Viewing profile — mprime1

Very cool! Here’s something similar-ish but using symmetric encryption (i.e. password): https://mprimi.github.io/portable-secret/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34083366

Shared something very similar on HN a few years ago. The entire source code is about a hundred lines, which makes it easier for folks to review and trust: https://news.ycombinator.…

There are some restrictions. I had the foolish idea of installing a Tesla charger at home to charge my Bolt. I’ve been unable to ever use it. The wall charger works fine with Tesla…

> 5.9k stars, 727 forks, 132 contributors: https://github.com/nats-io/nats.go That's the NATS Go _client_. The server project is https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server 17k stars, 1…

Mastodon is another one (ActivityPub / Feediverse) https://nlnet.nl/project/Mastodon/

> never really understood how just adding extra invisible stuff to make the equations work is justified IANAP but here’s my understanding. At the end of the month you spent $2000, …

My anecdotal evidence confirms this. Friends in my home country are hooked on Telegram meme groups and as a result they’re spreading [Russian propaganda] conspiracy theories at ala…

Stay humble - There is someone else that is better at X than you are - The person not so good at X is probably better than you at Y

Same thing as what? Parent was asking about deduping encrypted data. Someone said (wrongly) it’s impossible and I shared a popular project that does exactly that.

Indeed. Borg for example is e2e but able to dedupe. My bookmark archive is 10TB but deduped on-disk size is 100GB because most files are the same across backups! https://www.borgba…

I had a fascinating conversation with someone that has been working on this system for the last 20 or so years. Water treatment is powered by the geyser and in turn the leftover br…

Ordering gives you ... ordering. And nothing more. Process 1 receives: 3:00 [1] "P1 is leader" 3:01 [2] "P2 is leader" Process 2 receives: 3:00 [1] "P1 is leader" 4:00 [2] "P2 is l…

Rounding up 'usually works' to 'is reliable' is a recipe for building crappy systems. Rounding down 'usually works' to 'it's not perfect and we need to handle edge cases' is how yo…

The fatal flaw is calling them "locks". When programmers think of locks, they think of something that can be used to guarantee mutual exclusion. Distributed locks have edge cases w…

> They both reduce to a paxos style atomic broadcast Atomic Broadcast guarantees order of delivery. It does not (cannot) guarantee timing of delivery. Which is what people want and…

There's some serious flaws in your reasoning. TCP guarantees order [as long as the connection is active] but it is far from being 'perfectly reliable'. Example: sender sends, conne…

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be bashful. I am not familiar with S3 and maybe what you describe is a perfectly safe solution for S3 and certain classes of usage. I could not get past…

Notice I did not mention FLP. Atomic Broadcast (via Paxos or RAFT) does not depend on partial synchrony assumptions to maintain its safety properties. Your internet or intranet net…

"Distributed locks" are at best a contention-reduction mechanism. They cannot be used to implement mutual exclusion that is _guaranteed_ to work. I've seen way too many systems whe…

Telling people "here's a recipe to do locks" should come with a giant flashing sign that say: "this is not an actual lock (as in in-process locks) -- locks in distributed systems a…

Thank you for the link GP! I’m the ‘maintainer’ but I’m hands off and not planning on significant improvements. Discussion on HN was also quite interesting and you may find some id…

Leader election and distributed locking reduce to the same problem… which is proven to be impossible. It means in some edge case it will fail on you, is your system handling those …

Definitely! 1. Many companies are hiring "AI" engineers. My guess is 90% of these jobs are virtue signaling to investors and those positions will go to folks that are good at appea…

FYI Evolutionary Algorithms have been an active area of research for decades.[1] Among the many uses, they have been applied to ‘evolving’ neural networks. Famously a guy whose nam…

The AI training team asked for this feature (I’m being a bit provocative and assume today it stores locally only but a future TOS change will secretly and “anonymously” upload your…