troquerre

Are there any open source alternatives to retool? We’re uncomfortable using a third party tool for our internal operational workflows without more visibility into the source

Compliance seems to be an increasing concern for tech companies. I think Sym is making a smart play here.

Digital gold is a better analogy for BTC than digital cash. As a value reserve BTC has a lot of desirable properties over gold (try moving $10m of gold around...). The fact that it's fairly easy to spend BTC is an additional positive point.

Namebase | Full stack engineer and Backend engineer (Node.js) | REMOTE | https://namebase.io

Namebase is on a mission to enable freedom, security, and ownership on the Internet. We’re doing this by making Handshake — a new decentralized DNS protocol — easy-to-use. You can think of our product as GoDaddy for Handshake.

Since launch six months ago we’ve already processed over $20M in transaction volume and tens of thousands of Handshake name registrations. We work in a highly collaborative environment across a distributed team (currently in US and Australia). Open communication is the standard — strategy discussions occur in slack, not behind closed doors. New initiatives have a single owner to maintain focus while feedback is solicited from everyone.

We use Node and Go on the backend, React on the frontend. We're a small team of 7 with ample funding — we've raised from Coinbase Ventures, Thrive Capital, Paradigm Capital, Balaji Srinivasan, and count Josh Elman (board member at Discord) amongst our advisors.

We're on an ambitious mission to fight the trend of the traditional internet becoming balkanized. If this resonates with you send me an email at tieshun at namebase.io.

Try resolving welcome.nb/

Traditionally two of the issues with federation have been sharing namespaces and sharing logins. Once you need a single source of truth, the federation breaks and you need to rely on a central authority. There are some new decentralized protocols (Handshake's decentralized naming system is one) that provide a solution to these problems so I'm bullish on federation in general — I think a federated system could break into the mainstream given the recent geopolitical issues affecting centralized services.

Agreed we should have names at the root level. There's a new DNS protocol that enables this called Handshake. It's an alternative root zone where anyone can register a root TLD through an open vickrey auction (unlike ICANN which often works behind closed doors...).

For instance, I registered my name tieshun/ which you can resolve through NextDNS, a Handshake Chrome extension (https://github.com/execc/link-frame), or a Handshake gateway like https://hns.to/tieshun

The summer job at Teespring was an internship — iirc around minimum wage. After my internship I became a fulltime employee and they put me on a normal salary which made SF more affordable.

Not at all! I expected disparaging comments and I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how encouraging many of the comments are. Thank you for your kind words as well :)

You’re right that’s an interesting contrast. Can you share why you ended up leaving? I’m curious about your perspective.

I started coding when I was 13 and started wanting to build companies around the same time so I think that focus of desire definitely benefited me. I strongly believe finding what you want to focus on is more valuable than how early you start. Greg Brockman (founder of OpenAI) didn’t start coding until he went to college, and there are numerous examples of people in tech, art, and other fields discovering their focus later in life and succeeding.

Author here. I appreciate you sharing this message and I completely agree — I think it's really important to separate happiness from being dependent on success. So much of success comes from luck and timing that basing happiness off it is a recipe for being unhappy most of the time.

Have you read The Courage to be Disliked or A Guide to the Good Life? These books resonated with me and it seems like you may enjoy them too :)

Yeah it was around 13/14 that I found YC. I think it was through a programming humor subreddit haha.

The amazing thing is that Silicon Valley doesn't take advantage of young founders in this way (at least much less than in the East Coast/other environments I've seen). YC did a lot to change the culture of VC in Silicon Valley — I think almost everyone has shifted to playing infinite iterated games where screwing over a newcomer is disadvantageous because you don't know where they'll go in the future.

There will always be characteristics that are advantageous, but what's beautiful about SV is that it's possible to succeed without those advantages. I'm not sure I've seen that anywhere else — at least not at the scale of SV.

I sent a cold email to Walker Williams who was the CEO of Teespring at the time. I created a functional clone of Teespring and shared the demo with him which got me the job.

VC as a category is not meant for stable returns — the goal is to find breakout successes with power law returns that return the entire fund. VC LPs (like the Yale college endowment) allocate only a small portion of their AUM into VCs knowing this.

> This seems like sheer dumb luck. For every one of him (or you, if you're reading this) there's a lot of people who thrash and struggle. I went through 80+ job applications before I got one offer last search, and that's less than I thought I would need Author here. There was definitely luck involved (the luckiest part imo was that Teespring was an incredible company to work at and I had no idea when I reached out), but I think cold emails are a surprisingly effective tool that are underutilized for some reason.

I sent two emails, one to the CEO of Teespring and one to the CEO of Y Combinator at the time (Sam Altman). Both replied (though sama politely declined my request to be his summer intern haha) so getting a response from high profile entrepreneurs is definitely possible without much luck.

I’m half Chinese half white. I’m impressed you could tell from photos!

I was a high school dropout when I applied to YC — I got into MIT only after going through YC, so it’s the other way around. Going through YC definitely helped me get to MIT. There’s a meta lesson in that success begets success which is observable in the valley, but I think it’s possible for anyone to get the first seed of success to build upon.

Author here. I completely agree that privilege opens doors not available to others. But my intention was that it’s possible to break into Silicon Valley and succeed (to the extent you can consider going through YC success...) even without privilege.

I saw another comment saying that I went to MIT around the same time as YC. It was actually after — going through YC enabled me to apply to MIT and get in without a high school diploma. Privilege didn’t help me get into YC (persistence + timing + luck did) but afterwards the privilege of getting into YC helped me with my college applications.

The problem is that the root issue of ICANN corruption hasn’t gone away. So there will be more problems in the future, you can count on it.

There are initiatives like https://handshake.org that are trying to do away with ICANN entirely

The amazing thing is the ICANN tried to frame the decision to shelve the .org sale as a decision that they initiated, when it was only after numerous organizations like the EFF and even the California Attorney General steppes in that they did anything.

This is why projects like Handshake exist[1]. It’s a DNS protocol that aims to replace CAs and decentralize the governance of TLDs as well.

[1] https://handshake.org

Here’s another good article on how to set up DANE/TLS using Handshake as your root of trust instead of CAs https://medium.com/@ca98am79/how-to-view-dane-tlsa-websites-...

The use-case above is what I’m most excited about for Handshake, because CAs are basically trusted backdoors — every time people browse the internet they need to trust that thousands of CAs aren’t compromised and aren’t responding to their local court orders around the world to issue bad certs.

NextDNS is great. I've been using it for the last few months to access Handshake sites[1] and there have been no issues, and it's important that there are more resolvers than just Cloudflare and Google on the market.

[1] You need to enable it in your NextDNS settings.

The root of trust for DNSSEC is a key that's stored and controlled by people, and needs to go through routine key signing ceremonies. This is fallible and even recently there have been issues with the key signing ceremony https://www.icann.org/news/blog/root-key-signing-key-ceremon.... One could argue that this system works "good enough" but ultimately I'd prefer that the root of trust for security on the internet to be more robust than relying on humans to avoid error. That's what Handshake is trying to do — instead of using a key in a physical vault as the root of trust, you use a distributed blockchain that's very difficult to break.

It's also relevant to note that 51% attacks to most payment/store-of-value blockchains like Bitcoin, but for Handshake 51% attacks don't really affect the security of the network because an attacker would need to get the private keys for a name in order to attack its certificate.

Handshake took inspiration from predecessors like Namecoin but it’s very different. First is scope: Namecoin puts domain names on its blockchain under the .bit TLD whereas Handshake targets TLDs. It does so because Handshake aims to improve the security of TLS by shifting trust from CAs to its blockchain. The CA model is weak bc only a single CA among the thousands of CAs that your computer trusts needs to get compromised in order for your security to get compromised. And the likelihood of a single CA failure increases over time. That’s the opposite of what you want in a robust system.

With Handshake, certs can be pinned directly on the blockchain, which becomes more secure as more nodes join the network and across time as more blocks get mined on top of the pinned cert. This shifts the system from diminishing security to accumulating security. That’s the main innovation behind Handshake.

There are other differences in the issuance model as well. Namecoin’s issuance destined it for failure from day one since names are registered for a flat fee without restriction. This meant that squatters and early adopters could lock up the namespace without paying the true market price of the name. Handshake uses an auction system for name registration and releases the namespace over time (the release date is determined by hashing the name % 52), which means that names are registered for their true market price and newcomers can still register good names. This difference is critical and already playing out successfully — the highest auction was for 200k HNS, which is equivalent to $20k USD and 7/12 of the namespace is still unreleased.

There will always be a need for a shared global namespace, and DNS needs to improve its security and privacy as the world continues to rely on it. I don’t think DoH is the answer since it just shifts trust from ISPs to CDNs[1]. On the security end, there’s a new DNS protocol called Handshake (https://handshake.org) that’s trying to shift the root of trust from CAs to a distributed ledger. It’s still early but it shows promise with NextDNS.io and Vercel.com supporting it.

[1] CDNs are a lesser evil than ISPs but I still wouldn’t want to need to trust them to protect my privacy.

Handshake.org is a another project that’s giving users control of their identity — specifically web identity. It’s an experimental new DNS protocol that uses private keys to determine ownership of domains. This lets users truly own their domains instead of renting names from TLD owners as the existing system requires.

When users have completely sovereign identity they’ll also need some way to share it. I could see Handshake being the solution here (keybase was another viable alternative but they sold to zoom...)

Right now most of the sites are personal projects and toy sites. You can check out some of them here https://github.com/NamebaseHQ/Awesome-Handshake. For my personal use, I set up tieshun.txt to point to my personal todo.txt file, and I use watchman to rsync my local todo.txt to tieshun.txt so I can access it from all my devices. I could also set up todo.tieshunroquerre.com for this but I find that tieshun.txt is much more convenient to use.

I bought tieshun.txt on https://gateway.io (in beta). The owner of .txt set up their own registry and they're selling .txt domains. That's another aspect of Handshake that I'm excited about. To get an ICANN TLD you need to be a big corporation that can pay for the $200k application fee (and you're not even guaranteed to get the name), whereas anyone can create a registry on their own TLD with Handshake.

The cryptocurrency aspect is unintuitive (if possible it would've been ideal to not require it), but it's actually needed in order to have a more secure root of trust alternative to CAs. This article expands on this point: https://www.namebase.io/blog/meet-handshake-decentralizing-d...