nothxbro

Lets hope so!

@derefr Yes, that would happen. Thats why the PH way of doing things is shitty.

The way to get selected to submit or comment appears to be ryans buddy or that buddies buddy. Its a really misogynistic way to do it and minoritys and women seem to be under represented.

I am sure if he chimed in here, he would say something along the lines of "We are super excited to open it up to everyone but want to do things correctly and not hurt the quality! With that in mind we are only letting a few people in at a time!"

Which of course means a huge amount of straight white dudes on the site and no transparency about what is submitted or chosen to be on the site.

Whats especially troubling is that this is spilling over to other countries now. I always felt that despite having relatively lax laws in regards to the internet, russia is starting to turn into a seriously unfriendly place for the internet. Being a expat in moscow makes it especially awkward as I have tasted the koolaid on the 'free' side.

Worth noting is that this was essentially number one on product hunt, above all other items.

Meaning, the product hunt results shown are the absolute best result you could hope for and most users will receive a far smaller amount of visits. PH gets a bit of hype because its invite only and people assume it has a big impact, but for most folk it would be much more impactful for their launch to even be on a smaller tech blog like Read/write or recode.

For the average person who gets on PH and gets the normal amount of upvotes (around 10-20 ) you can expect a blistering 250-500 visits. You would get more traction just posting a comment in a HN article. PH seems more powerful because its invite only and has tons of hype around it, but it does not deliver on results yet.

Surprised that HN numbers were so high, but not surprised that Techcrunch was number one. They still have a great share of the market when it comes to initial exposure.

which is kind of ironic, seeing as conway is major airbnb investor and airbnb is arguably one of the largest contributors to the housing shortage in the bay area.

people ellis act buildings and then airbnb them as a way around the law

Sorry to hear that. You must have known that this day was coming though? Basically you were living on borrowed time from Google. If the revenue was that much of a priority to you, you should have laid much lower than you did and certainly not make threats to people who have no issue with doing fraudulent things.

If you lay down with pigs, you are gonna get dirty

If you play with fire you will eventually get burned

etc..

Ok, some good news. It might be untrue about them having passport scans. Reason I say that, is the following:

We know from the leaked mtgox crisis plan doc that they have 550,000 verified accounts.

Each user who wanted to be verified had to scan at least 2 documents- a passport+license and a electric bill of sorts.

Assuming both documents alone were only 100KB combined (and its likely way more than that since scans are usually 500KB+ per document) than we can estimate the file size:

550,000 x 100KB = 52.45GB

Thats more than double the claimed 20GB.

In fact, even if we believe that every persons doc is in the DB; and assuming nothing else but passports is in there- you are only allowing for 20KB per document

Its really not bold at all.

If you drink that koolaid, Sounds like you would also believe megaupload was used 'primarily for non infringing use'

It looks good, but I am wary of using any of these guys stuff based on how fast they 'pivot' and shut things down.

Question-

I had a idea about how to make this type of punishment non feasible.

Replace the standard truecrypt bootloader with one of a design that has a 'self destruct'

What I mean by that is, when you turn on your computer and the boot loader is initialized it actually deletes its keyfile from disk and only keeps it in ram. If you dont enter the correct password in xxx minutes or if you restart the computer, that data is lost and restoring it becomes impossible.

There could be another option as well, a 'extra' unlock code that you could not prove the existence of, which could overwrite the deletion of the above.

Basically its a way to say "The FBI turned on my computer without asking me for instructions and destroyed my data- Its not possible for me to restore it, but this WAS my password"

This seems like a bit of attention whoring. If the guy wants to come back to the scene, which he very obviously does, then just do it. These occasionally cryptic updates should be reserved for the new releases of half life and portal. Not for a Ruby programmer who had a nervous breakdown and has now decided to return to public life. It is annoyingly cocky to be posting what he does and to assume the community will go through the time to behold his crypted messages and even more saddening that everyone is going for it hook line and sinker.

HN is not for this kind of stuff and it should be flagged. Tech news; not personal drama.

Also worth nothing- Jonathan Gillette never vanished into thin air. _why was just his made up character. Like kermit the frog.