We're hiring at status for a number of different engineering and supporting roles, check out or postings here - https://jobs.status.im/. We rely on some of the technologies built by PL and the surrounding community and would love to engage with talented individual contributors that want to continue building p2p and decentralized solutions across the board. You can hit me up directly with any questions at dryajov at status dot im.
Hey HN! Status is developing a range of tools, protocols and solutions for secure communication, p2p storage and distributed consensus. We're looking for highly skilled and motivated individuals to come work with us on a variety of technically challenging and high impact projects.
yep, I get a 404 on those assets, CORS is just a generic error the browser displays apparently. Has sent me down a few rabbit holes over the years - I which CORS isn't mentioned when its just a 404... arrg...
I think some of the fundamental shortcomings could and will be replaced/fixed by decentralization/distribution which is actively being worked on with projects like ipfs and ethereum.
Thats a great way of describing the process of creating an enemy, the question is what you do with that enemy. Natzy Germany took it to the extreme of total extermination. I can't help but notice how this is still a very effective tactic that governments, in particular in the west, continue to use to advance its military agenda - we just haven't got to the point of were we see another full blown extermination in progress. However, and the scariest part of this is that all the machinery to achieve that is in place and has only improved. The media (willingly or unwillingly) is very effective at painting an enemy, dehumanizing him and eventually justifying military action. Can this be changed, is there a way of doing the right thing, without abusing it?
Bitcoin and other blockchains are not currency, they are platforms and infrastructure. Currently, Bitcoin doesn't have a lot of intrinsic value, but as more and more core services (DNS, identity, etc...) migrate over to the blockchain/s it will eventually increase its value and come out of the _initial_ speculative phase.
The blockchain is essentially a globally distributed transactional log, that allows you to build things that require synchronization and consistency, it just so happens that moving assets is the most obvious application.
Currently it's pretty slow, but work is being done, specially in ethereum to speed it up. Things like proof of stake over proof of work as well as sharding should make it a lot faster, and capable of processing several thousands of transactions a second. Ethereum is also the next step in the evolution of the blockchain, with the addition of a Turing complete virtual machine it is now possible to execute arbitrary code and have a truly programmable block chain. This allows it to be used for virtually anything without having to roll your own blockchain, for example you can program a truly distributed naming system that would allow alyisyng anything out there to human readable names, from IPs to to arbitrary hashes in a distributed file system, or even fisical people, granted they have a virtual presence of some sort and and a unique hashed handle.
The other important aspect of it is the possible symbioses with the distributed/decentralized web or web3 or next web. Decentralization seems to be the theme for the next several years, and I personally am extremely optimistic about some or all of it becoming real and currently actively trying to contribute to it in any way I can.
However for decentralization to become economically vaiable an intrinsic way of incentivation is required and this is one more place where the blockchain will be what makes it possible.
To sumarize:
* Blockchain is a platform not a currency
* It enables synchronization on a global distributed scale
* "Next web" and blockchains go hand in hand. On the one hand providing the backbone infrastructure required to run some critical parts of web3, on the other providing a transparent digital aset management system which you can build incentivation on top of.
On a side note, I wouldn't necessarily trust Buffet and company on this one, for one, it requires a pretty good understanding of the technologies involved to be able to make any sort of informed prediction, and I'm not sure if you can perform any sort of typical fundamental analysis on it at all, which is a common practice in his business line, and yes currently the bitcoin price might be somewhat speculative, but that will change as more and more core infrastructure relies on it.
As for scammers, raids and etc... That's pretty common in a nascent complex and deregulated environment such as this, remember the WWW at the beginning ;)?
This, thats exactly what I think. We as an industry are so confused about what we do that it's starting to become a real problem. Engineering is very different from science and many companies are interviewing as if hiring a scientist, for what is essentially an engineering role, and when they get someone that can crack algos left and right, but can't code in real life situations, they wonder WTF?
Honestly, I believe the industry is cannibalizing it self, and this sort of practices is pushing out more and more creative and capable people. When I have to make a choice of whether to practice my algorithms or work on my open source project, is when things are going to start blowing up. This industry is built by people with passion and dedication, some of the most powerful and defining projects were built by individuals who sacrificed their spare time to build something useful, now they will sacrifice that time to practice... Algos? C'mon!!! I think our industry has passed the initial honey moon period, when crazy and beautiful solutions crystalized in garages and basements all across the county and the world, and we're headed for a bumpy landing were big corps control open source and the crazies that made them possible are pushed out. This is not sustainable on the long run, and pretty soon were going to be regulated to oblivion. Bye bye innovation.
Pouchdb/Couchdb can be used to build a self hosted alternative. With pouchdb you get replication to any couchdb like backend, offline storage in the browser (which neither parse nor firebase offer yet), and it runs on a number of platforms - browser, mobile, standalone server with several backends including levelup/down and SQLite. There are a number of node modules that will allow you to build a PaaS like self hosted backend (if thats even a thing), one such module is superlogin, https://www.npmjs.com/package/superlogin. It offers an angular client, I'm also building a vanilla js version for it that can be used without angular - https://github.com/dryajov/superlogin-client. That said, Parse server has been open sourced, and it might just suit your needs.
Thats definitely one of my favorite books. If anyone is interested in Bulgakov, "Heart of a Dog" is another book to read. Perhaps, even wittier than "Master and Margarita".
I'm the author of the framework, and would really appreciate some feedback. The framework is still in pretty early stages, and not necessarily ready for production. Please ask questions, and leave feedback :)