Unfortunately, there's a lot of bad in SV now.

It was more like one company with a stranglehold on the market was terrible. The intensity of that has waxed and waned, but that's been true from then all the way until now.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47961596

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

So it's extremely important that they get an injunction that allows the cloud compute companies to continue to work them. I think they probably will, but it's really crazy that the government is actively trying to kill them off over this.

This software is my retro computing white whale, I've never been able to find it. But I think it's evolved into a product called OpenInsight, by Revelation Software, which still exists.

But I don't think even he believes he's going to launch a million satellites.

Making authentication and SSO more painless will actually make the world a better place -- apps will become more secure, people will be less frustrated when they use them, etc., and people like me will have less stress in their lives.

There is one cultural thing that might be confused with unfriendliness. Sometimes people react badly if someone posts incorrect information. But I think that's good. When you search for information about Python or PHP you have to wade through quite a bit of junk. Ironically, it's sometimes easier to find correct answers for Clojure.

Clojure itself is very clean and consistent, it's got a lot of polish to it, which makes it comparatively easy to learn. And there isn't that much of it. But for a long time the tooling was hard.

That's far less of a problem than it used to be. deps.edn and shadow-cljs both made things easier, as has Cursive. People say nice things about Calva, but I don't know it.

I'm a big fan. Babashka alone is enough to make learning Clojure worthwhile. Also, for someone like me, it's kind of nice that it feels almost finished. Once you learn it, you know it, and now that the tooling has settled down a bit you don't have to keep running to keep up.

Other people had a lot to do with the spread of strong crypto as well. Many people realized that encryption was necessary if we wanted to do business online. Matt Blaze (who was on the Cypherpunks list, but never said anything crazy), helped blow up the government's compromise solution, mandatory key escrow, by demonstrating flaws in their Clipper chip technology. The MIT Press published PGP's source code in book form, using an OCR font, because books couldn't be blocked as munitions. I think Hal Abelson, who wasn't on the list, was the person behind that.

The basic political idea behind the list was that you could effect change by writing code. Instead of going to the government, with your cap in your hand, and saying, Please, sir, can we have strong encryption?, you write code and give it away, thus making the law impossible to enforce. This sounds really cool when you're young, especially if you write code, but it's an anti-democratic idea.

The political positions of some of the leaders was kind of an extreme, anarchist spin on libertarianism. Bitcoin is a currency designed to solve a specific problem -- it's kind of the ultimate solution to the old goldbug fear that governments will print money and dilute the currency. That's impossible under Bitcoin.

The original crypto currency the Cypherpunks were really into was David Chaum's Digicash, which was designed to solve a completely different problem, the same one Monero is aimed at today. It was supposed to be untraceable. Instead of asking governments to lower taxes, the idea was that programmers could create a way to transfer funds anonymously. In theory, taxes would become impossible to collect, and national borders would collapse.

Eventually this led to things like discussions of anonymous murder contracts. There was a proposed protocol that was supposed to allow you to put out a hit on someone with complete safety. You could pay the killer anonymously with digital currency. I think the payment would go into some sort of escrow, so the killer would know they'd get paid. I don't remember how the system was able to know that the hit had taken place.

Those murder contracts were one of the things that made me pull back from the list. But it really was terrific to read, even though I think it would be a mistake to lionize it too much. Arguably, they were struggling to make the whole world run on 8chan's rules.