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spiddy

I asked chatGPT it's controversial take on the article itself.

It's a long but interesting read https://chatgpt.com/share/6adb5209-f6fc-83eb-85ee-86a1949a4f...

tldr: the question is sometimes more important than the answer.

Re:Source code of the Estonian online voting system on Saturday October 17, 2026 @06:19PM (#50135698)
there is a limit of how many people you can be physically present to coerce up to end of election, making it inviable en mass, thus impractical.
Re:Source code of the Estonian online voting system on Saturday October 17, 2026 @04:32PM (#50134864)
retraction of vote with a new vote solves this.

Since I'm able to retract my vote, I cannot sell it. And since I can retract my vote, I cannot be coerced in any way.

Joke's on you, now I know your password is 7 chars, but more importantly, I also know your password is not 7 stars.
Also, make sure to use official website, not just Google search, or any chat agent question, the SEO are sometimes poisoned with scam phone numbers.

I consider myself always to be wary of scams and my trust-level is zero when they call me, but I recently almost got myself hooked on an airline support call. I google searched the support number and trusted the AI summary on top and called it, they asked me my reservation number and I happily provided. With the reservation number they have public access to the entire reservation details, they knew my name, my flight, my co-passenger details everything. I called to do a reservation for my pet which is normally not done online. their problem, they got greedy and asked me more than pet travel, iirc they said there was a problem with one of my flights, it wasn't paid and I had to repay on the call. If they just followed along instead of going by the script I would have paid the pet travel amount.

you don’t need to be an aviation expert to trust the plane will fly.

likewise e-voting systems pass through cryptography experts auditing to verify it does what it says it does.

said that the voting solution can also provide cryptographic proof that your vote was unaltered, and accounted for, without need to expose your actual vote.

the claims about database altering, are also false as the vote is cryptographically signed and unalterable.

also there is another feature where you can recast vote on top of your previous one and the last vote will be the valid one. This is crucial for countries where the bad guys can come at your place and under distress (gun) force your vote. you can then recast safely invalidating the forced vote.

e-voting solutions is really interesting and in an alternate reality I think we could have had a mainstream e-voting and more even direct-democracy vs our current democracy by proxy (elected officials)

yes you can.

each citizen gets an anonymized private key via a secure channel (eg. postal) and use that to vote.

votes are double enveloped: outer envelop: anonymized id + inner envelop: vote.

mixnet separates the votes and cryptographically shuffles them to decouple relationships.

only at the end the shuffled votes are decrypted using the private key of the election itself that was split using shamir secret sharing (eg 5 out of 7 shares to reconstruct)

the thing that’s not clear from the article and it’s a shame is that it seems the failure was the hardware (the 3 USB keys) not the election software. This could be simply avoided by having redundancy on the hardware (2 USBs per share) or more shares themselves (5 out of 9 shares)

Re:Are two heads better than one? on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @12:35AM (#46612714)
Weirdly this reminds me of the Raft consensus protocol: two nodes cancel each other when failing consensus as you can't tell which is the valid one, three gives you better chances, if one fails you have the other two that can get consensus. Of course in the off chance you have two failures you cannot get consensus with the only living node. Adding another two nodes make you robust to two failures.

Now replace fail with lying and you have the exact same problem.

Re:Everything I know about good system design on Saturday August 16, 2025 @05:07AM (#44921610)
though why treat booleans as special case and keep timestamps for them when you don’t for integers with this pattern:

isDarkTheme: {timestamped} paginationItems: 50

I can see when dark theme was activated but not when pagination was set to 50.

also, i can’t see when dark theme is being deactivated either.

seems like a poor-man changelog. there maybe use cases for it but i can’t think of anything tbh.

this. Let’s not confuse meanings. There are multiple ways to improve quality of code. Testing is one, code review is another. this belongs to the latter
Re:Full power outage in Spain and Portugal on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @11:47AM (#43834249)
I'm located in Barcelona, and yesterday lot of transactions on mini markets / pharmacies were not possible because the item prices were unknown, adding to the fact there was no phone lines available to reach out.
This reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42342382 on the blog https://eieio.games/blog/writing-down-every-uuid/ they mention how they tackled various challenges such as rendering.
Re:Notes on Existential Risk from Artificial Superintelligence on Tuesday September 19, 2023 @05:48PM (#37577294)
seems to me a survival bias.
Re:An Unexpected Benefit of Unit Tests on Saturday January 21, 2023 @02:58PM (#34469754)
That's because by definition it is not going to be "major" problem since the unit test acted as gateway before it got pushed to production, instead you'll probably be 'meh' and fix it once the unit test fails.

This reminds me the saying of a manager arguing why do we need so many SREs since the system is working fine.

I’ve actually talked with ChatGPT and asked it both to output mairmaid diagrams of discussed architecture (context was kubernetes clusters, namespaces and Pods) and also read diagrams and convert them correctly to kubectl commands to build the diagram.
Re:The image in this post displays its own MD5 hash on Saturday September 24, 2022 @10:41AM (#32963040)
That would be a great, and terrifying at the same time, first contact response message to us.

proof-of-superiority if you will.

I had an understanding that quantum entanglement can be used to for encryption and guaranty there are no man-in-the-middle attacks by making sure the entanglement is not broken. if we can’t know the collapse happened how can we make such claim (mitm can meassure stolen briefcase put it back and no one would know)
Re:CEO Shadow Program on Saturday August 13, 2022 @05:13AM (#32448146)
From the investor's perspective starting from Google is a lot better, and I bet this was done deliberately. It provides him the insight he doesn't need the CEO to find the articles.
Also worth noting that time response deviance when user exists or not can also be a leak of info
Re:The Wisdom in Kung Fu Panda on Wednesday March 23, 2022 @01:39PM (#30781117)
This reminds me my father when I mentioned bad news he always referred to a saying; no need to worry, things you can't control you can do nothing about them, and why worry about things you can control.

I think the frustration often arise when we create the illusion of control and unexpected events shatter that idea, bringing ourselves in denial.

A good measure is to keep a buffer for unexpected events and prepare yourself sentimentally.

Re:My First Impressions of Web3 on Saturday January 08, 2022 @05:31AM (#29850337)
There is a point to be made here that is an important difference between web2 and web3+centralized apis. On the latter companies do not have lock-in of the data, which provides a big incentive to not be evil. the moment someone can make a case for bad play they have the advantage to shift the market to a different platform. Unfortunately this is not so easy on web2 because of the data that locks users on those platforms.
Re:Web3 is centralized on Sunday January 02, 2022 @07:16AM (#29768120)
> Helium is very much centralised because it has to (by the nature of their offering) lock down the end-user devices heavily. They have a single approved manufacturer last I checked.

As far as I can see there are currently 19 approved device manufacturers [0].

> It essentially operates as a unregistered and unregulated ISP and that isn’t something to be taken lightly. It does that by pushing all legal and regulatory liability to operators. There’s also a lot of scams with operators faking their signal etc.

Scams faking their signal will only help improve the robustness of the network on the long run as these are fixable issues.

Regulation seems to be spurring on every web3 conversation. I believe regulation is lagging behind user adoption and is a pending conversation. As for the exact scenario (LORA network) what kind of regulation do we __want__ the network to have? I don't think blocking user traffic is something we want to have, as an example you mentioned with current ISPs.

[0]: https://www.helium.com/mine

Re:Web3 is centralized on Sunday January 02, 2022 @05:12AM (#29767418)
I tend to look closely into projects that are outside of the echo chamber that can provide real world value and better economic models than web2 solutions.

My two favorites are:

helium where they build IoT global network, I use a helium GPS-alternative tracker for my moto which costs 10 times less than GPS tracker.

scPrime (although there are other storage alternatives) which build global S3-compatible storage using available disk space on HDs. There is a lot of real estate that is sitting right now that can be harvested for money easily with networks like this.

On post-docker pre-kubernetes time I used `--cpuset-cpus` on docker args to dedicate specific cpus to redis instances, using CoreOS and fleet for cluster orchestration.
Re:The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @02:50PM (#29334313)
When you buy bitcoin you are _investing_ in the possibility that the bitcoin will be part of the economic network.

The earlier you invest the better the returns. As time passes and bitcoin grabs hold a position the S curve of possible returns will be less. Same as investing in stocks.

The value is brought by being early adopter. Historically bitcoin is gaining adoption, but one would argue we're still early.

Paradoxically if you think that bitcoin is useless, it's early, if you think it's a sure thing, it's late.

That has nothing to do with bitcoin though, it's universally true for any type of risk investment.

Re:The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @02:34PM (#29334149)
global economy is much like communicating vessels, large scale domino effect is also possible, having a global currency such as bitcoin disconnected from nation events, is no more riskier than without it.

see China's Evergrande crisis as an example.

Re:The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @02:06PM (#29333806)
You assume there is a correlation between USD and BTC. Another way to see this is this:

If USD prices rise, the price of BTC will also rise, as BTC is another product you can buy with your USD. Meaning your bitcoin wealth is not affected by USD inflation.

Re:The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @01:47PM (#29333594)
> Stablecoins piggyback on the legal aspects of dollars, and as long as you treat them as dollar-denominated assets, you're fine. The second you treat them as dollar-equivalents, you run the risk of a change in the value of that asset being something that the government is forced into supporting.

Why is that scenario worse than now? Why is bank the preferred medium to support when they default?

Re:An unwanted update to your Google Account on Saturday June 19, 2021 @05:28PM (#27564613)
Doesn't this mean that US customs should comply with GDPR when collecting data from EU citizens? I don't remember being notified of my GDPR rights when entering US last time. I suppose this boils down to enforceability.
I find it very interesting the idea of separating development image from production one and skaffold promotes it in a way ("skaffold dev" vs "skaffold run")

Same as in frontend for example you don't "npm build" your way through development, instead you want hot-reload and other similar features.

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