skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This stuff is much simpler than it sounds, and that's a good thing.(1)

The intuition here is that with hashed data structures like merkle trees, if you and I agree on a hash digest, then we also agree on all the data hashed by that hash digest. Since you can hash a hash digest, this agreement operates recursively.

When we talk about a "query", all we're really saying is Alice wants to prove to Bob that if he runs some function on some datastructure, he'll get a particular answer. For instance, Alice might tell Bob "Hey, you know that merkle tree we both agree on? If you run get_index(10) on it, you'll get the value `foo`"

She can prove that to Bob, by running that operation herself on her computer, and then recording what data was accessed during that operation. Next, she serializes that data, and replacing the parts that weren't accessed with their hash digests. Finally, she sends that partial data structure to Bob.

When Bob gets that data, he first hashes it to make sure the root hash digest actually matches what he expected. Next he runs the operation, which will return the same result as when Alice ran it. This is a proof for a very simple reason: both sides ultimately did the exact same thing!

If it helps, think of virtual memory: the data that Bob is missing, is similar to a page in memory that has been flushed to disk. Unless your computation actually needs the data in that page, it'll run successfully even if your disk isn't working.

So why does all this matter? Basically, this is exactly what blockchains are supposed to do: let multiple parties verify the same thing is true, based on the same data. So in, say, Certificate Transparency, the operator of the CT log can generate can extract one of these proofs to convince the webbrowser - who doesn't have all the CT log data - that yes, if you run the operation "fetch cert #12345 from CT log" it will in fact return the cert they're expecting it too (in other words, CT already does exactly this). Where this improves on naive blockchains is simple: now you don't have to have the whole blockchain to verify something.

I actually did a Python implementation of these ideas years ago for a client: https://github.com/proofchains/python-proofmarshal I'm also (slowly) working on a Rust implementation.

FWIW, I think it's an awful example of how a really good idea has been explained terribly by academia. It actually pre-dates Andrew Miller's paper, but the previous example I found never caught on, likely because no-one understood what they were talking about. Heck, Andrew himself tried to explain it to me years ago, and I didn't get it, then went on to reinvent the same thing, which I only realized about another year later. We really need to find better ways to bridge those two worlds. :/

1) EDIT: And to be clear, I don't mean for that to come across as a negative way! Rather, it's good that academics have thoroughly proven these techniques actually work. But for programmers, the mechanics of those proofs aren't necessarily all that important. Same as how you can use calculus effectively to solve many problems without necessarily understanding in detail how we actually proved it worked.
Explains why everyone at IU uses Zoom nowadays for conference calls plus Slack for daily convo instead of Skype.
That doesn't really explain the timeline of crippling and disabling it. Surely is cheaper to reskin and fix bugs than it is to, seemingly, recreate the whole thing every year.
sometimes you just want to avoid talking to another human, I would be very happy to do these things online instead of an actual talk. I think the advantages are more in the other side, from customer support, which from some company is terrible (mostly fro management/budgets issues)
Indeed. They also didn't have the omnipresent surveillance back in 1989. Hard to imagine how the student movement back then would have gained momentum using today's communication tools (with the government backdoors and all).

Surveillance and an all-powerful regime has well and truly snookered the Chinese, and it seems their autonomy will not improve for a very long time.
I believe they have stopped putting much effort into Skype for Business and are hoping to move everyone to Teams ASAP.
>putting 100 first semester students into a room full of drugs and costumes and then letting them act "professional".

That had to be the most succinct description of the corporate work environment I've ever encountered. I'm shamelessly stealing that. Well said.
I don't consider removing superfluous features a bad thing as long as the core features are working flawlessly.

EDIT: Apparently they removed really useful features which is a bad development.
The move to "supernodes" happened barely a month after the acquisition was finalized, iirc. I remember thinking it was a bit too quick to have been instigated by MS alone. The chief architect later declared that they started working on the move more than a year before the acquisition was done, mostly for scalability issues. But it's true that, before the acquisition, Skype had been resisting requests for wiretapping capabilities from the US government for at least three years. It is not unreasonable to think that this move was factored in the acquisition (a conversation like "the US government will remain on your tail forever -- just sell to us and switch on those supernodes, and the problems go away: we take the reputational hit (and reputational credit with USGov) and you get f-u money" would not be out of the realms of possibilities).

After the acquisition, for sure, Skype has been completely owned by NSA and friends - this was confirmed in the Snowden docs.
dwm and demu from Suckless for over 12 years.

When I start X11, dwm and a xterm my ram consumption is only 60MB.

https://dwm.suckless.org/
That's what their public relations department says.

We don't have the full data, and seeing past behavior, it is completely possible they have second intentions with the change. We just can't rule out that possibly because of a press release.
Pretty much every sport? You don't go all out every opportunity you have the instant you have priority. Nearly every sport has some concept of setting up plays: American football, soccer, basketball, boxing, MMA.

They can't even score a goal now. The purpose of this within the US legal system is a pure intermediate play. And the when net neutrality doesn't get overturned as a result of this instance people will feel demoralized and hopeless.
Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but it can be quite pleasant riding on the bus. My trip used to be up the Kings Road.
They are often on sale however at e.g. MicroCenter.com , where the base MacBook Air is selling for $799 .
That needs to change as much as anything else. We have to adapt, too. This can't be a unilateral thing. We need to change in response to the world around us, and if we don't, we won't survive.
It's amazing how things MS got wrong with Skype for Business. For something that had so much potential, that piece of software on Mac's is so ridiculously bad. It's a shame too, I'd definitely pay and be happy to be locked into a really nice softphone technology with corp IM/directory all in one.
Thanks. Seems my assessment and SBCL's self-description match perfectly, as they explicitly aim to "reward the use of type declarations throughout development" and exhort users to "always declare the types of function arguments and structure slots as precisely as possible".

They do want their users to use one of Common Lisp's least safe features pervasively.

If the point was to mine assertions for type information, they could have encouraged the use of assertions. But they don't. They encourage the use of declarations, which is entirely not the same thing, and it's a bad thing for the Common Lisp source code ecosystem, even if not for the SBCL ecosystem. Hurray for SBCL.
I tried that as well with the same results (blurry text). The best approach I found was to install gnome-tweak-tool, and set the font scaling factor to 1.5. Chrome and a lot of other apps scale everything including ui elements by 1.5. The window manager and some other apps don't seem to support this though.
Ask HN: Is Google recording our calls for Google duplex?
Is google recording our every call to train their AI models for google duplex ? e.g. "Mm-hmm"
EvilPlot – A combinator based plotting library for Scala
Beating Traditional Low-Light Image Enhancement  with a CNN
> They do not give you access to the underlying profiling and the social graph they have built on your information.

There are hints of it though. I noticed in my most recent data dump there was a list of "contacts." Some of those were people who I was never Facebook friends with and included contact information (e.g. alternate emails) that I never had.

It seems like this data was built off of people's phone contact lists. It definitely seems like my contact list was the root of mine.
What happens if you lose your hardware token (or it gets stolen, ec.)? Is there a way for then to access your accounts?
Can I recommend the Dell precision 5520? Dedicated GPU, up to 32gb ram and sold with Ubuntu.
It doesn’t. Microsoft just will never admit that it’s bad
Several years ago MS released a new, "RT" version of app for Windows. One of the differences is that it doesn't even have an option to disable updates. So if Microsoft decides to add more ads or integrate more Facebook pages or make the app even less usable, you cannot opt out of that.

By the way, I hate updates. Today I updated Sublime Text and the background of code changed from light grey to white, making it harder to read. And they removed all bright themes (including Dawn), leaving only dark ones with poor contrast.
It was a consumer product until Mircosoft acquired it, now it's neither.
GDPR
Is that really true? My understanding is most CGNs are full-cone, and keep the same external IP+port for the same source IP+port combo for the duration of the mapping. Thus, you can use a STUN server to establish a direct connection.

Certainly my ISP works in this manner, but I can't find much data about industry trends.
I don't think the behind the scenes were exposed how this all worked and the development time but high tech like this is typically not accessible to small/med businesses because the overall costs to implement. Large corporations with existing crap IVR's is definitely a target.

Give it 3 years where it's a game changer to a bigger audience and devices. I could see this complementing teachers or enabling a whole new method of interactive learning, not making appointments.
I have heard this before, but it doesn't explain why it was ever released without features such as, I don't know, WORKING CONVERSATION HISTORY!
Censys.io Guide: Discover SCADA and Phishing Sites
I used the title from the NY Times homepage, which at the time of submission had the more definitive version of the title.
Our solution was to switch to Discord for our remote meetings, which is a VoIP app targeted at gamers. Works flawlessly once you tweak the auto-ducking settings.
I don't agree with all of these or consider all of them feasible, but really appreciate the concreteness of the suggestions and the grounding in real world experience from a POV we don't hear from all that often on HN regarding this topic.
>Before email I had more letters and phone calls

Funny: When I forced people to call me by not being on IM, I got far fewer calls than I did IM's. And I doubt people were getting 5-20 letters per day every day.

The lower the barrier to communication, the more the communication. Phone presents a higher barrier.

>If you disrupt your flow to answer emails and that is not mandated by your manager, that is your fault. If you disrupt your flow to answer emails because your manager insists, then that is your managers fault.

I have worked, and know many who have, under managers who will keep flip flopping between the two as it suits them. They will berate you for wasting time on emails, but then they'll penalize you during reviews because customers/peers send in feedback that you are unavailable.

I try not to leave it unambiguous. I make sure I ask during interviews: If I check emails 3 times a day and am by default not on IM, is that a problem? I don't mind in-person or phone interruptions, because they are always far fewer. To give you an idea, I have a coworker who sits a few cubicles away from me, and to him it's a pain to drop by my cube when he has questions. Gives you an idea how low the barrier is to using IM whenever something pops in your head.
Well, that may have been their reason but I had excellent service on Skype prior to the acquisition super nodes and all and absolutely rotten service afterwards.

So whatever they tried to fix it didn't work. Of course this is all from a European perspective and the broadband situation here could not be compared to the US at the time (and in some places still can't).
This was never true in any of the jobs I worked. You can mostly modify your email programs to be unannoying about notifications and if you really focus on a task you simply don't see the emails for 2-4 hours. I have also never received an email that required immediate reaction. So...
I don't see much risk of actually annoying people---since the service is run from a centralized company, they can take measures to prevent their own system from DDOS'ing people. It doesn't feel like it'd be too hard to institute rules like "No user can call the same number more than once every N hours." Hell, you can even institute rules like "No number is allowed to be called more than once every N hours from any user" if concern about the service itself DDOS'ing someone is significant.

On the topic of the asymmetry of the experience: is the larger issue that the fake John Legend voice will become boring to talk to for a human?
> I don't know if this is true today

It's not.

Also, I can't stand the ugliness of GNOME, while Plasma looks mostly neat and clean.
There's a nice general lesson from double cruxing that you can apply outside of one on one arguements if you care about holding consistent beliefs.

Always argue for your weakest crux. I.e. out of all the necessary premises of some position you hold, always keep the hardest to defend premise close to the front of your mind.

This is counterintuitive because people reflexively try to bury their weakest assumptions. What's more: we're rewarded for presenting strong arguments. But if there's some fact that, if disproven, would cause you to change your mind and you aren't really confident that that fact is true - you should care the most about finding out if it's false, or at the very least becoming more certain in your belief about it.
If someone doesn't want to talk to you (or your bot), why not just leave them alone? It's not their job to be your guinea pig.

Was it right to not tell the victims of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment what was happening to them, because they would have refused and blocked the progress of science?
We actually do! We use the energy of stupid people to power reality TV and it was the fuel behind the Trump take over of the GOP.
Except that it wasn't anything we have done, and reinstalling the entire product multiple times didn't fix the issue.
In a database Undo, in spite of the name, is the act of applying a transaction log to return to a particular state. I used to work on databases earlier in my career, so selling this as a new invention seems somewhat bizarre to me.
This doesn't address your question but might be interesting. As someone who has used Android forever and never tried Siri, those anecdotes are mind blowing to me. For me with Google Assistant, media commands work about 80% and successful call initiation is about 90%. And I haven't looked for documentation either. YMMV of course.
Is this also affecting code in 64 bit mode?
Lego sets are still almost entirely bricks or bricklike pieces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Srv0GZPvTtw

Still look like bricks, too.

Another point is any semi-competent person can fabricate additions to the Gilbert sets with simple tools. Making things that hook up to bricks? Fuggetabootit. You're stuck with what ever Lego makes. Lego is a closed universe, a walled garden.
To be fair, we do that same “handshake” with google hangouts.
I switched to signal for calls to android users and facetime for everything else a long time ago.

Long term, I’m rooting for signal, but their video chat stuff for iOS is a hot mess (low speakerphone volume, front facing camera only). In the short term, I’m considering buying an iPad for my parents, specifically for facetime.

Both are preferable to skype by a large margin. Every time I opened it for the last year or so before I gave up, it went through “this device is authenticated, but probably stolen” login hoops.

This was before they overhauled the app, and saw the big nosedive in ratings. I’m definitely not going back to that platform.

Maybe I’ll add the signal foundation to my list of charities his year.
... and bridging the gap between computer interactions and land-line interactions is key for reaching people who don't have the resources to adopt an OpenTable or maintain a connection to it, which is one of Google's initiatives.

https://www.blog.google/topics/next-billion-users/
This could be a great excuse to visit Bangalore/India for 3 months.
I'm only offered "classic Skype for Win10 mobile" (not my definition of classic!), or regular Skype for iPhone or Android.
>> Microsoft switched to centralized servers to _increase_ call quality.

Or to better address their CALEA requirements. It was about surveillance. It still is. The number of telephony decisions that are based on "security" boggles the mind.

Why did Skype fail? Because I wouldn't trust Microsoft to protect my grocery list.
The "rich people donate money to avoid paying taxes" meme has always been odd to me. If you donate $1, yes, your tax bill is lower, but you are also out $1. Unless you are corrupt and are funneling money to your own foundation or something, donating money is not a way to beat the system wrt taxes, its just a way to shift money that otherwise would have gone to the government to charitable entities instead.

Also, it results in more loss of wealth for the donator: if I owe the government $1 in taxes, I can choose to pay the government that $1 or, if I loathe the idea of the government getting that $1 and I can afford it, I can choose to give ~$3 to a charity instead.

The fact that rich people choose to donate to charity at a rate of about 3:1 instead of paying the government says a lot about their faith in the government in spending their money wisely.
Sure, but the point is that that exact same code will throw a type error in SBCL. It at least complicates what you need to do before you can say "what implementation doesn't behave like that?".
Yes, Siri knows family
I use only i3 and no DE. It has really improved my productivity with features like sending windows to other screens at the touch of a button and floating windows across all workspaces.

Sure it was a pain to set it up (and having to configure stuff like i3-lock and suspend) but I did it once years ago and have not changed anything since then.
It’s hard to remember back to those days but there was a huge legal/congressional pushback against p2p technology driven by the big media companies who saw p2p as the core enabler of file sharing. One side effect was the legal risks of providing p2p services were looking way heavier than traditional client service services. Skype was also heavily used in those days by people who wanted “anonymity” not from the government but from other users on the web. The old p2p architecture allowed users to discover each other’s IP addresses and either attack or discover identities of the other person on the call. I won’t for a moment pretend to say I think Microsoft has made good decisions around Skype (the UI is an unmitigated disaster that somehow still manages to get worse with each new release), but I do believe there were a ton of reasons back in the era of their switch from p2p to client server architectures that did make it the legitimately correct engineering decision in that moment. That’s nowhere near as fun an answer as the NSA conspiracy theories, but engineering decisions don’t have to be fun.
You might like to look at Shen: http://www.shenlanguage.org/
I say this with a perspective of watching it happen over forty years. I'll get all kinds of heck if I start saying this or that language has faded. But many languages have changed over time, sometimes in breaking ways, as their developers work to make them more expressive and add features. Code that is written one year often doesn't work a few years later - that's a kind of fading as specific reference implementations fade away and code written in them needs to be updated or it rots.

Common Lisp doesn't have this problem - and it has many features that other languages have added over time, often in less comprehensive ways.
For example C++11 lambdas are not as expressive and powerful as Common Lisp first class functions, and I joke that C++ template programming is to Common Lisp macros what IRS tax forms are to poetry. Note: Clasp includes a lot of C++ template programming and C++ lambda code that I enjoyed writing and I am so grateful that C++11 added variadic templates.
New language features can be added to Common Lisp by the programmer with macros, and for the really adventurous, they can be made efficient by augmenting the Common Lisp compiler. Common Lisp compilers are almost always written in Common Lisp and available and accessible. This is why Clasp uses a new and understandable Common Lisp compiler "Cleavir" (developed by Robert Strandh) and LLVM, which is a great C++ library for generating native code on a variety of processors. Cleavir will be an excellent platform for efficiently implementing new dynamic programming language features.
Of course people will cooperate: it's in their self-interest. It's rational to recognize positive-sum situations and cooperate.

It's also rational and serves your self-interest to act "altruistically", as your empathy is a basic biological instinct that you can't really fight against, just like hunger or sexual desire. But just like with hunger or sexual desire, letting a biological instinct dominate your whole life is unhealthy and, tbh, pretty stupid.
We need the equivalent of CSS user stylesheets for UX, where user preferences can contextually override publisher/designer preferences. The relationship between the user and other sources of “design input” can be adversarial. Open-source rule engines can help users to negotiate this adversarial space.
Spot on. US introduced credit scores even before China.
Yep, it used kazaa "supernodes" as servers for call setup and finding other nodes. Read an article about this a long time ago where someone reverse engineered it. There was also a lot of details about how Skype contained a shitload of anti reverse engineering techniques.
How is this related to this:

https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn/

?

EDIT: found this relevant comment (I think) from yesterday's discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17030302
backup/recovery codes and/or "forgot your password (authenticator)" recovery
Thanks: In the US, according to Wikipedia: before "2003, the penalty for violating a sodomy law varied very widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction among those states retaining their sodomy laws. The harshest penalties were in Idaho, where a person convicted of sodomy could earn a life sentence. Michigan followed, with a maximum penalty of 15 years imprisonment while repeat offenders got life.[citation needed]"

To compare, in the UK the maximal penalty until 1967 was two year prison with the hard labor, until 1885 life imprisonment, and before 1861 death.