dougk16

Look into privacy coins like Monero.

Ah ok good, that means you won't fix the caching..."feature" that I found. :) Thanks for the discussion!

Good question, and thank you for the question. Both at the time of my initial development several years ago, and including now when I just tested it, scraping has faster response times (cache invalidations) to profile updates than the API. This saves the user of my site being frustrated that they put the code in their profile, but they keep smashing the "Check again" button to no avail.

To be fair the API's cache invalidation does seem to have improved since last time I tested it. It only takes up to 5-10 seconds now, but still this is an eternity to an impatient user.

Also since you imply you work for HN, I'll give you my little secret: If you randomly capitalize the letters in the HN username it invalidates the cache. Otherwise scraping the profile would indeed take as long as the API approach. I'm taking a risk with you fixing it now. :)

I hope that helps clarify and I look forward to your thoughts.

It's a powerful idea but say I'm a website that wants to add "Sign In With HN". Me personally I've lost faith with "Sign In With Facebook/Google/etc.", nevermind some random site offering sign ins with random forum identities. As a website owner, I would have to trust that the "Sign In With HN" service would still be there in a month or two, nevermind a year or two. If I wanted to create such an SSO service, what kind of reasonable social/technical guarantees could I make to website owners so they'd be confident I'd be around for the long haul?

A better technical solution would be to offer an SDK that does the same thing that websites could integrate themselves, but then you have the explosion of languages and frameworks to support.

I'm doing something similar with my service https://aytwit.com/thoughter

There is a trick to busting the cache but I almost don't want to say it in case they fix it lol. Feel free to contact me directly.

I'm doing something very similar with my service: https://aytwit.com/thoughter

To the author, there is a simple trick you can pull in order to make the confirmation instantaneous and avoid caching. Have you figured it out? Let me know!

I also use a residential proxy service for all my profile requests, regardless of the identity provider. For some sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc. this is required, and for something like Hacker News it's simply future-proofing in case they decide to block scrapers at some point in the future.

Good work!

Bitcoin is like the "http://" of cryptocurrency. Public balances, public transactions. We need that little "s" on the end. Taproot doesn't come anywhere close. Monero and PirateChain are the leading "https://" contenders, in my opinion. There is lots of competition in the privacy coin space so everyone will have different opinions here.

The only way to win is to not play the game.

Interesting I had not heard of SCRT. The others I've vetted pretty deeply but of course I could be missing something. Everyone do your own research of course and it'll be interesting to see which one(s) win.

Good analogy with http. But keep going. After http people realized the importance of https. Sending credit card numbers and passwords in cleartext over the Internet was clearly a bad idea. So what is https in this analogy? Monero, PirateChain, Aeon, Wownero are the major contenders.

PirateChain and Aeon as well.

I'm with you, I don't trust it's private/secure at all, but until proven otherwise it's a very interesting technological feat.

There is at least $625,000[1] on the table already. Not to mention how many blockchain analytics companies and other actors would pay millions to have such a capability.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2020/09/14/irs...

See my peer comment. You can "synthesize" gold pretty easily. I agree most people don't consider this when buying gold though. So "stronger belief" is still accurate. Unfortunately unscrupulous people make fortunes off of that strong belief.

> It at least is tied to a physical thing.

People should know more about the paper gold market. Most importantly how much gold people think they have stored safely in vaults, but is essentially just an IOU that could never be paid if everyone withdrew at the same time. Pretty scary/exciting stuff. I couldn't even begin to describe all the dimensions to this and still learning myself. But long story short, consider the possibility that the price of gold isn't anywhere near tied to a physical thing. :)

Who gets the megaphone? My answer is either everybody or nobody. :)

I get what you're saying of course, but as a fun counterpoint, I gave my brother $50 worth of Monero for Christmas and he has absolutely no idea how cryptocurrencies work, had never heard of Monero. I simply wrote out instructions on a piece of paper, the seed, basic opsec, and there you go. He probably put it in his drawer and forgot about it. But he'll remember and learn how it works real quick if I ever tell him it's at $50,000 or something in a few years haha.

Thanks for all your comments in this thread. I looked at your profile to try and find an email address to say this personally but I figure it's good to say this in public too. You're writing all the things I would if I had a bit more time and inclination. I know it takes a good chunk of time and courage and mindspace to go against the current like you are, but just know there are a lot of people reading comments like yours and nodding their head but just don't want to join the fray. There are also a lot of people waking up from the virus fear only to confront the way scarier danger of the agendas driving things. Your comments are helpful to them too. Anyway keep it up!

Great comment thanks for putting it out here. I'm excited too. :)

I'll take that as a compliment. Indeed I was "taught" poorly and so educated myself. If you're trying to prevent repeating history it doesn't matter as much what the number is. It matters how you allow a society to get to those kinds of numbers.

To summarize the major issue, we're taught in schools the results of something like Nazi Germany, 6 million died in camps, Hitler was a psychopath, etc., all the details of how horrible it was and how we can never let it happen again.

What we're not taught are the methodical psychological operations implemented over decades on at least 2 or 3 generations that lead up to a situation where an entire country could be fooled or intimidated into allowing such horrors to occur.

If we were taught the causes and not the symptoms then I dare say history would be harder to repeat. Go read Mein Kampf, 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, it's all there. The methods are extremely simple, it's just the level of psychopathy in our ruling class that is hard for people to accept.

Ok, thanks for your reply and perspective.

Hancock has at least one transcribed interview with Klaus. Look it up for yourself. They had an interesting relationship. Klaus definitely did not agree with many of Hancock's ideas. It's admirable, an open exchange of ideas with people you disagree with. Just like we're doing here! Good on us.

Just open one of his books. He travels the world with his partner and takes incredible photographs, scuba dives submerged ruins, interviews locals and mainstream archaeologists like Klaus Schmidt, digs very deep into mythology and cross references with science, gives almost exhausting levels of citations and references. Not to mention dealing with incredible levels of vitriol and threats while doing so. Not so easy to generate such nonsense! :)

Gullible means believing something. Believe nothing. This is what an open mind is.

I'm with you. I tried to find that keen edge of sarcasm in my comment but I missed the mark. And really it was childish and I shouldn't have even attempted it. Apologies to AlotOfReading for not replying in earnest, and since I think they upvoted me. Yes I will continue to recommend Hancock's books, along with recommending critiques of his books. Hancock is pretty tame compared to other books I recommend ;). Free flow of information and especially the freedom to be wrong is vital and Hancock is a great expression of this.

Ok I will stop recommending his books. Thanks for the heads up. I did not know his ideas were causing such destruction. I will still read all his books with an open mind but you don't have to worry about me looting any sites. :)

Great book, highly recommend. Even if you say 90% of it is pseudo-scientific bs, fine, read it like you would fantasy or sci-fi and there's still easily 10% of mind-expanding possibilities in here. I've read many critiques of Hancock's work and there are always arguments and evidence left over that critics don't address. The only way to decide for yourself is to read his work with an open mind. Or don't!

You didn't mention email confirmation in the first place but figure I'd mention this for others. I recently ran into a similar situation and had the idea of registrants emailing ME a secret code I give them instead of confirming they receive it. Still technically automatable but would definitely throw a curveball to the bots. I confirmed with an Ask HN that this is a secure method: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24116530

Thank you. :) See reply to smt88 if interested in a counter.

Thanks for the response. :)

My guess is that more users will be alienated simply because it's, well, alien. They're not used to it. I've never heard of a service doing this. But if you think about it it's not that onerous. After a user submits their email address I have a page with <a href="mailto:proof@example.com?subject=SecretCode">Click Here To Prove You Own This Address</a> which hopefully will work on a good percentage of people's machines and smart phones. I don't know how many people have mail clients installed.

If they don't have a mail client, I'll still have a nicely rendered example email so they know they just have to put the secret code in the subject line and click send.

This is of course harder than clicking a link, but then again people are used to receiving secret codes and having to copy/paste them into the website.

And again there are CAPTCHAs to consider when sending people emails, which are hard to solve and give up privacy and effectively lock you into Google. For some small services I've set up over the years I also have had a lot of people complaining about not receiving emails despite using very reputable services like Postmark and Sendgrid. It's hard to say percentages though.

I agree I'll lose more users, but I think it's more a matter of people not being used to it then it being a technically inferior solution from a UX perspective. Anyway thanks again!