Are you supporting this law in favor of the purported "more safety for children" outcome regardless of the privacy impact? Or do you believe the government should have access to the information that's generally encrypted?

I'm in the latter camp. If I can't trust the people my community decided to represent us, then I can only fix that problem by organizing and running myself. I haven't done that just yet. I'm very much on the fence here though - since this does grant a lot of power to the government...

But I don't really feel like this is the most effective way to make our children safer, and I feel like framing it like that is disingenuous. Maybe the reps who introduce it feel that passionately about this issue - but I'm sure a less drastic solution is available.

Maybe we should apply the "principle of least privilege" to the government!

Your first argument discounted psychological studies primarily on the basis that there are two many dimensions to account for in relation to a measurement of behavior.

You then went on to suggest a link between gender identification and the results of a study on a single variable. It’s probably the case there are many environmental and physical dimensions at play with gender identity. While I can’t say at this point that your link is wrong, it may be best to hold back on the last assumptions; especially a biologically based one, given the scope of the impact.

You're literally replying to a comment which makes this exact point.

> Well, we can introduce a protocol, and study it, and know conclusively in perhaps 10 years. But, between then and now...

Lots of negativity here that I don’t think is completely justified. I subscribe to a family plan for 1password. I have options to sync with iCloud and several other cloud services, and for the most part that’s great. But I don’t have an option to sync with a service that I can guarantee will remain in existence and outside of state control. I also have to maintain an account in good standing with these services, or potentially host and secure my own hardware.

Blockchains - at least those that are heavily adopted - provide a kind of good solution to this problem. State is maintained by a third party that’s likely to be around for a while, and if I forget or can’t pay a bill for a while, my credentials are still stored and accessible at a later time. I like the idea of paying a little to a third party for the store operation, vs paying a little every month for the privilege of performing a get operation.

It's not a lot of data. There are other places where you could publish a small file for free, provided that you entirely trust the encryption and therefore are willing to make the file public. For example, a gist on Github.

(But personally, I wouldn't publish the encrypted file, just in case.)

Store it with some scheme like TripleSec https://keybase.io/triplesec/ and put it in a private gist on GitHub, so you'd need three encryption algorithms plus GitHub account security to be broken before anyone can get to it.

> But I don’t have an option to sync with a service that I can guarantee will remain in existence

How does blockchain ensure this? (I'm not sure that blockchain has any particular advantages or disadvantages here compared to the classic "upload it to Usenet" approach to reliable backups.)

> and outside of state control.

How does blockchain ensure this? In particular,

- State still control almost every network connection in the world, and blockchain is meaningless if you can't actually connect to the network.

- Almost all blockchain schemes distribute power in proportion to existing ("real-world") power, e.g., people with the most existing capital, people with the most computational resources, people with the most coercive ability. Wouldn't you specifically not want a blockchain if you're worried about state power executing a 51% attack?

- What, precisely, is a state going to do by "controlling" your encrypted password store? Controlling a cleartext password store, sure, but there are already well-established mechanisms to just encrypt them, no blockchain required. And I don't really understand what a 51% attack on an encrypted file is supposed to do.

Blockchains are very good at one thing: avoiding double-spend attacks in a system otherwise susceptible to Sybil attacks. That turns out to be exactly the problem that a worldwide distributed electronic currency has. But it's not the problem everyone has. If you don't have that problem, blockchains are not particularly useful to you.

Block chain seems like an overkill solution for this though. I could just use open source software like keepass and sync the encrypted password file to a few different local devices and maybe a cloud backup option. If I can't pay the cloud bill, that's fine, I have a few local backups.

Blockchain's most important feature is the shared ledger. But for a password manager, I don't have anything I need to prove to anyone else.

This seems like a use case much better suited to the BitTorrent protocol than blockchain.

In either case, it seems unwise to put your passwords in the hands of absolutely anyone and everyone even if they are encrypted.

On the other hand, you're making a pretty big bet on the correctness of the implementation of the tool. What if, due to a sneaky bug, the tool uses far less entropy than is required to securely encrypt your passwords? If there is nobody working (professionally, for money) to check that the implementation is correct, you're just hoping that your passwords (stored on a public blockchain) were blessed with the correct incantations. As it turns out, getting a proper audit of products like this where there is no central money-having entity is incredibly hard.

Uh yes you do? Keepass and sync to self hosted services

I'm a little uncomfortable with how quickly you decided to label these thoughts racist/xenophobic; but I'd like to better understand where that comes from.

Lynn's stating that he hasn't seen any clear examples of where diversity led to innovation; and while your scenario makes sense, you're not providing 1) an actual example that demonstrates why he's incorrect, 2) any observation that a diverse group will generally produce that innovation.

> I'm a little uncomfortable with how quickly you decided to label these thoughts racist/xenophobic; but I'd like to better understand where that comes from.

Right, and that's totally fair!

I don't know that Lynn is racist or xenophobic, and I'm unsure whether I believe that he is for sure. But I find his statement to be... curious, to say the least.

My point was that this kind of rhetoric — "Diversity isn't that important"; "Diversity doesn't lead to anything particularly good"; "Diversity doesn't do XYZ thing that people says it does" — is often common amongst racists/xenophobes who are attempting to hide their true opinion (that non-white people are inherently lesser or worse than white people). It's a way of phrasing their thoughts in a way that's not obviously offensive. People think "Yeah, I guess that makes sense!" and suddenly diversity is valued less than it ought to be.

You said that "Lynn's stating that he hasn't seen any clear examples of where diversity led to innovation", and this is definitely true on a factual level — Lynn is merely stating that he hasn't seen such evidence. But I would argue that he may not have been looking for such evidence. Here's a hypothetical scenario: perhaps Lynn was a developer who worked in a company where the vast majority of developers and employees in general were straight white males. The products they produce are good stuff, and seem innovative enough. Therefore, Lynn concludes that "innovation [doesn't necessarily] come from diversity."

Lynn could very well just be another guy blinded by what is now commonly described as "white privilege" — essentially he is unable to see the positive effects that his being white has granted him compared to non-white people because the situations he exposes himself to do not exemplify anything else. Or he could be a racist/xenophobe who is relying on people like you to say "Well he probably didn't mean it that way" and give him a free pass.

The reason I lean towards the latter is because of his choice to utilize this opinion to then build a political platform. It seems unlikely that someone would both (a) feel that diversity is not really that important because of their background but also (b) choose to use that opinion to build a political platform. The people who build political platforms have strong convictions, more often than not. And what kind of person has strong convictions about diversity not being important?

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Here's something else to think about. A common opinion of people like Lynn (based on what little I know from the article) is that all hiring decisions should be 100% merit-based.

At first glance, this seems totally reasonable, right? Why would we not want a meritocracy?

Consider the IQ test as a counter-example. The stated purpose of an IQ test is to measure a person's intellectual capabilities relative to an average baseline. The stated purpose has nothing to do with race or culture or anything like that.

And yet... IQ tests are almost all inherently prejudiced against large groups of people. If we go back to some of the earlier tests, they're really essentially racist. That's because the tests were written by smart white males to measure the capabilities of other people relative to those same smart white males. They gave English grammar tests to non-native English speakers. They gave math tests to people who had never been taught math. And then they passed off the results in a way that indicated that other people were less than they were.

I readily admit that in a field like computer science, it's a little easier to come up with more fair measures of ability. But I think that the current mentality is very similar to that of the "scientists" who gave IQ tests back in the day, and that concerns me greatly. I think we should focus more on inclusivity and diversity in the short-term and restore meritocracy in the future when there are fewer historical prejudices at play.

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Sorry I wrote so much, and sorry it took me so long to respond! I always forget to check my comments on HN. Is there no way to get notifications for responses like I get on Reddit? Kind of a pain haha.

This supports previous research that indicates there's a connection between asthma and cleaning products, particularly in occupational cleaners.

I don't see any reference to study on particular cleaning solutions, exposure times, or any particularly reliable control. I'll continue working under the assumption that long term exposure to any chemical can be associated with an increased health risk - until a more detailed study is done there's really no actionable conclusion here.

Attaching a transaction history and wallet to an identity perfectly positions keybase as a player in the credit scoring industry.

I’m excited to see this, and hopeful that it takes off. However, I’ve enjoyed utilizing keybase as an identity tool. I’ve had a decent experience with the system as a workplace productivity tool (chat, git). I’m worried that the team will lose focus by branching into a third, and potentially fourth area of focus.

So would a signature check on the trusted layer against a signature generated with the device id (you'd need to distribute a different binary against every device id) permit the generation of an OS image that could only run on a single device?

It would, in theory. If there weren't any catches with this approach though... Apple could have avoided having itself in this position in the first place.