screwt

This article is a great explainer of the basics underlying anonymous credentials. I look forward to the promised follow-up explaining real-world examples.

The key issue however is trust. The underlying protocols may support zero-knowledge proofs. But as a user I'm unlikely to be able to inspect those underlying protocols. I need to be able to see exactly what information I'm allowing the Issuer to see. Otherwise a "correct" anonymous scheme is indistinguishable from a "bad" scheme whereby the Issue sees both my full ID and details of the Resource I wish to access. Assuming a small set of centralized Issuers, they are in a position of great power if they can see exactly who is trying to access exactly what at all times. That's the question of trust - trust in the Issuer and in the implementation, not the underlying math.

In case you don't already know - set noprocrast in your HN profile to limit the time you spend on this site.

It's great that you slip into this mode automatically.

For me, the reframing of "goal" to "quest" helps enormously with this change of mode. A "goal" is something I hope/want to achieve in future - but today I'm busy with day-to-day chores etc. A "quest" however is something you are on. So if I'm on a quest to do X, of course I need to do something toward it every day.

(very late reply, but in case you see it)

This Joel On Software article [0] is a good starting point. Incredibly it's now over 20 years old so that makes me feel ancient! But still relevant today.

The suggestion that the web should just use utf-8 everywhere is largely true today. But we still have to interact with other software that may not use utf-8 for various legacy reasons - the CSV file example in the original article is a good example. Joel's article also mentions the solution discussed in the original article, i.e. use heuristics to deduce the encoding.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minim...

Yes, this has happened. See this example from OpenJSF:

"The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated emails. These emails implored OpenJS to take action to update one of its popular JavaScript projects to “address any critical vulnerabilities,” yet cited no specifics" [0,1].

[0] https://openjsf.org/blog/openssf-openjs-alert-social-enginee... [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/04/other-attempt...

With Google->Alphabet and Facebook->Meta, we can now use MAAAM instead.

Not for trains - there's a shared expectation that pedestrians should not access the track.

Similarly, not for a freeway.

Where some feel the balance is wrong, is at local-level streets. Today the assumption in most places is that cars have total right of way, and pedestrians must keep clear. It doesn't have to be that way. In a residential area, it's quite feasible to say all road users have equal right to use the space. And in that circumstance, put the onus on the car user (wielding a heavy, dangerous weapon) to not hit other road users.

If you’re in a group and talking about something factual

A good rule of thumb for this that a few of my circles use: you can check, but only after 10 minutes have passed. Of course, 95% of the time by then no-one cares, as you say. Occasionally it's still relevant after 10 minutes, and so checking makes sense.

They are not sailing downwind in this case - they're sailing across the wind, which is why they are able to travel so much faster.

Do you check everyone's card when you split the bill? What makes you think the others are debit rather than credit cards?

For info: the debit & credit cards from my bank look almost identical. The only difference is one says "credit" in small black text. My credit card handles exactly like my debit card in terms of tap-and-pay etc. I just wouldn't use it to take out cash from an ATM, but then I can't remember when I last needed to do that.

Easy! People have lots of different reasons why they may choose not to eat meat or dairy. "Not liking the taste" is one possible reason. If that particular one isn't your reason, then you may still miss the taste/texture of certain foods, so having a substitute helps.

ELO ratings start at 600 for absolute beginner. With a good amount of effort, a dedicated amateur can reach ~1500 without too much difficulty, and at that level you'll beat any casual player. 2000 is international standard. Best human player is around 2700. Note - chess.com does not use ELO ratings - they have their own rating system which is more complex (includes an uncertainty factor based on how recently you have played), but is supposed to be roughly equivalent. The author of the article is playing blitz chess (3 minutes a game) rather than standard chess, so the ratings are largely irrelevant to standard levels.

For a very large set of people, motivation to study is absolutely key. If your motivation comes directly from learning the concept itself, you may be right that studying it directly is more effective. But for many, trying to do that because it's "better" will lead to worse outcomes when they end up not completing the study.

Calling it "an excuse to slack off" ignores that different people's motivations are different. If being interested in poker makes someone want to learn the underlying math, then that probably is the most effective way _for them_ to study it.

You're right - though it's more about the precise timing of the tones than the frequencies themselves.

The T.38 protocol exists to allow faxes to send over a packetized network. Already if you're sending a fax there's a high chance it's been converted to T.38 at some point, as SPs gradually move toward a fully packetized core.

That's not the case where I work.

It's a sound business decision for a company to invest in its people. Better-trained staff, happier staff, longer retention.

It sounds like the place you work isn't like that. There are other places that are better.

To be fair, the article does explicitly call out that the system won't work for arbitrarily hard or impossible problems. That's addressed in the opening paragraphs, and again called out in step 4.4 of the single-loop.

Yes - this does happen.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/dutch-chipmaker-sues-to-silence-se...

[2] http://www.eweek.com/blogs/security-watch/german-software-co...

[3] http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11259

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=security+researcher+sued&t=ffsb&ia...

Be aware that 'free range' and ('organic', FWIW) are close to meaningless in terms of animal welfare. Both give a set of definitions for what meets the label, which is then achieved by farmers by the most cost-effective means possible.

E.g. 1 - 'free range' chickens have almost no extra space per chicken compared to battery-farmed chickens, and many die after being trampled by the others. They are at least a breed which can stand on its own legs - battery chickens can't even walk.

E.g. 2 - 'organic' animals must not be fed antibiotics (which means their general conditions must be good enough for not too many to die from disease, which is otherwise avoided by routine antibiotics in feed). This means sick animals are generally left to die rather than be treated, since allowing antibiotics would lose organic status.

E.g. 3 - For eggs: no matter how good the conditions are for the hens, egg-laying chickens are a different breed to chickens-for-meat. Ergo, all male layer chicks are redundant, and are killed immediately on hatching (normal method is to grind the chicks en masse).

Eating animals is not a pleasant thing. Definitely worth reading up on.

(FTR: I eat animals, eggs, and dairy. I'm struggling to find out how to do so ethically, given the current 'ethical' labels are so close to meaningless.)

For self-driving cars, I'd much rather your code control _all_ the cars, not just an individual.

Individualistic driving leads to worse overall performance for everyone. One of the things I'm most looking forward to in an all-code-controlled driving future is seeing efficient highway traffic moving fast and smoothly.

(And yes, clearly there's a long transition period where some cars are controlled while others are still human-driven.)

True. But also the pendulum of which is better (Firefox vs Chrome) has swung back and forth a couple of times since Chrome first came out and overtook FF. At this point though most people are just using whichever was best N years ago, and haven't thought to compare recently.

I'll second brusch64 here.

I used SVN for 7 or 8 years and then Git for the past 3, with about a year of overlap (on different repos).

To me, Git is vastly superior. I tend to use it in quite an "SVN-like" fashion - there's a single main trunk branch that we all share - but in terms of what I can do locally it blows SVN out of the water.

The difference is that Git makes things that are hard or impossible in SVN trivial. So for e.g. I create local branches all the time; I commit a bunch of small changes locally as I experiment with a fix, and then `merge --squash` to leave a clean history for others; merging fixes across different branches is easy and just works.

if you don't have the official engineering degree, you will never be considered an engineer

The same is true in the UK - apart from the fact that we overload the term 'engineer' to mean both 'someone who fixes things' and 'someone with a particular professional qualification (similar to a doctor or lawyer)'.

Becoming a Chartered Engineer requires a relevant masters degree, some years of professional experience and then qualifying exams - which is similar to other professions such as medicine or law. And these professional qualifications exist for a reason - e.g. someone has to sign off on a new bridge project and say that it will be safe. I don't want that person to be someone who reckons they know what they're doing just because they've done it for 10 years.

NB: There are good reasons why software is (and should, IMO) be considered differently to a field such as structural engineering. And indeed, very few software engineers bother trying to achieve chartership.

As per jacquesm's comment below[0], your example would, by default, be compiled out if NDEBUG is defined. So in production you'd never release the lock.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8206258

Catch-22. In a similar vibe (but a fair bit shorter), Slaughterhouse 5. Both cover the hell of war by examining its absurdity. Catch-22 is also the funniest book you'll ever read.

If you're into engineering books, the best I've read is Skunk Works (Ben R Rich). It's an account of the work of Lockheed's legendary skunk works division - behind the U2 spy plane, stealth fighter and the blackbird sr-17.

- Browser plugin : block 'useless' sites entirely (for me, that's reddit, boingboing and a few others). I can check these out on my tablet at home, but not on my work PC

- HN noprocrast. I have this set to 30 mins max, refreshing after 8 hours. Which allows me 1 visit per day, which I can make the most of - rather than my previous must-check-every-5-minutes.

As soon as I couldn't just flick to [random website] I found I was able to concentrate longer on the real tasks at hand.

It's a bit of a bizarre analogy - I don't think it fits.

The reason why the rudder is at the back rather than the front of a ship is the same as why a pendulum rests straight down, but a pencil won't balance straight up - stability. I can't really see any links between that situation and the one being described in the article.

Not to say there aren't some good points being made - I think though the analogy being used distracts from, rather than adds to, these points.

And yes, the lack of capitalization does make it harder to read.

    Sites are susceptible when user input is ... incorrectly filtered for characters used in database commands ...   

Apologies for nit-picking at punctuation, but occasionally it matters :-)

"Twilio is over-billing ..." = Twilio is charging more than they should.

"Twillio is over billing ..." = Twilio has given up on billing. It's so over.

Just my personal bugbear - but sometimes it's worth getting this sort of thing correct. Apologies if this is just a US/UK difference, also (I'm in the UK).

I very strongly recommend the book "Eating Animals" by Jonathan Safran Foer in relation to this topic.

He covers the desensitization of abattoir workers, as well as documenting some of the cruelties (and just day-to-day work) that is involved throughout the life of the animals we eat (with a particular emphasis on factory farming).

From the article: > "The videos may seem troubling to someone unfamiliar with farming, said Kelli Ludlum, the group’s director of Congressional relations, but they can be like seeing open-heart surgery for the first time."

I completely disagree with using this as a reason not to show what is really going on. Personally, I think people should know exactly what goes on to produce the food they eat - and at that point decide whether you think it's ok or not.

And how much do you trust google/facebook? Because it would be trivial for them to link your logged-out behaviour to your account if they wanted to (via cookies and other means). Using a separate browser might help, buy isn't s guarantee.

I'm not trying to be paranoid here, just pointing out that there is a lot of information which we make available to Google. If they wanted to be evil, it would be.very easy.

I don't think it would tale much more to link this to your credit card either (eg via amazon/PayPal) by which time all your activotes ate there to see.

Again, not being paranoid, just pointing out we live in an info-rich environment. Your only way to avoid it is to go totally over yhe top in avoiding leaving any trace which most of us are not prepared to do.