi and he doesn't outright say yes... To paraphrase, he basically answered, "I can't say for sure. It seemed like he (Len) lacked the C++ knowledge.. but his programming got a lot better since I last seen it... so I don't know. It seems to be the most likely scenario would be Len doing the brain work and someone like Hal doing the coding."
But, isn't that sorta what happened? Satoshi had 169 commits and Hal basically took over and cleaned everything up. Satoshi didn't do that much coding, and the coding he did do was done over 1.5-2 years (as he stated in the cypherpunk mailing list).
^ I think you'll enjoy the paper's deep dive. It goes into the references deeply!
I believe Satoshi was a cypherpunk and a remailer dev. Cypherpunks had a history of doing things anonymously on the mailing list and even trying to out one another (a sort of game).
Furthermore, as a remailer dev Satoshi was all too familiar with what happened with the penent remailer[1]. He knew such services will become a legal target by the powers that be. This is why Satoshi even said we "kicked the hornets nest" when Wikileaks/Silkroad began accepting Bitcoin.
He knew the powers would be coming.
Those are weak pieces of evidence.
Meredith appears to be telling the truth. She didn't say Len wasn't Satoshi, she simply said to the best of her knowledge he wasn't. That doesn't mean he wasn't working on it covertly.
One of Len's best friends (Bram Cohen) knew Len was posting pseudonymously on the cypherpunk mailing list but never knew what handle he was using. Also, when Bram was about to release BitTorrent Len tried to convince him to do it anonymously. It's not hard to believe that Len would have done it secretly; even from his wife.
Furthermore, Meredith can't be 100% trusted. When Satoshi handed the project over to the maintainers and stopped posting to the cypherpunk mailing list in late 2010, Meredith tweeted, "Bitcoin isn't ready for prime time yet, according to its creator. Interested people can help finish it, though!"[1]
Satoshi never said those words publicly or privately-- so it's a curious thing to say.
As for the computer...
It's likely Len used university computer(s) for the development as the commit times and communication line up with an academic schedule. It's likely the university had Windows computers. Plus; it's one way to isolate the environment and reduce the chance of information leakage (could have even been a Windows VM).
[1] https://twitter.com/maradydd/status/12163582133276672?t=dk8C...
SPAs were a psyop by FAANG companies to gain a monopoly and mind-share of developer talent.
Are you team Google (Angular)? Meta (React)? Are you a hipster (Ember)?
From there things only went downhill faster.
That's why I hope the truth comes out. If say, Satoshi is Len, then Satoshi is no longer a god. He's a regular dude, that suffered like many people and tragically took his own life. There's a lot to unwrap there.
Here's Len's macbook as proof:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/enochsmiles/449655745/
Fun fact, he was experimenting with email based image uploads on flickr. That was around the time Satoshi suggested they build an image hosting site that accepts Bitcoin.
It's not a leap to assume Len's brain made the following cypherpunk leaps:
remailer (anonymous email) -> image upload by email -> pay via semi-anonymous crypto currency
Len's own bio says, "I have a very strong interest in the real-world applicability of my work."
Len was a Macbook user, but he would not have done Bitcoin on his personal laptop. It's much more likely he used available PCs in a computer lab on the campus he studied/worked at, which were likely Windows machines.
It's also been shown Satoshi (and Len's) activities aligned and they overlapped with a school/academic year.
Satoshi stepped away from Bitcoin in 2010 and handed over the project to the maintainers.
Len started posting about Bitcoin in 2010 (post Satoshi handing the project over).
It seems to me, if Len was Satoshi, he grew distant from the project. Maybe it wasn't the cypherpunk utopia he envisioned. Maybe the wikileaks and silkroad issues weren't what he wanted to enable. Perhaps he wanted to distance himself further from the project.
I don't think it's a legal issue. People want to know who it was and credit where it's due.
Satoshi didn't do anything wrong but distributed consensus was finally solved (or so it seems) and that's a big deal.
If you want a detailed look at all of the Satoshi evidence (circumstantial and others), check out this paper:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.10257v14.pdf
If you want the TLDR; the meat is the "Candidates" section about Len Sassaman and the original Bitcoin paper's references (in particular, how Len was the only person with the right skill set, in the right place, at the right time to even get a copy of the referenced work).... among a mountain of other circumstantial evidence.
https://twitter.com/kurtwuckertjr/status/1760734617152410017
^ Original Adam Back emails that were never released before.
Reminds me of the Marvel movies when they flash back to the 1940s.
Hold on-- Abraham Lincoln wasn't a black trans non-binary demi-human?
I had to build Skia once in order to build Aseprite from source... I gave up and bought Aseprite instead.
I've done this sort of thing and it does work well. The caveat is you usually need a cookie/token after logging in, so you still need to fake that part as well as manage the session state.
It does work well, though some sites certainly detect the behavior after a while.
I'd say neither web or desktop are easy. Cryptocat was a great example. It started off as a web app and got a lot of heat. Was rewritten as a desktop app and still failed.
Isn't the main issue with e2ee on the web the fact that you're battling on three fronts?
1. You need to securely get the code and resources to the browser. A state level attacker can make this very hard.
2. You need to securely run the code on the client which may or may not include code from n-third parties.
3. You need to securely handle data and logic from the client which may or may not involve n-third parties.
Phew. That's a heck of a challenge.
Another coincidence happened in 2010.
Satoshi secretly fixed the poison block issue within Bitcoin by locking the block size at 1MB. He discovered it and fixed it before anyone noticed. This makes it seem like Satoshi was actively poking holes in the protocol with security in mind.
Coincidentally, in 2010 Len was giving a number of talks with his wife regarding protocol design and security.
Seems like the pool of people with the right expertise, area of study and skill set gets smaller and smaller... to the point where N=2, and that's Satoshi and Len.. or maybe N=1.
Open client?
It does have a place. For example, a password manager browser extension should be open source regardless if the server/platform is. It's nice to be able to audit something that is running on every website you ever visit.
It's really cool to see a search engine alternative. I wonder about the practicality in the wake of large language models? It would seem almost easier to build a model that acts as a search engine than to build a traditional search engine.
Of course you can build nice websites like that-- websites have been made nice before the world had SPAs.
I have made a number of fully profitable (and pretty nice) websites over the last few years using that stack.
I can't point to any specific resource for learning how to do it other than the official docs regarding writing web applications [1]. For me, it all started there and evolved over time.