I'm not sure how linking to twitter supports your comment that HN needs to improve. If he'd said that on HN he'd have been (I assume) banned. dang is constantly asking people not to be mean or dumb, or banning people for being mean.
dang is great. I just wish we had a bit less negativity.
--
Finally, a brief history for readers who dont know yet:
* Cryptocat v1 was a cat themed anonymous chat webapp with very broken homebrew encryption. It was basically Nadim's crypto learning project as far as I can tell when he was ~20 years old.
* Snowden allegedly used it at some point. Oops.
* Crypto experts reviewed it and found significant flaws. Tptacek wrote about how terrible it was, how JS crypto is Considered Harmful, how amateurs shouldn't write crypto because they could get someone killed, etc
* Cryptocat v2 a desktop chat app using Axolotl / Signal Protocol for e2e encryption. Nadim is a phd student now. It's a new and totally separate codebase.
tldr; there's no reason to assume that Cryptocat v2 sucks in the ways the original did. It may be totally sound.
(I have no involvement w the project and have not reviewed the code.)
No he wouldn't.
The knives are out for Signal. It's not hard to see that. Of the "independent" messaging schemes, Signal is probably the only one that has a chance of relevance 5 years from now. Everyone else is working on something that will be a checkbox feature for Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook in less time than that.
I'm happy about that. Clearly, not everyone else is.
Which is exactly why I, even though I don't care much for drama (infosec drama especially), find myself "complaining" about Signal from time to time. Because we are going to have to live with it. If I could go back and "complain" about PGP, before that became the preferred "just use" argument, I would.
What did he do? Does he know what he did? Do we ever get to find out? The people want answers.
Nadim has enough information to know what that hash corresponds to. Maybe he'll tell you. I won't. Not until I'm ready.
I don't think it should. I think us pretending that we are some group of regal statesmen is a bunch of pretentious bullshit.
Being civil is preferable, but not if it means being fake.
People aren't any less "mean" on HN, they're just good at bullying in more subtle ways, and we are all worse off for it.
For those who don't know, here was Thomas Ptacek recently joking about Nadim's penis: https://mobile.twitter.com/tqbf/status/705825790529662976
Here he is telling Nadim "go fuck yourself, forever": https://mobile.twitter.com/tqbf/status/705900243313758208
This is unprofessional. That kind of bullying is especially unacceptable coming from someone who has a lot of money and a pretty big audience, directed at someone who is young and just starting out.
I think Hacker News should be better than this.