volaski

Curious too. Let me know if you try it out. Technically I think it should work.

In John wick, they use commodore computer and dial phones for security purposes, reminds me of that :)

The document says it’s network protocol agnostic because it only focuses on decentralizing the data layer, so it might be possible to use vapor on top of IPFS in addition to HTTP

Maybe wallets can implement an identity system (either as a standard or through federation among vapor nodes)?

Until now, it has been impossible to "record" and replay authenticated HTTP requests outside of a single service provider because authentication by nature has been centralized--Your identity belonged to the service provider. By "Bitcoinizing" HTTP requests and adopting the decentralized authentication scheme using Bitcoin wallet signatures, Vapor makes it possible to record authenticated HTTP requests and replay them anywhere.

<= Now this sounds WAY cool.

wow, trying to wrap my head around this thing. how does this exactly work?

According to the website:

Why a standalone browser instead of building as an extension for existing browsers, or waiting for mainstream browser support?

1. Build for the future

Many things we take for granted in the old "web browsing" experience--including the security model--no longer apply in the new world of Bitcoin.

The thing is, Bitcoin is NOT "the next web". In many ways it's completely opposite of what the WWW is, which is why Bitcoin is so powerful.

That's why it's more beneficial to start from scratch instead of forking an existing full-fledged browser built for the existing WWW, with many legacy features that can constrain future directions. We can create a new user interaction model optimized for the new Bitcoin world order.

2. Bitcoin-Native

Bitcoin has a fundamentally different architecture than the old web in many different ways, with built-in immutability, a self-contained authentication model, and natively monetizable/traceable files.

Instead of thinking from the old WWW mindset, we should think from a Bitcoin-native mindset.

Bottle can discipline us to publish Bitcoin-first documents, build Bitcoin-first apps, each interconnected to one another in Bitcoin-native ways.

As someone who tries to position oneself as someone with all the wisdom in the world, you sure are acting immature, closing your statement with "okthxbye" type comment.

Also, "You're wrong" is not such a mature way to engage in a conversation, and yet that's exactly how you start every comment you posted here. Could have been a productive conversation if you acted maturely.

And even though I said no offense and clearly meant it in a generic manner (and not attacking YOU), you actually sound very offended. Why are you so offended by some random guy on the Internet?

But I guess I'll never get an answer, since you're probably a man of your words and keep your promise to keep that last comment your last post :)

it's offensive only because you choose to be offended, it actually tells more about yourself than parent.

people running successful startups don't have time to write about it, while people who have wound down their companies do

tell us what kind of mental gymnastics you have to go through to go from above statement to come up with such a twisted interpretation as "it implies that if someone manages to find the time to write about how they're running their company they probably aren’t successful". Since it's HN, I'm sure you can show how you came to that conclusion, in logical expression.

any success is a success as long as you truly believe it was a success deep inside.

Which means the people you're talking about are all success cases. You don't have to be a household name to be considered a success.

A food stand guy who makes a good living and has learned tons of things about life and street smarts is a huge success and we have much more to learn from those people than idiot VC funded startup entrepreneurs who con their way into raising capital and burn through all their money without making anything work. These people may even pretend they're a success by "acq-hiring" themselves to a larger company, but anyone who's actually been in a startup know that's all fake bullshit. If you get acq-hired you have failed, period. Don't listen to these people's advice either.

The specific category of people I'm criticizing are those who have nothing to show for themselves but failure. They write Medium articles on their way out, so that they can:

1. get a pat on the shoulder

2. get more exposure so that they can get a job now that they're jobless.

3. get more exposure so that they can use that false influence to keep their charade going.

4. just do what everyone else does (they genuinely think for some reason that writing a post-mortem is some sort of a ritual to celebrate the liquidation of their startup for which they raised tons of money from strangers)

Most genuine entrepreneurs I know don't do this. They instead try to analyze what they did wrong, but they're humble enough to not shout out loud to the world to listen to what they have to say about why they failed. They show the lessons learned through action, not through medium post.

The reason why your advice is not as useful as you think is because chances are, if you google around, most of that lesson would be already out there. Don't take this the wrong way I mean no offense. I'm sure you've learned a lot of lessons and I'm sure they're all valuable lessons, just saying most of what I read online nowadays are basically rehash of what these failed entrepreneurs heard from someone else, who probably heard it from some other successful person.

My point was "why listen to failures when you can listen to people who've both failed AND succeeded, especially when most of what the former would say is a rehash of what the latter said?" Think about it. I've thought about this myself as a once-failed-entrepreneur, and come to a realization that until you actually have succeeded in life and gained enough confidence to be able to think independently AND have the confidence to share your lesson you came to independently, most of what you think you understand are basically what you heard from other more successful people. You may think otherwise, but if you think deeper, that's what you're doing.

There's nothing wrong with this on its own, but the problem is that most of the articles I'm referring to actually mislead other people into believing in some seriously wrong interpretations of why they failed, and they all stem from the fact that these people have no idea why they failed but just try to come up with their own "theory" of why they failed with their limited knowledge. There are many reasons why people fail at something. Some people make all the bad decisions yet still succeed because they made one small decision that made a huge difference. Some people make all the right decisions yet fail because they made one small decision that messed it all up. Without this COMPLETE context, your advice is not complete because it's just small tidbits that may or may not work. If this comes from someone who has succeeded at least once, you at least know this is something that has happened. But if you follow "advice" from people who have only failed, then what are you really believing?

you're right i'm being cynical, because i genuinely believe you have not much to learn from people who have failed but haven't succeeded yet.

That said, there are PLENTY of successful people who used to be a failure. In fact 99% of the successful people have been a failure at some point in their life. THESE are the people you listen to.

The things you read in the media about a genius who got it right on their first attempt are very exceptional cases, which means they were not only talented but also very lucky. And you're right that there's a selection bias when it comes to these people and they may be totally out of touch because they don't understand why they succeeded.

But like I said, the vast majority of accomplished people in the world were once failures. They just kept trying and made it happen. Which is why these people are worth listening to. They are the ones who actually learned from their past failures, applied it to their life, and finally succeeded.

But you don't deserve to tell others what you think is the right thing when only thing you've achieved in life is failure. You gotta earn it by taking the lessons you learned and applying it to come to a true success. These people are worth listening to.

From what I see, there are too many people who've never tasted success but just use their failures as an opportunity to get more attention for the sake of getting attention. Most of the times when you read their posts, they're full of "failure biases", which is much worse than success bias. And I think most of the "lessons" they learned are shit, and most of the times demonstrates exactly why they failed--because they were out of touch (which is why they think they understand why they failed)

So my point is, you should listen to people who have failed AND succeeded. There are many people like this.

it's refreshing to see someone who actually successfully scaled a company write an article about "here's how we did it", instead of bunch of failed entrepreneurs who write medium posts about why they think their startups failed to either feel better about themselves or to capitalize on their failure with the attention they get from the blog post (answer: they don't know why they feailed, and that's why they failed. The only way they know what they think they have learned through failure was actually something meaningful is to apply the "lesson" in their future endeavors and see if it works out. Until then, all your interpretations are nothing more than your opinion)

I would love to see more of these posts on Hacker News instead of failed startup post-mortems. Thanks for sharing!

You're missing the point. Like you said, Mosaic was ALREADY a great product, compared to the nerdy terminal browsers without embedded media, etc.

OP's point is not whether netscape or mosaic is better, but that the graphical web browser was what brought the web mainstream. Doesn't matter if it's mosaic or netscape (or several other graphical ui browser competitors that existed during that time)

I don't think anyone's being as hostile as you make it out to be. They're just talking about how you can't really guarantee safety, which is true.

And I find it weird that you're comparing yourself with Snapchat. Snapchat is a casual app, targeted at a completely different audience than the people Keybase targets (at least that's the impression I got so far)

Also Snapchat is mobile only product, which makes all the difference. It's much easier to detect screenshotting on mobile than desktop. And as far as I know, Keybase is desktop-first app. So it's kind of ridiculous that you're comparing yourself to snapchat.

I don't know if you are aware of above distinctions or not, but if you're not aware of this, there's something wrong here. You guys are supposed to be completely aware of all these subtle differences. And if you ARE aware of this, why are you trying to make these claims pretending there's nothing wrong?

I have nothing against Keybase, I'm just pointing out the faulty logic in this specific comment you're making (which happens to be hostile towards those who are just pointing out the issue with no trolling intent)

"technical primer", yeah right.

I guess this counts as "technical" to people at Deloitte.

in the short term this is annoying, but in the long term I think this is really great. it's almost as if the market is pushing people to adopt decentralization technologies, which would have been difficult to get adoption without this type of push.

This is a problem because it results in vendors with huge budget to dominate the open source space. This in itself is fine, but the side effect is that it discourages all the grass roots innovations that could have happened, and effectively kills off all the small time competition with no budget.

normally these large vendors have every interest to stay away from implementing anything that undermines their power in the ecosystem.

When that happens, people can “fork” out of the project since it’s open, you may say.

But imagine even thinking about forming something like react.js or tensorflow. Unless you have very strong motivation it would be very discouraging to even start.

So I think the problem with these large vendors dominating open source is that when things come to this state, we don’t have an alternative and everyone is locked into the “open source” projects given to us by those small number of companies. Not so much different from their own services dominating consumer market share.

Nope, your sentences are not as valuable as you think. Neither is mine. But a great book containing thousands of sentences is valuable enough to to be purchased.

I agree. Personally I think it's a great tool, run by a wrong company. If some other company--say Google, Microsoft, or even Amazon--acquired this I would trust it 100 times more. This is not just because of their history of betraying their own developer ecosystem but more importantly because Twitter has never known (and still doesn't know) what they want to be (which in turn was the cause of aforementioned betrayal). All that fluff on the Wired article is just a fluff. Yeah sure you collect more data and sell it to advertisers to make more money, but tomorrow they may find out that the model doesn't work so well and may ditch it.

I'd close the first, say, $200k from the first reasonably good investors that offer it on reasonable terms--say a $5 million pre-money valuation or higher. This removes some uncertainty and pressure, gives you capital to execute with while raising the rest of your round, puts you in a stronger position, etc. It's worth a discount for all of this.

Wow 5MM pre-money for seed is considered reasonable (and considered a discount) nowadays? Or have I misinterpreted?

I didn't say TRIZ is bad. I even said it's a good technique to learn. I just pointed out that anyone can be creative without "training". The concept of training is based on the assumption that people are not naturally creative. I think anyone has potential to come up with creative achievements in their lives but only small number of people get the opportunity or motivation to do so. I think in many cases it's just a matter of changing your mindset and putting yourself in the right environment. Anyway, if you haven't read that book I recommended above please take a look.

I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm basically agreeing with you that there is no inherently creative person and you can acquire it. I'm just making a distinction between becoming actually creative vs. emulating creativity. I would rather "become a creative person" than "use techniques to come up with creative solutions" if I were to pick one.

As i mentioned it does work. And it is a good guideline to look at when you're stuck. But it's not the fundamental solution. TRIZ teaches you to emulate creativity. The whole idea is "how can an even ordinary person come up with creative ideas?" My point was that's all fine and it's good to learn that skill, but it would be better if you shoot for actually "becoming a creative person" instead of "ordinary person coming up with creative ideas". I suggested that book above because I found it helpful from that point of view.

This just means you haven't met enough people. You probably met some people who worked on embedded systems where they only need to use a simple set of instructions predefined by the device. But imagine doing that for your laptop. Personally I learned assembly when I was into hacking operating systems (not as in the diluted 'hacker' notion people throw around nowadays for merely being able to write a simple html code, but as in actual 'hacking' to make the OS work in ways its designer had not intended) and from my experience it is the farthest thing possible from being simple. Teaching 14 year olds to write assembly code? Read up on my analogy above.

That doesn't make this guy's comment anything close to true. It's like saying "Writing a piece of English literature is easy. All you need to know is alphabets. Really that's all you need to know." It is hard to express yourself using assembly, and like you said that's why there are higher level languages. Of course you don't need to know what a car is made up of in order to be a good driver, but it's idiotic to think the internal technology is simple.

Anyone of us could code some assembler - like OP said, it's fun and easy. We teach our 14 years olds how to code assembler - it's that easy. You don't honestly think you can compete with those skills? You need to learn the hard stuff.

Aside from rest of the comments, this is such a ridiculous comment that I can't tell if it's a joke or not. Have you actually built anything meaningful with assembly language?

While some of the approaches mentioned below do work to some extent (TRIZ, etc.), they won't really make you "inventive". Personally I think they're all gimmicks (although to be fair they are gimmicks that work). I think what you really want is to "become" an inventive person instead of trying to force invent stuff. Read this book for starters: http://www.amazon.com/Where-Good-Ideas-Come-From/dp/15944853...

I once lived there for a few months. The first day I arrived, I opened by window and looked at the view and thought "Wow this place has a beautiful view, no buildings, all nature... wait... what are all those things on the ground?"

Society has the problem. Twitter just makes it public.

Yes. Thereby making things worse than they used to be.