# Key Points from IRC Conversation

• Security researchers discovered that 0.75% of TLS certificates share keys due to insufficient entropy during generation, allowing them to obtain RSA private keys for 0.50% of TLS hosts and 0.03% of SSH hosts by finding common factors in public keys, as detailed in the papers "Mining Your Ps and Qs" and "Ron was wrong, Whit is right."

• Web scraping techniques were discussed, with recommendations to use mitmproxy for examining HTTP requests rather than dealing directly with JavaScript, and suggestions for phantomjs+casperjs as alternatives to Selenium for JavaScript-heavy scraping tasks.

• The conversation touched on alternative approaches to medical decision-making, referencing MetaMed (a medical consultancy with LessWrong community ties) and Robb Wolf's Specialty Health initiative, both attempting to improve upon traditional consensus-based medical approaches.

• Participants debated the merits of email-based communication platforms (like Mailman/Sympa) versus web forums, with concerns raised about maintaining accounts across multiple proprietary platforms like Discourse.

• Technical discussions included the acquisition and use of UV-vis spectrophotometers, with notes about sourcing deuterium bulbs inexpensively from Alibaba and potentially using spectrophotometers as monochromators when lacking proper equipment.

• A link was shared about Starcraft's development history, describing how a competitor's fake game demo at E3 prompted Blizzard to completely reboot their development process, ultimately leading to a much better final product.