11 ms·
I thought I was designing for SpaceX, it may have been for the Silk Road
- themodelplumber 10y agoThe Silk Road reference--is he saying he was working for Chinese interests? Where was the sensor data coming from? I understand it's probably a painful story to tell, but a lot of little details are missing here, and they'd probably help both the author's friends and new readers like me understand what happened.
- phpnode 10y agoHe's talking about the Silk Road marketplace - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)
- themodelplumber 10y agoThanks, so it sounds like the SpaceX pitch was just the client wanting to build up a really cool cover story while he worked on(?) Silk Road in secret. Right?
- phpnode 10y agoPresumably yes, and the datapoints being visualised would have presumably been transactions. The admin in question would have been Blake Benthall, not Ross Ulbricht who'd already been caught by then.
- elastic_church 10y agoSilk Road 2.0, Not Ross Ulbricht's but a different Dread Pirate Roberts
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sandworm101 10y agoThe lawyer was correct. If you have reason to suspect the FBI is watching you, they already have what they need. The men-in-black routine is meant to alter your behavior, to cause you to do something rare like empty an account or contact a distant friend. This was federal investigation 101. Walk past the car and photograph the driver. They really love that.
- jawns 10y agoI would love to hear more about this. Both you and the lawyer in the story recognize it as true, but is this something you're taught ... or learn officially ... or learn unofficially?
- sandworm101 10y agoExact procedures are of of course classified, but talk to enough people under investigation, read enough warrant affidavits, and you learn the patterns. They haven't changed much over the decades. They still dress in 1950ish black suits with sunglasses, at least when they want people to recognze them. This is a culture no different than any other corporation. They all dress to look like the boss/oldest man in the room. FBI agents follow the trial lawyers credo "never ask a question you don't already know the answer to". They dont ask for a meeting until they know enough to dominate the conversation. Thats why they watch nearly everyone they ever deal with. Actual footage of a low-level FBI agent engaged in semi-covert activities. Note the suit, haircut and body language (Ex-soldier, doesn't know a thing about the tech he is standing amongst). He stands in the middle of the action because he thinks that makes him part of the process, but all he can really do to help is close the cage door. This is a very junior agent out doing unimportant grunt work. He doesn't even have a partner with him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqX4oJWV-Ws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqX4oJWV-Ws
- pzh 10y agoHe kind of looks like Dean Winchester from 'Supernatural', and I thought that was a cliché.
- 10y ago
- hrayr 10y agoThis is a nice ShowHN with a cover story. I'm not questioning the validity, just finding this amusing.
- wongarsu 10y agoThe story is good, the app really isn't worth mentioning. It's little more than a slighlty nicer version of a paper prototype of the basic UI.
- ufmace 10y agoI'm not doubting the story, but it doesn't seem to fit together much the way that it's told here. Exactly who was he really working for, and what was his "friend"s relationship to them? All I can really say is maybe you should be extra skeptical when somebody talks about working for a "big name" company, like SpaceX, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. If you're never reading or writing emails from a company.com email address, going to company's actual public website, going for interviews or meetings at an actual company office, then maybe you should look really closely at who you're really working for.
- griffinmb 10y agoHe was working for "Defcon" or Blake Benthall (his roommate in the story). Defcon was running Silk Road 2.0 after the second "Dread Pirate Roberts" left. Blake had been working for SpaceX, and left to work on Silk Road. This is his HN account: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=blakeeb https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=blakeeb
- qz_ 10y agoThat's crazy. Is he in prison now?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- emodendroket 10y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7277371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7277371 Prophetic.
- dmix 10y agoDefcon was always much more hateable than DPR. There's probably a reason no-one came to his defense the way they did with Ross. And buying a Tesla with Bitcoin? He was begging to get caught. And he complains about greed. He should have watched Breaking Bad and learned the basic lesson of not buying a flashy car when you're trying to keep a low profile.
- sbierwagen 10y agoWhy did the silk road want a data visualization app? The "live demo" in the linked github doesn't seem to be very "live", in that it seems to be totally static. The post talks about "drawing correlations" but all it does it make a graph. http://sciview.herokuapp.com/#/data-sets/0 http://sciview.herokuapp.com/#/data-sets/0
- CoryG89 10y ago> Why did the silk road want a data visualization app? Telemetry, analytics, data visualization, and things like AB testing would probably work just as well for a dark web market as they would for Amazon. It's all about the money. As for why they felt they needed to create their own specific tool for this specifically, I'm not sure.
- busterarm 10y agoBecause it's virtually all SaaS these days. Can't exactly use some hosted service when you're running an illegal business over Tor. And it takes less time and is safer to write the software yourself than to do a full code audit of any self-hosted solution. Plus that would usually involve business contracts, etc.
- krick 10y agoYou want to believe it, because it would be a more exciting story. But if I wanted you to make me an analytic app for the Silk Road, I would tell you I want an analytic app for a marketplace. Which will be selling toys or whatever. Amazon 2.0. Not a fucking spaceship. It wouldn't be very plausible even if this guy was a programmer, asked to make some generic analytics engine for a spaceship (because things rarely are truly completely generic). But this guy is a designer. You do not hire a designer, because drawing a picture for UI is some secret knowledge available only to them, but because it requires spending your time thinking about this specific problem and picking pretty colors. So if I wanted to make some app without telling designers about the real purpose of the app, I wouldn't really need a designer at all. I would hire a programmer and ask him to make me another Salesforce, with exactly the same GUI.
- welder 10y agoHe hints at the end that 30 FBI agents kicked down his door, then says nothing more. Way to leave us hanging!
- cocktailpeanuts 10y agoWait for the next season of... Mr. Robot!
- pzh 10y agoOn the plus side, the OP had plausible deniability. I wonder whether he could've been considered an accomplice or liable in any way, or not knowing who he was working for completely exonerated him.
- pfarnsworth 10y agoThis story is completely unintelligible. I have no idea what this story is about, where does it say he was designing for Silk Road? Did he say he was talking with DPR or something?
- johansch 10y agoIt's a weird-ass story the writer likely concocted to save his ass.
- degenerate 10y agoThis. If he is ever charged he will point back at this article as "proof" of accidentally complicity.
- kneel 10y agoOooh, this makes sense now. He skimped hard on the details.
- mawburn 10y ago...thank you. I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt this way. I kept backtracking thinking I missed something. It's reads like a random stream of thoughts.
- jordache 10y agohorrible story.. i guess anyone can write on medium and the nice layout makes it somewhat legitimate looking. It could have very well been a rant on IRC
- stiva 10y agoThis really is an interesting story, but I wish he'd taken it to a journalist instead of writing it himself. The narrative is choppy and has a lot of holes in it. I would have loved to see this done as a feature from someone with a lot of experience writing about technology. That might also have given some extra credibility and context to things.
- wheelerwj 10y agowhat gave you that impression? I sent the following email (below) shortly before receiving the previous one (above).
- untog 10y agoI assume you mean about the credibility? We don't know those e-mails are real. A journalist handling the story would contact the relevant parties to confirm the account given.
- ryanx435 10y agonaw they'd just cite an anonymous source and publish anyways
- madgar 10y agoI assume they meant that it was seriously confusing to read an email without context, only to find the context in an earlier email after reading another full page of content.
- wheelerwj 10y agoI was just making a joke about it being choppy and hard to read.
- csomar 10y agoReally? I actually like it this way. Journalist tries to make it intriguing and longer. But that doesn't change the events or make them more interesting. I guess I just like simple and straightforward.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- gthtjtkt 10y agoEdit: Turns out the headline is completely made up. This was in the comment section: > So was “Sciview” actually some sort of analytics app for Silk Road, with the “sensors” representing some other Silk Road metrics? Or was BB truly freelancing for SpaceX while administering Silk Road? > AUTHOR: Excellent question, I don’t know. So he has no idea if he was just a subcontractor or if he was doing work for Silk Road. If I had to bet on this, I'd guess the friend subcontracted a project to him for easy cash (or because he was in over his head) and the Silk Road stuff was completely unrelated. What would Silk Road do with such an application anyway?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- bduerst 10y agoNot sure, but Silk Road obviously couldn't rely on traditional third party web analytics, even though they still needed to identify and fight spammers/fraud. There's also a lot of open-source solutions for things like this (PiWik, AWStats) so, as you said, the author probably was involved in the outsourcing a different project for someone in L.A. But then why would they try to disguise the sample as rocket sensor data? I also don't think you can go this long with living and working with someone, notice the major purchases/parties (with outstanding invoices from SpaceX), and not get a hint about what's going on. If there were so many parties, what did they think when none of the coworkers from SpaceX showed up to one? Or his roommate's Linkedin profile shows something else other than SpaceX?
- stephenhuey 10y agoHe had worked for SpaceX in the past. The blog post author omitted many details, probably because 2 years ago this story was so heavily documented by every major publication you can think of (BBC, NY Times, IB Times, Wired, Ars Technica) that he felt his audience would know the details.
- stephenhuey 10y agoDon't recall if I ever met the author of this blog post personally, but his boss/roommate mentioned this particular application to me several times over several months. I was thousands of miles away from SF but it came up repeatedly in casual conversations and after leaving SpaceX he seemed to genuinely believe he had a shot of selling this product to SpaceX as an internal tool. He always juggled lots of projects and besides this SpaceX idea, I remember him telling me 2 weeks before the arrest about another unrelated project he was trying to get a team together for so he could apply to Y Combinator. Never once did I hear anything hinting at involvement with the Silk Road, but he always talked about a million ideas at once. Anyone who knew him for long knew that he traveled a lot for years and years (back in 2010 he was the first person I knew who jumped on Jet Blue's special offer of a month of unlimited travel for only $600), so the author would've realized that was routine if he knew him for long. I do find the author's story very plausible.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y agoI think this is a great story to tell buddies when grabbing a drink, but not really good for posting online which will last forever. Maybe if the project was actually functional and high quality, but it's just a half baked project that doesn't even work. Furthermore, there's no proof that what he worked on was actually silk road. Even looking at the screenshots it says nothing about silkroad, looks actually like a spacex project. Like others said, I think his main motivation is to post it for the record, so if one day he disappears, people know where to track him down.
- shitgoose 10y agoso, who do you have on your resume, SpaceX or Silk Road?
- yeukhon 10y agoI wonder if SpaceX will recruit him after the publicity.
- jnpatel 10y agoThe author's title seems misleading, since in the post's comments Thomas acknowledges how he's not sure if his design was being actually used for Silk Road or if his leaseholder really was freelancing for SpaceX.
- joshstrange 10y agoI honestly have no clue how this is voted so high on HN right now, I assume it's just the title people are voting on. It makes no sense, jumps around and no flow. I had to re-read parts multiple times and I still have no clue what is going on.
- clay_to_n 10y agoAs bad as the writing style is, I still found the story interesting. The bits of info about working with his friend are juicy, even if the title is overblown and there's not much meat to the post.
- minus7 10y agoIf you take a look at the code on Github you quickly realize it's complete bullshit, a bit of hardcoded data [1] and one file of backend code that looks like it was copied from somewhere [2]. [1] https://github.com/tdrach/Sciview/blob/master/public/javascripts/services/Sources.js https://github.com/tdrach/Sciview/blob/master/public/javascr... [2] https://github.com/tdrach/Sciview/blob/master/routes/api/v1/journey.js https://github.com/tdrach/Sciview/blob/master/routes/api/v1/...
- weaksauce 10y agoI mean there is not much there... odd that the author thinks this would be used by spacex like it's close to being done.
- TrevorJ 10y agoHe doesn't claim it was a finished product
- wongarsu 10y agoBut he talks about an ongoing business relationship. He probably spend a lot of time that isn't obvious in the code (requirements, interface design, software design etc.), but we can only see code that anyone could have coded within one hour. That's substantially less than what I would have expected from the article.
- the_hangman 10y agoWow, this is utter shit. There is literally nothing here. No wonder he was going 70+ days without being paid.
- ukyrgf 10y ago> This makes for an awkward cupcake ceremony where you’re not sure whether to smile or to laugh. "I don't know whether to smile or laugh" isn't a very powerful expression.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoWhat does it mean?
- ukyrgf 10y agoA common idiom is "not know whether to laugh or cry", which usually means a situation is extremely bad. I don't really know how that applies to having a birthday party a week after you announce you're quitting, though.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago"Not know whether to laugh or cry" usually means (to me) a situation is both funny and sad. Like you wouldn't say "my entire family was killed in an automobile crash, I don't know whether to laugh or cry," there's no humorous component. Like you said, birthday cake celebration of an outgoing employee is neither.
- jpeg_hero 10y agoDo a FOIA request and get your FBI file. Could be interesting confirmation
- jordache 10y agoWtf? Why would spacex utilize a freelancer front end Dev / designer to develop a one off crappy custom soln for data analysis? When much more robust, performant, established solutions exist? Also space x is not a green start up, why would they still lack the ability to visualize and analyze data? The author obviously failed to ask himself this obvious questions.