krcz's comments

While there are many good critiques of Hyperloop, comparing its speed on half-kilometer test track to established technologies is not one. The article is joyfully bashing a strawman it has built on its own.

By coincidence, I finished reading that document yesterday. Really good one, it builds zk-SNARK understanding step by step. Sometimes though it possibly goes to deep in explaining basic concepts - I'm not sure if someone who didn't have experience with modular arithmetic would be able to get to understand it in a way that would be enough for the whole concept. Assuming basic mathematics knowledge as modular arithmetic, polynomials, interpolation, etc. might be a better approach in my feeling, but YMMV.

You don't care after, but you do care before you die if you know that's about to happen.

Sure, my answer to that is that subjective experiences are learned in a chaotic process, so location of neurons representing the same color might be in different parts of our visual cortices. At the same time we learn patterns that exist in the real world, so our experiences will most probably create similar associations, e.g. associating mint taste with green or strawberries smell with red.

> But where does that 'blue' experience come from? It is learned by having interactions with blue things and trying to find patterns, common qualities about these, and such association of possible outcomes creates a subjective concept, a qualia of "blueness".

> Sure, I'm just asking why there are different experiences to begin with. Here I don't have good explanations. Maybe it's matter of different wiring in our brain, maybe it comes from the fact, that you can predict how things are going to look to your left eye by looking on them with your right eye or how things are going to feel touching your face after touching them with your hand - allowing you to create abstractions between such perceptions, that are not transferable across senses.

> Why aren't our interpretations of red and blue switched (so that we interpret red visual data as a blue visual experience and blue visual data as a red visual experience)?

What would that even mean? Is it based on some underlying assumption, that we have some hardwired, a priori subjective experience of red and blue colors and later we only associate these with perceptions of blood, roses, ripe apples and sky, water accordingly?

That might be just an illusion and our color perception is learned, so blue is just the color of sky and water, and nothing more.

> Why don't we have 'smell experience' for visual data and a 'visual experience' for smell data? Some people do (synesthesia), but generally lack of such experience mixes can be explained by different part of the brain getting different inputs, and impossibility of e.g. auditory stimulus to generate the same response as seeing red color would do.

I liked this PDF that starts with using modular arithmetic to prove knowledge of polynomial, using bilinear EC pairings to make it self and then, finally, encoding computations as polynomials: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.07221.pdf

The more randomness, the more information bits you need to encode the observed outcome. But I can see where your dissonance comes from: you probably parsed "information" as "information I already have about the system", not "information I need to describe the system state".

I don't think that's going to happen and I hope that's not going to happen. DOM provides good abstraction of UI elements, which helps with accessibility, scrolling behaviour with the same feel as OS, standard text utils like selection, copy-paste. Using many incompatible libraries for that would lead to neo-Flash nightmare.

What I believe is going to happen is splitting more complex web applications into frontend part - written in JS - and backend + graphics part - provided as Wasm, possibly written in Rust.

While there is no direct equivalent, kujon seem to be pretty similar. (For non-Polish people, kujon is a derogative term for someone having good grades, coming with a stereotype that such person spends all their time learning, not doing any fun stuff)

It is not COVID tracking specific, is it? So no change here either, I guess. And it seems you can turn it off as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22856030 , first comment.

While it is important to keep Apple and Google under scrutiny and demand transparency, this blogpost is mostly FUD based on silent assumptions contradicting descriptions of the protocol and implementation.

> ensuring that all users of a modern iPhone or Android smartphone will be tracked as soon as they accept the OS update. (Again, to be clear: this happens already even if you decide not to install a contact tracing app!) It is unclear yet how consent is handled, whether there will be OS settings allowing one to switch on or off contact tracing, what the default will be.

I don't think that's correct: you can always disable Bluetooth. Moreover broadcasting, if I understand the documentation correctly, Google and Apple will be providing just general framework: no ID broadcasting will happen until a tracking app is installed. But even if it did, if the tracking keys are not published, it doesn't affect privacy more that Bluetooth MAC address.

> In other words, a malicious app could act as if the user is infected (in a way that is unnoticeable to the user) and extract the daily tracing keys and upload them to the server surreptitiously.

That's true for decentralized tracking not using Google's framework as well.

> This means the technology is available all the time, for all kinds of applications.

In Android ecosystem Bluetooth is available for all kinds of applications too. There is a permissions subsystem that can be applied in both cases.

Everything that Google / Apple Contact Tracing allows is already possible in Android. What it provides is a common standard, implementation, and iOS background Bluetooth capabilities.

Sure:

* TON blog: https://ton-telegram.net/news/telegram-and-sec-asked-to-spee...

* nice summary of how US securities law affected TON (from October 2019): https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/10/13/sec-blocks-t...

* verdict in the case: https://www.reuters.com/article/legal-us-otc-telegram/sec-wi...

Some investors are considering launching independent blockchain based on open-sourced TON technology. But even if they do, it's not clear when is Telegram going to integrate wallet with their app, if ever.

Telegram was on a good path to become WeChat replacement, with its Telegram Open Network blockchain an Gram cryptocurrency coming and plans to add wide range of services including decentralized storage, web pages and payment channels. But now it looks that part has been killed by SEC, so the niche is still unoccupied.

Why wouldn't it? Phones used to be trackable based on WiFi MAC address, now it is randomized. General drive is towards avoiding tracking, I don't see any reason why would it change.

You need just one key per day, 15-minutes ids can be generated based on this. Bloom filter might be still useful though.

> So first obvious caveat is that this is "private" (or at least not worse than BTLE), until the moment you test positive. > At that point all of your BTLE mac addrs over the previous period become linkable.

Linkable over the period of 14 days. Or even linkable during one day - each day means new key, so linking between these might be attempted only on basis on behavioral correlations.

What to do with such data? Microanalysis of customer behaviors? It won't be possible to use such data for future customer profiling, as it won't be possible to match the history with identifiers after the infection. This data is practically worthless.

Don't these providers need to be registered somewhere? It should be easy to reach them and provide with either code generator software or even printed one-time codes for database addition.

You can use changing IDs and publish ID history (or ID generator seed) for confirmed cases.

Just extrapolation of the trend from plot my friend has prepared: https://covid.matemaciek.com/ - I won't be surprised if the number of confirmed cases in the USA reaches 300k in a week and overtakes cumulative number in mentioned group of core European countries in two weeks.

The USA started later and seems to have quicker growth rate. There is still time to catch up.