Hacker News Reader

ineition The JVG algorithm could break RSA-2048 encryption with fewer than 5k qubits

https://postquantum.com/security-pqc/cybersecurity-apocalyps...

TLDR: No

Longer explanation: guy behind a company selling PQ algorithms from a new "University" which span up 4 months ago says they're better than everybody else and writes paper about it.

ineition Willow – Protocols for an uncertain future [video]

Very inspiring talk how to organize data for federalized systems.

ineition Just redesigned my personal site with a TTY-style interface

No ls and no cd?

ineition Traefik-101 – simple traefik setup

Wanna learn how traefik _really_ works? I summarized my two days of learning to configure traefik for simple web-services, multiple hostnames, and more advanced configurations.

Plus you can test my commenting system using Mastodon - if you have an account...

ineition Xkcd Game Theory Question

Because you're in an exam, and you cannot really draw a straw. So you have to choose a number randomly, and pretend you chose the short straw if it's a 0. And then hope you're the only one.

The article also discussed how it'll work if you prepare beforehand and actually can draw a straw. Spoiler: you might want to cheat if you chose the short straw :)

ineition Solving the "Are You a Millionaire?" Problem with ZK Certificates

The last point, proof of personhood, should of course be done with parties :)

https://www.epfl.ch/research/domains/irgc/spotlight-on-risk-...

ineition A circuit simulator that doesn't look like it was made in 2003

Replace the resistor of the LED with 0Ohm and switch the LED on. Nice animation :)

ineition My IDE is too heavy so I moved to Emacs

True - nowadays, `Eight Megabytes Always Continuous Swapping` is a feature, not a bug...

ineition Ask HN: Shut down a startup despite strong traction?

Failure is relative - perhaps they decided that there is still some hope.

At least I would switch regularly between "oh, let's give it up" and "no, there is still hope" :)

Perhaps the "sunken cost fallacy"...

ineition The Xinjiang Police Files

The wayback machine has you:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220524092913/https://www.xinji...

Unfortunately the documents haven't been saved before the site went down :(

ineition Elliptic Curve Cryptography: A Basic Introduction

Point 2 is a simplification that borders on wrong: you don't "wrap around if it's too big" - the point operation will always cross the curve (except for the zero point)!

You "wrap around" because you're using a finite field. As far as I understand, the finite field of the scalars allows you to have an inverse for the multiplication, and the finite field of the points is there to make the calculation easier.

ineition Show HN: Test your shape rotation skills

There should be a way to share our shapes/minute in Twitter :)

ineition It's time for an inequality index for cryptocurrencies distribution

Wow - this is a really good description of Bitcoin. Similar to the tweet that said "Whenever I read 'decentralized', I think 'unregulated'."

ineition Generic engine to evaluate logical circuits on homomorphic encryption

That looks awesome! Do you have any evaluation of the speed? is this based on a paper? is there more documentation?

ineition Americans aren't willing to pay to stop climate change

In Switzerland there was a vote 2 weeks ago about whether we want to support a law to reduce CO2 output by our population. The law was very clear how the money would be spent: improve heating, direct pay to poor citizens, and many others.

Cost:

- 50 cents per gallon of gas (our gas is about 6$ per gallon)

- 20$ to 100$ for a plane ticket

The law was refused by 51% of Swiss citizen.

What really killed me was that the youngest part of the population, the ones who will be the most impacted by the climate crisis, voted the strongest against it. Switzerland being one of the richest countries, I cannot understand how an increase of 10% on luxury items (plane tickets) can have this impact.

Funny story: now that the law has been refused, the oil companies announced a 15% increase of the gas price... Nobody is protesting so far.

ineition Show HN: Diffie-Hellman exchange for the layman

Interesting, but why does the "Check" use a handmade hashing algorithm that is just summing up all bytes?

A much safer implementation would be to take the sha256 of the key and only show the 2 rightmost bytes.

ineition Social networks neither ‘social’ nor ‘networks’ – what should we call them?

I just learnt this term. And also saw that this example is already in the Wikipedia article ;)

ineition Finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life

In fact I wanted to point to the following... Googling 'hash' put me to the wrong page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife

ineition Finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life

Did you consider something like the following to speed up the calculation? This method can go forward _really_ fast. Not sur e if it can also go backward...

https://pzemtsov.github.io/2015/04/24/game-of-life-hash-tabl...

ineition I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

You might be right for single-casual illnesses like a broken leg, CoVid-19, Tuberculosis, and others. But it's a whole other thing when it comes to more complex illnesses.

Having been for 18 months through different types of psychiatrists and clinics, I came out quite surprised in how "trial and error" this whole system is.

I'm writing this from Switzerland, where we have an (arguably) high quality health care system. But the amount of "OK, that didn't work, lets try this other drug". Or, now, 18 months later, "Oh well, we did the list once through. But who tells me that the MD prescribing the first drug did a correct analysis? Lets start the list from top again." Or, for a friend of mine, his girlfriend found a working cure like that: "Oh, this brochure describes your symptoms so clearly, and it's completely different from what you've been treated for these last 20 years. Let's try it!"

Spoiler alert for my case with the list: the top of the list was not better the second time around.

If you think this is cynical, well, I would like at least _one_ of these drugs to work. If you think the MDs are all useless: well, at some times I was glad they were there.

So, well, I think having a little less than random system might be helping. Let the MDs watch if it makes sense, enter the correct diagnosis, and catch the stupid errors data entry people can make. But i'd give it a try...

ineition Show HN: Print chr$(205.5+rnd(1)) goto 10

Chrome seems to compile before it runs it. Only Firefox takes some lines before it runs it as fast as Chrome. Now I wonder why it takes so long to do the JIT? I always thought that JIT compiles with every execution...

ineition Sierra Leone just ran the first blockchain-based election

They did use our permissioned skipchain available on: https://github.com/dedis/cothority and ran some nodes on a server.

Instead of burning 200kWh for one transaction, a voting consensus system is enough.

BTW, there is also an e voting system in that repo, using neff shuffles.

ineition Ask HN: How do you manage SSH keys and SSL certificates in your company?

We were working on a more decentralized solution here: https://github.com/dedis/cothority/tree/master/cisc - unfortunately the update is still 1 month away...

This system uses a set of untrusted nodes that form a permissioned blockchain. Updating the chain requires a threshold of keys stored in the first block. The private keys are distributed over laptops/phones.

A person can have multiple devices that accept/deny new keys, while the servers check periodically for updates and can verify the new ssh-keys are legit by verifying the signatures.

I did a small demo at HotPETs 2016: https://www.securityweek2016.tu-darmstadt.de/fileadmin/user_...

I also hope to have it running again, soon. If anybody is interested, don't hesitate to contact us at linus.gasser@epfl.ch