griffinmb

I don't think 'retained knowledge' is the best metric for deciding if a liberal arts education is worth it. A degree, particularly a liberal arts degree, seems (in my admittedly limited experience) to be geared towards honing critical thought, and the ability to express ideas well. I think this is important. And even though a lot of students may take it to the extreme, I think partying/socializing in college may be important too.

Ultimately, I think the issue is with insane tuition prices, not with people who want a liberal arts degree.

He was working for "Defcon" or Blake Benthall (his roommate in the story). Defcon was running Silk Road 2.0 after the second "Dread Pirate Roberts" left.

Blake had been working for SpaceX, and left to work on Silk Road. This is his HN account: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=blakeeb

I tend to have issues with the web link on NY Times. Opening the article in incognito mode bypasses the paywall though.

Rather, if you had a friend in North Korea and they told you about the domains, you WOULD be able to resolve them.

Now that this has happened, you know all of the domain names and no longer need a friend in North Korea to tell you what they are.

That's awesome, thank you.

A virtual reality web is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. As in, how do we make the 'Metaverse' a reality. In particular, I've been thinking about how to best handle distributed identity/look. It's definitely an interesting problem, and it's cool to see tools like this already being built.

I feel like this is partially correct. OB's peer-to-peer nature gives it the spirit of 'uncensorable,' in that no central authority can keep someone from making whatever listings they want. Though, individually, the shops are certainly censorship-prone since everything is clearnet.

A lot of people seem to think this is Bitcoin's 'killer app', which I don't agree with. I really can't see it pulling many legitimate users from established centralized companies. But I do think it's an interesting piece of work.

If Spam Nation is accurate, spam is actually quite lucrative. The knock-off medications they're peddling often work just as well as the real thing and at a fraction of the cost.

ScriptCat

http://www.scriptcat.io

Currently it's a "pingdom for ports", and emails you if a new port opens up on your server. I'm working on making it a fuzzer for basic web vulnerabilities that automatically scans your site on deployment. Basically, ScriptCat will be your script kiddie in the cloud.

I've been wanting to put "Time's Person of the Year 2006" as an award for a while now. Though, if I thought of it, I'm sure it's not exactly original.

The problem with the encryption conversation, is that they believe people more knowledgeable than myself are dealing with it. I demonstrated its importance, and they see how necessary it is.

But when I say the kinds of changes being proposed would fundamentally undermine the security encryption provides, they think I'm wrong. Like most of the current presidential-hopefuls, they believe in a magic-bullet that will give the government access but no one else. They think someone smarter than me will implement it, and that my concerns are misplaced.

Again, I don't see this as a strange viewpoint. I think, to some degree, it's what most people believe.

My parents are okay with mass surveillance. I've tried running them through how it actually works, but it turned out that they really don't seem to care about this kind of privacy. They are very much about the idea that "if it even saves just one person" it's worth it.

On the subject of encryption bans and backdoors, I explained that this would make it easier for them to be the target of hacks and fraud. This concerned them, but ultimately they are under the impression that the people handling it know more than me and I can't be correct.

I don't think they are particularly out-of-the-ordinary, so I don't think the solution is a simple act of informing people. I think people who do care about this stuff largely need to accept the possibility that this isn't important to the majority of the population, and that it never will be (no matter how informed the public is). Instead, we need to continue build the tools and the infrastructure to secure ourselves regardless of policy and legislation.

Looking at this article more, it does seem more likely that this is an attempt at some weird anti-abortion propaganda.

That being said, I still think it's an interesting concept. I don't think that the AI assuming personhood of a fetus is inherently wrong. There are plenty of philosophical arguments about what constitutes personhood, and how that effects the topic of abortion.

Again, this is something that I think could be potentially very interesting in relation to artificial intelligence, which has it's own fair share of 'what makes it a person' type debate.

An Artificial Intelligence (potentially non-person) relating and empathizing with a fetus (also potentially non-person) -- that's an interesting thought.

I agree though, it does appear to be self-insertion on the part of the author. And, if it matters, I am pro-choice. I just think there is a lot of interesting stuff to be said on the topic of personhood.

I didn't see it as anti-choice. The explanation and reality-show aspect seemed a little dumb, but I thought the core idea was really intriguing.

I feel like in Sci-Fi, there's often this dynamic between Creator/AI as a Parent/Child relationship, so the idea that a nascent artificial intelligence would perceive abortion as threatening or scary is, in my opinion, a super cool idea.

I didn't read his book, so maybe it really was just anti-choice drek. But from only reading his blog post, it sounds to me like a nugget of an interesting idea with not-as-interesting execution.

Thanks for the invite! If I get invites, I'll update so I can send them out as well.

Recently my car battery died on a side-street without much through-traffic. No one else I know has a car (I live in NYC), so I had to call someone to jump it for me. It cost $75.

The guy used a portable jump-starter, which I'd never seen before. So I looked it up when I got home, and bought it on Amazon for ~100 bucks. When my battery died again, I jumped it myself and I'm now just one jump away from 'saving' money.

I guess this is a roundabout way of saying all these services (like locksmiths, car-jumpers, etc) can be avoided with minimal effort and a little bit of know-how. There is something rewarding about being self-sufficient in that way.

Sorry if this wasn't completely on point!

That's the one! I'm glad you like it :)

I think talking to businesses personally would be great, but I wouldn't even know where to start with that. Do you have any suggestions? (books, articles, personal experience?)

That would be great! I'm at work now, so I'll shoot you an email tonight (I'm assuming it's the one in your profile?).

Thanks for the suggestions, I just added 'em :)

Wow, thanks for the great info! I just bought the book, I'm excited to get into it. Your ISP suggestion is really interesting... it's got me thinking about a lot of channels/partnerships I hadn't even considered.

Nice, thanks for the tip!

I want to reply to afarrell, but I can't.

I think going to meetups would be great! That might actually be my best bet since it's person-to-person and majority technical. It's definitely the target audience at least.

My site is http://www.scriptcat.io -- basically, it emails you if it detects a new open port. "Pingdom for open ports"

(Edit: I could've sworn afarrell's post initially asked what the project was)

Hey! Thank you! I limited the number of sites you can add by default to discourage malicious use -- I've updated your account so you can have 10. Let me know if you need more!

Thanks for taking a look at it! I like the idea of "native" promotion, and I think you just made me realize another problem I have -- I'm not actually sure who my best customers could be. I've just thought of it very broadly as "people with websites". I'll think more about that...

I pretty much immediately dropped the idea of advertising without even looking into it, mostly because it's currently a completely free tool. But I didn't realize it was that affordable. I may actually look into that now!

Congrats on the 50 active users :)

My first step after getting that one user was to "do things that don't scale". So I sent him/her a personal email letting them know I hoped they found the service helpful, and that I'd be happy to help out in any way possible. And to tell a friend.

No response yet!

That's a really interesting point. Maybe "hobby project" wasn't the best word choice. I just wanted to emphasize that I'm not looking for rocket-ship growth (or even money), just a way to slowly get users who will find use in my app.

Thank you for the recommendations! I'm always up for a good book.

The book seems like it's targeted for rapid growth rather than the small/steady growth I'm looking for. Is that the case? I'd be interested in reading it either way, but I'd like to hear more.

The URL is http://www.scriptcat.io :)

I initially thought about PH, but was scared off by the recent posts about needing an 'insider'. Maybe I shouldn't have let it deter me, but I'm also not sure my site is 'right' for Product Hunt and I'm definitely not an active part of their community.

I read that! It was definitely a catalyst for this question. I emailed my one user and let them know I'd be happy to personally help in any way I could. No response yet :)