skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm actually really curious as to whether verifiable E2EE is possible in normal business videoconferencing -- if someone here can enlighten me I'd really appreciate it.

It seems clear that there has to be a single key, rather than separate keys for each pair of participants, since in a large meeting we need all video streams running through a server and everyone receiving the same streams, for manageable upload bandwidth. Also, many participants often cannot peer directly due to NAT etc.

But therefore... as long as you're trusting the server with key distribution/management in the first place... don't you necessarily have to simply trust that the server isn't peeking? That by necessity, since anyone else can join the call and get the decryption key from any of the peers... that the server can too, whether by MITM attack, a "fake participant" that joins for a millisecond but doesn't appear in UX, etc.?

That unless you actually have the capability of auditing the server and the code it's running, E2EE doesn't actually give you any concrete guarantees whatsoever? You've just got to trust? Which at the end of the day, is no different from trusting them not to peek at transport encryption?

Of course you can run your own Jitsi server. But if you've already got control over your servers then you might as well just be using transport encryption anyways, since you trust yourself -- right?

(Obviously if you come up with your own keys and send them to participants via a separate channel of communication then it's fine -- but obviously that's not something regular users are ever going to do.)

Would love to know if I'm misunderstanding something here -- if the newfound significance of E2EE in videoconferencing is just due to Zoom falsely advertising it, or if it's actually a realistic goal.
Some additional thoughts I have in this direction in no particular order:

Both Holochain and Urbit emphasize composability. One of the main design patterns with Holochain are microservices that you can hook up together to make more complicated apps. This philosophy emanates from the receptor notion in Ceptr (the OS that Holochain is supposed to be distributed data integrity engine for). When I worked on Holochain I spent a lot of time going on about what sort of mathematics you'd need to do this well and without unintended side-effects: namely category theory, as category theory is a mathematical formalization of the notion of composability. Composition is a first-order concept in category theory and the whole point of category theory is to be able to think of things in terms of what they're composed of - this is a large chunk of the content of the Yoneda lemma. I believe that there is a good description of Holochain using category theory in the sense of David Spivak and his collaborators, and more generally that creating an entire operating system made of composable "atoms" like Ceptr would really benefit from that kind of theoretical backbone. I never got to the point of anything really worth sharing, though.

The one project that is going in that direction though is Statebox. They are designing a language for making distributed applications based on new ideas on composable Petri nets and how they can be used to represent symmetric monoidal categories. Work of Abramsky, Coecke, and collaborators has shown that in some sense, symmetric monoidal categories can be thought of as a general model for any kind of distributed computation, including quantum computing. Thus Statebox should be able to talk about things like blockchains, holochains, block lattices, whatever, all in the same categorical language. This will allow apples to apples comparisons, cross-compiling, and lots of other fun stuff. So Statebox is, in my mind, the most mathematically sound language that's in production for building composable systems of microservices. I think it would be really interesting to rewrite Holochain using Statebox.

Urbit attempts to achieve this level of composability by virtue of being written entirely in a purely functional language. Functional programming has many ties to category theory which is why this is the correct strategy, but Urbit actually tries to be as mathematically simple as possible. No category theory is really in sight (ok, some monads are hanging around now) and for the most part, nothing more than high school algebra is needed to understand how Urbit works. The whole system is actually much simpler than the Unix stack, it just doesn't look that way from the outside. Urbit follows the Unix philosophy of simple tools that just do one thing well. You can really start doing some magical things when all those tools are written in a purely functional fashion.

One other project I'm aware of that is trying to do the purely functional distributed apps thing is the Ambients protocol, but sadly I haven't put aside the time yet to learn about it.
Incident Recognition Is the Anomaly Detection You Wanted
Silicon Valley restructuring veteran says his firm is winding down up to 3 star
I've been hired to perform "technical-interviews-as-a-service" for a handful of non-technical founders / leaders. Has anyone partook in this format, either as leader, interviewee, or interviewer?
Sounds like an animal encountering a larger animal and deciding to not engage.
This was actually an amazing experience on my phone, sucks you had that experience :(
The app has a logging facility.

I'm not affiliated with the WireGuard project, but I would appreciate it if you could encounter the issue again, and then submit an account of your experience and the logs from your device.
> Tell me how you format your PhD thesis in a plain text editor without wasting countless hours on LaTEX?

I've never written a thesis (at all, let alone for a PhD), but my impression from people who have is that the academic institution typically already has a LaTeX .sty or template or whatever, so literally all you're doing is writing content (and the minimal amount of markup necessary for document structure).

That said, I can see how this might quickly go sideways as soon as you start using TikZ, or if you do indeed have to create your own style (though in the latter case the defaults seem reasonable, and indeed seem common if the numerous academic papers I've read over the years are any indication). I've written my fair share of technical documentation with LaTeX and it can definitely be a rabbit hole, albeit usually a self-inflicted one.

And that's definitely true about Excel and Access. Virtually every company has at least one Excel spreadsheet or Access database that's effectively mission-critical, lol.
Poverty isn't a lack of character; it's a lack of cash
Not really. There could be multiple possible reasons why everyone is advertising. Everyone buying ads does not necessarily prove that ads work. I personally think they do, but that is not any proof.
In the software universe I have always preferred intelligent design to evolution.
How to Read a STR Report
I'm a little disturbed that I feel like the country has been tearing apart for a while. There is a major political bifurcation, and now pacts between states. Right now the pacts are for the pandemic, but what else might these coalitions be used for in the future? I'm not saying that they'll be used for some nafarious purpose, but the fact that they are like-minded politically makes it more likely to deepen the divides.
This isn't about building software similar to what we currently have and just making it more end user configurable. This is about rethinking software so that end user malleability makes sense.

What does such software even look like? We want some kind of end user modifiable artifacts, still contained within some constrained substrate. Think Minecraft or Excel - I can give you a spreadsheet to calculate some taxes, but you can then dig in, change the formulae, remix with other sheets, and so on. Most software is not like this - typically you get some pre canned views and switches, not a canvas of composition.
I guess a good response to this is

> A SENSE OF TIMING IS THE MARK OF GENIUS
Yeah, that's the point right there. Why the heck is this so bleeding edge? A small team at Stanford made it happen rather quickly. With a small budget.

And yet our leaders aren't even talking about it. Where's the will to do this obvious first priority?
And it needs to be built with microservices and run on a multi-cloud Kubernetes installation with a service mesh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1-GrBy67LY
Absolutely love the idea of this service.

Trying to sign up now, site is returning a blank page near the end of account creation.

Hopefully this is a good sign and you’re seeing the HN spike. Either way, thank you for making this a thing.
True. Factorio shows how complicated and power wasting logistics are. And it's already generous enough by not having items that can expire, it makes logistics exponentially harder
That's 2 meltdowns, ~500 reactors globally.

Before accounting for 40 years of technology improvements in reactor design (the 40 years with the most stunning safety improvement in humanities' history) that suggests a probability of ~0.004%.

40 years of tech improvements could feasibly have reduced the risk by 2 orders of magnitude. ivanhoe's made up number is in fact defensible. It has big error bars on it but it is not unreasonable.
You're saying that cutting (meaning reducing, not zeroing) budgets of social and health programs can kill up to 0.5% of the entire population of a state? Because that's the CFR of the virus.

You're aware that even programs on reduced budgets can offer a reduced set of services, and prioritize the ones with most impact? (i.e. most lifesaving potential). And that their work will be far easier if there are fewer total sick people in the system? Have you balanced the effects of that versus letting the virus run amok so that the tax receipts aren't impacted?

That's why I'm asking for numbers. Otherwise "a bad economy will kill more people" is a fuzzy assertion that sounds "cool" and "contrarian" but has no actual substance.

Here are my numbers btw:

"Our finding that all-cause mortality decreased during the Great Recession is consistent with previous studies. Some categories of cause-specific mortality, notably cardiovascular disease, also follow this pattern, and are more pronounced for certain gender and age groups. Our study also suggests that the recent recession contributed to the growth in deaths from overdoses of prescription drugs in working-age adults in metropolitan areas. Additional research investigating the mechanisms underlying the health consequences of macroeconomic conditions is warranted."[1]

In the last big recession, deaths due to certain causes went up but overall mortality decreased. So what you're saying definitively did not happen in the only other comparable situation.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28772108
The biggest tech companies you know are founded and run by techies.
Nice to see somebody else in the WP plugin business here on HN!

I'm developing Advanced Forms (https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-forms/), not nearly as popular as your plugins but makes for a nice side income.

If you have the time I'd love to hear how you've been promoting and growing your plugins over the years. I find that aspect of the business challenging and have mostly been relying on outside help.
Credit card chargebacks are going to put that company out of business.
Tab-completion is somewhat obnoxious in directories with lots of files sharing a common prefix, for example.

Also, if you accidentally tab-complete the same file for output and input, depending on how clever the program is, you may end up deleting the source file.
the smartphone is the computer. at $1000 many consumers use it for all of their daily needs, many of which ironically have nothing to do with phonecalls.
I think that Sudoku could be categorized with those.
It 'clicked' for me once I got to the example using the ?: rune since I'm already familiar with that as the shorthand ternary operator in various languages, and 'Generator' doesn't sound strange at all to any Python programmer.
That's really interesting!

They only support disbursements in six currencies (AUD, EUR, GBP, NZD, PLN, and USD), but they can accept eighteen currencies; presumably because they already have a large balance of those and they are relatively stable -- the one question mark for me would be PLN, but I would guess that it might be an important remote work market.

It seems the main difference is the lack of a requirement for an intermediate bank or banks; even a large international bank like HSBC might have to go through a third party for currency conversion in certain circumstances. It seems a lot easier if you are only making increases / decreases to your own balance sheet (cut out the middle man, no settlement requirements, etc).

Presumably you issue bonds to get the to do this with, which is relatively safe because it stays as cash and you know your churn rate. Does TransferWise have any levers they can pull besides halting disbursements in a given currency if there is a sudden devaluation, e.g. Poland goes bankrupt and PLN goes to zero?
It's not some secretive process.[1]

[1] https://informeddelivery.usps.com/box/pages/intro/start.acti...
plenty of people use software such as Max/MSP, PureData to do exactly that
It seems to me the key then would be to have that programmable interface be used to actually implement the features shipped as part of the project. It will be a lot easier to get the API right if the developers are using it themselves, plus that adds a lot more incentive to maintain backwards compatibility as well.
It would be especially good if that kind of organization had limited and agreed-to powers that were written down in some sort of document, and then those constraints were respected and not repeatedly gamed around.
Thank you. It blows my mind how rarely I see anyone talk about what an utter disaster of a product this frontend is.
> For example, coal plants release orders of magnitude more radiation than nuclear plants.

See for example:

* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
Overly brief summary for those who can't watch the video with sound: it might seem that 'the poor' make bad choices and therefore they don't have money. However, research shows that this is not the case and that a basic income would help the rich and the poor alike.

Personal thoughts: the speaker presents the research as unequivocal and while I don't completely believe that we have enough data just yet, I do think these are some very strong indicators that we really should be giving this a try, either regional or country-wide, in one of the more pioneering countries. According to the speaker, in the end it should save money rather than cost money, so it sounds like it should be possible if we can get the political will together.
Sounds like the words of a useless advertiser.
An “archives first” approach to mailing lists
> Except, in the real world there's more than just A) unknown snake oil and B) high quality products with perfect awareness.

There doesn't have to not exist more than A and B. If A and B both exist then 1 and 2 are each true and the further existence of C and 3 don't change that.

Moreover, even if some additional classes exist, the two examples are still central and problematic, not least because they're more likely to represent a higher percentage of ad spending.

The first because advertising is the only way to sell crummy products, since the only way to get anyone to recommend it is to pay them to, so their incentives to use it are higher.

And the second because the existence of the prisoner's dilemma is what drives up the ad spend on both sides. If you're targeting a niche that no one else is then you buy a small amount of advertising, reach those customers, make your sales and are done. If you're locked in a prisoner's dilemma with a direct competitor, you spend a little so they spend a little so you spend a little more until you're all spending a huge amount. And the fact that you're selling Fords and they're selling Chevys and they're not completely identical products doesn't really matter when they're both still cars.
Not suitable for touch-typing code writers. (Interestingly enough, visual programming is closer to doing mathematics, in that mathematical notation is often non-linear but rather two-dimensional.)
I miss vimperator :(
> My opinion is those apps work because S. Korea remembers SARS-1 (2002/2003)

Actually, at least per Vox, it was more about tracing problems learned during MERS in 2015:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE-cA4UK07c
Deploy High Availability PostgreSQL on Kubernetes by Example
I think I get what you're talking about. Some systems are designed in such a way where the "platform" is formed in two layers: a low level, which exposes a set of primitives; and then a set of abstracting core libraries, implemented in terms of those primitives. Users are expected, idiomatically, to create business logic by making calls into the core libraries; but they're also free to call on the low-level primitives directly. In such a system, the "userland" sits directly on the primitives, with the core libraries as a sibling.

This is the pattern adopted by some, but not all, "runtimes." For example, Erlang has the low-level BEAM VM, and then has the Erlang "kernel" implemented as BEAM bytecode, rather than as native emulator support code. For another example, MOOs (object-oriented MUDs, e.g. LambdaMOO) only had the barest object-graph infrastructure specified in native code; everything else about the foundations of a MOO was defined in terms of objects and classes held in the MOO's state database.

In such systems, you have a sort of "intermediate" level of access to the native API surface, greater than the kind you have from the userland of a traditional VM or OS kernel.

Still, this "intermediate" level of access still doesn't allow you to break through the abstraction layer that the low-level primitives are founded upon. If there are any "complex" primitives implemented entirely natively (e.g. Erlang's `term_to_binary` function), then you can't "break into" that primitive to extend it unless the native runtime has been extended with an explicit "upcall" hook back into the VM userland.
Crypto secured domains, I assume. First google result is namebase, which is a familiar name in such a field. https://www.namebase.io/
So is this an attempt to isolate the responsible parties across hundreds of smaller legal entities?
It’s Time to Get Smart About Dumb Pipes
That's fine. 1000 summary judgements in small claims court will be expensive for Ticketmaster.
Key distribution is a problem, yes (as discussed in other comments here).

Upload bandwidth isn't so much of a problem with the number of participants, as you of course wouldn't encrypt the whole data stream separately for each peer. Instead, you would encrypt it with a rotating symmetrical key that you can then safely exchange with all peers (at negligible bandwidth cost). You would still depend on the server to replicate your encrypted stream (and do NAT traversal etc), but it wouldn't be able to peek inside.

A separate problem is that you usually want your server to actually create reencoded video of your stream for participants with bad internet. There's potentially some ways to do that without server involvement with some clever video encoding (so that instead of reencoding you can just throw away some chunks), but afaik there's nothing production ready for video codecs here.
> It seems clear that there has to be a single key, rather than separate keys for each pair of participants, since in a large meeting we need all video streams running through a server and everyone receiving the same streams, for manageable upload bandwidth.

Why is this the case? Watching streams on Twitch or YouTube with HTTPS are all encrypted individually for each connection. It's not like TV or radio where you have to broadcast the same thing to everyone.

> But therefore... as long as you're trusting the server with key distribution/management in the first place... don't you necessarily have to simply trust that the server isn't peeking?

I think you're right that you'll need to trust key distribution. Some companies might actually have PKI set up properly and can do this. Other individuals who are particularly privacy conscious may also have this. Just because verifiable E2EE might not be applicable to a mass market doesn't mean it's not incredibly useful for those who do need it.
This is exactly what we built at MintData. [1]

A new way to construct software by using a spreadsheet to define application logic, instead of today’s spreadsheets which breed chaos.

“A canvas of composition” - I really like that phrase to describe this approach of re-mixable software creation and usage.

—-

[1] I’d add a link here, but I think folks below might be sharpening their pitchforks by now :D
Reminds me of the idea (and the actual practice) of describing chemical formulas with words.
This is a technique I use often:

mv file.name{,.bak}
cp process.log{,.old}

etc.
Article title is: "Using nfsstat and nfsiostat to troubleshoot NFS performance issues on Linux"
google and facebook are not "most players" -- they own walled gardens for measurement, it's much harder to do measurement on open web auction placements.

the google page you linked also says, "you won't be able to continue using this model if your data drops below 10,000 clicks on Google Search or below 400 conversions for the conversion action within 30 days." depends on what your market/CTA is, but a lot of SMB likely don't hit these thresholds. similarly with FB, my understanding is that you have to go through an account rep to set it up and that the minimum spend is fairly high to qualify.

i think that these measurements are possible to do with a reasonable level of certainty, but they require a particular set of circumstances to pull off.
I love this! I would be perfect is the little guy can jump in the cubes like in a platformer, it's amazing that you have all this space to run, but it's a litte boring if you can't climb thins or hit/interact with other users. But lovely idea, cheers. (sorry for my english)
So what is your experience in the business? I do not have any personal experience but I know plenty of people who work or have worked in adtech (e.g. ad words optimization consultants, ad agencies, affiliates who buy adwords) and from their stories I would say you overestimate the ad industry.

I also know of several (3 that I can think of on top of my head) companies who went bankrupt from buying inefficient ads.
Kind of like saying that the US is the “economic core” of Canada.