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rdl
39,335karma·10,537submissions·July 8, 2008
about
Working on stuff at the intersection of cryptocurrency and computer security. Also a Puerto Rico resident (Act 20/22); happy to help people move to Puerto Rico to take advantage of the federal tax exemption, 0% capital gains rate, and 4% business income tax rate. Also FFL07/SOT02.
Chief Security Officer for Evertas Insurance -- the world's first cryptoasset insurance carrier. https://evertas.com/
Previously, CEO and Co-Founder of CryptoSeal (YC S11), which was sold to CloudFlare on 2 June 2014. CISO/Board Member of Tezos Foundation 2018-2020.
Previous startup founder (HavenCo, a couple ecash projects, distributed colo, and DoD/Iraq contracting, new thing), too. Deeply interested in computer security, infrastructure, security, conflict zones, and making the world a better place.
Aside from living on a Caribbean island during crypto export controlled 1990s, I've lived on a tiny artificial platform in the North Sea, plus more reasonable places like London, Amsterdam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and spent 6 months diving in Thailand.
"I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace."
Email: ryan@venona.com (etc) Twitter: @octal https://twitter.com/octal LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlackey
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recent activity (10,537 total)
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It's pretty common for VCs to have the company being invested in pay for legal/research/etc. expenses out of the investment amount -- so you raise $500k and immediately pay $50k back to the VC for the…
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I'm also curious why 4/7 were cut -- was it that they were mediocre teams/products that Wertz didn't want to fund, or was it just that you ran out of money in the bridge period? It seems unlikely to …
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http://blog.bootuplabs.com/2010/04/14/wertz-joins-board-firs... I'm not really sure how I feel about this. It seems like they behaved pretty reasonably for a regular company, but as a fiduciary, th…
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How hard is it to set up a Vancouver startup independently, if you have 2-3 US citizens who want to relocate? Assume you have $100-200k of your own funding. Gaming the tax credits seems like it takes…
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Thank you! I love mixergy; it's probably my third favorite online news source after hn and news.google.com; it just beats out economist and quora.
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In general I think the video adds nothing to the Mixergy interviews -- I wish there were a way to subscribe to mp3 only. Some kind of interview + screencast/demo would be vastly more interesting, but …
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Not really; the hassle of maintaining a hackintosh is high. (I've considered it). Your time should be worth the $650 or so. I would consider the W510 to be a closer analogue, too.
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I really have no idea why people are so afraid of them. Maybe I'm foolish, but compared to someone like Scientology, I doubt they're terribly effective at harassment. I posted their URL on the origin…
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Attractive females in the 18-25 bracket are pursued by men in the 18-death age bracket, far more than 18-25 year old men are pursued by women in the 18-death age bracket. This leads to scarcity, and m…
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A hackernews dating site would be amazing, except for the demographic problem of too many heterosexual males. My favorite sites so far for meeting people for dating have been flickr, chow, and dprevie…
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If you can take the productivity hit to do this, I would be interested. My preferred format is kindle/iPad ebook of some kind, although PDF is fine too. I would pay up to $20/mo, but $5 would be mor…
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I can't figure out which site he's talking about (I assumed eHarmony, but they don't seem to use "elite" as branding, and searching for elite dating brought up only escort agencies).
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Tupolevs aren't exactly the safest of planes, and I think the President flew a lot more hours than most people. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if there was pressure put on the aircrew to not divert fro…
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I have seen 150/hr corp to corp or 1099 for single-person developers. Time spent getting contracts, doing administration, etc. means you can't bill for 100% of your time, but you can definitely make 2…
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One of the problems until recently with Ireland was massive inflation in salaries and housing costs. Even with low taxes, it's difficult for a startup to get started and grow there (sort of a victim …
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I still don't understand the hyperfocus on cost savings without looking to increasing income. For a startup, saving costs allows you more time to try to develop product-market fit and thus increase in…
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I lived/worked in the Tenderloin and in the "bad part" of SoMA for a while, and have personally observed:
* Club kid (homeless? probably not) shitting on the street, sheltered behind my car. 300 lum…
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This reminds me of routergod: http://www.routergod.com/ Fake celebrity essays/interviews about technical topics.
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The only real value they provide is the anonymization of submissions -- there are technical ways to do this, but most people with information won't know about those technologies beforehand. Authentica…
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I still am confused by the WikiLeaks budget request -- $200k minimum exclusive of salaries per year just to keep the lights on? $600k with a couple salaries? JYA did this with cryptome for YEARS as a…
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Molecular gastronomy would be a fun thing to try at one of the hacker spaces (hacker dojo, noisebridge, ...) (or just one well-equipped kitchen). Several cooking techniques (e.g. sous vide) use some i…
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Most of the justification for a doctor's prescription for routine is that the doctor will catch drug interactions, side effects, or changes in the disease. This is pretty bogus given automated testin…
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I heard this was about $500k in additional cost and maybe +6mo, starting from a reasonable technical basis, which doesn't seem that bad. There's also the "sell it outside the USA, then sell inside the…
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Yeah, it is nice to be able to work on something where you can be at a party and someone mentions a motorcycle accident or something, and you can point out how the product you work on was involved in …
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That is more true for EHR than for a lot of the more specialized systems in radiology, pharmacy, lab, etc. For those, it's much more clearly a CS problem, with a UI component, and then some interacti…
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I work with DICOM more than HL7. DICOM is very frustrating, especially because the task it tries to solve could be so easily done. I think DICOM-related products (an open stack for equipment vendors…
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I agree -- and it's amazing how bad the existing software is. (I work in this field). It would be a great place to do a startup (there are a bunch of niches which could easily support multiple compan…
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I like starting companies in general because I like:
* seeing direct effects from what I do (it's like a game!)
* freedom and responsibility to make important decisions, not filling in TPS reports all…
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Taubes explains this (sort of) by explaining that fructose goes straight to the liver, thus not contributing to glycemic index, but doing something to the liver related to insulin to make fat cells mo…