evgen (u/evgen) - Readit News

evgen commented on Why isn't online age verification just like showing your ID in person? eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12... · Posted by u/hn_acker

swid · 7 days ago

He’s talking about zero knowledge proofs - it’s a neat use of graph coloring where you send an encrypted proof that a graph can be colored with three colors and no neighbors with the same color. The verifier makes a challenge to prove two nodes don’t have the same color, and the prover provides a key to decrypted just those two nodes. This process is repeated a number of times (with new colored graphs) until the verifier approaches certainty that the prover will always be able to show all nodes have neighbors with different colors.

This coloring problem is NP complete and somehow the thing the prover is proving is encoded in the graph structure. At the end of the day, the only thing the verifier is sure of is that the prover can make the three colored graph, 1 bit that corresponds to the thing the verifier wants to know (eg - does the prover have a token that can show they are over 18).

evgen · 6 days ago

For simple yes/no questions ("Is over 18?", "Is US resident?") then you should look back to David Chaum's blind signatures and the work that came out of that back in the 90s. The math is super-simple to understand and there are a ton of even easier metaphors with envelopes and carbon paper that you can use to explain to your grandmother. Once you get someone to grok blind signatures it is easy to lead them to zero-knowledge proofs.

evgen commented on Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why? · Posted by u/ofalkaed

myself248 · 2 months ago

The Ricochet network. A packet mesh network providing ISDN speeds in the dialup era, wirelessly.

They burned through $5B of 1999 dollars, building out a network in 23 cities, and had effectively zero customers. Finally shut down in 2001.

All their marketing was focused on "mobile professionals", whoever those were, while ignoring home users who were clamoring for faster internet where other ISPs dragged their feet.

Today, 5G femtocells have replicated some of the concept (radically small cell radius to increase geographic frequency reuse), but without the redundancy -- a femtocell that loses its uplink is dead in the water, not serving as a relay node. A Ricochet E-radio that lost its uplink (but still had power) would simply adjust its routing table and continue operating.

evgen · 2 months ago

I loved my Ricochet modems so damn much. Sitting in a coffeeshop in Palo Alto with an Apple Powerbook and a second generation Ricochet modem rocking web browsing and ssh sessions at 56k when wifi was unknown to the general public. I still have a couple in a box somewhere and I am tempted to see if I can get them into star mode.

evgen commented on DeepFabric – Generate high-quality synthetic datasets at scale lukehinds.github.io/deepf... · Posted by u/decodebytes

decodebytes · 3 months ago

Very good, and even better with the new DAG approach - we have been using great-expectations to bench and seeing very good diversity and low amounts of duplication - you check out one of the recent CoT examples here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/lukehinds/deepfabric-devops-...

evgen · 3 months ago

This dataset disappeared. Did it move or get pulled for some reason? (glanced at it when you noted this and went back today to check it out and found a 404...)

evgen commented on Greenland is a beautiful nightmare matduggan.com/greenland-i... · Posted by u/zdw

hinkley · 3 months ago

Clearly not a fan of musical theater. The Music Man ~~takes place in~~ repeatedly refers to Gary. Ron Howard sings a song called Gary Indiana in the movie version. He’s about waist high in that movie.

evgen · 3 months ago

Pretty close, but the musical takes place in the fictional town of River City, Iowa and Henry Hill claims to be an alumnus of the Gary Conservatory (class of '05), which is the hook used to launch the song in question.

evgen commented on Bringing fully autonomous rides to Nashville, in partnership with Lyft waymo.com/blog/2025/09/wa... · Posted by u/ra7

yalogin · 3 months ago

Uber and Lyft are sitting pretty for the moment. They don’t own any cars anyway, now they don’t even have to deal with drivers. Also I am glad google finally found a GTM strategy for their tech. They are building these machines themselves though. These are expensive and cost a lot in maintenance, wonder how the numbers look for them

evgen · 3 months ago

> Uber and Lyft are sitting pretty for the moment.

The two completely replaceable components of this project are 'sitting pretty'? They should be scared to death because this is in fact the death knell for both companies. If the market decides that they are going to be nothing more than 'fleet management' companies for waymo then their share price will crater.

evgen commented on Ollama's new app ollama.com/blog/new-app... · Posted by u/BUFU

apitman · 5 months ago

Good to know, thanks. What do people generally use to connect to it for chat?

evgen · 5 months ago

OpenWebUI seems to be the standard. Easy to spin it up in a docker container pointed to 127.0.0.1:1234/v1 and away you go.

evgen commented on Changes since congestion pricing started in New York nytimes.com/interactive/2... · Posted by u/Vinnl

h2zizzle · 7 months ago

I've never understood what people mean when they say public transportation is "dirty". I've never had to sit or stand in or near muck or sick or anything like that. If there's a bit of grime in the corner or animals or something... Okay? I don't have to touch any of that. I care about as much as getting onto a slightly groady amusement park ride, or seeing bugs or squirrels in the park; it's not going to so traumatize me that I won't ride. Is it the people? I've had to sit next to one or two people who smelled in my hundreds of train and bus trips. Or is it an ethnic/class dogwhistle sort of thing?

evgen · 7 months ago

> I've never understood what people mean when they say public transportation is "dirty".

They are forced to share air with obviously poor and non-white people and that is simply intolerable...

One of the biggest adjustments I went through in moving from SF to London was accepting that busses were a viable mode of transit for any time of day. In SF I would crawl over broken glass to avoid having to take a Muni bus while in London my wife and I have taken a bus in dinner jacket and couture dress to an event at a club. There will doubtless be people to chime in with examples of bus systems that are better, but TfL busses are not 'awful and unreliable and slow and dirty and just terrible' by any possible metric.

evgen commented on India govt has backdoor to WhatsApp economictimes.indiatimes.... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi

evgen · 8 months ago

The article text explicitly refutes the bullshit title. Governments can get access to metadata, not the contents of comms. They can demands whatever they want from Meta, but it appears that thethe only thing they are getting is the same metadata everyone has always known is not protected by E2E.

evgen commented on The most famous carbon dioxide absorber howequipmentworks.com/apo... · Posted by u/bemmu

8474_s · 8 months ago

The part of story where Co2 absorbers were incompatible between two modules sounds really dumb. What was the cause?

evgen · 8 months ago

There was never any requirement for sharing anything between the two vehicles and they were made by completely different contractors. Grumman made the LEM and North American Aviation made the command module. There was also a significant redesign of the command module after the Apollo 1 fire which completely changed the cabin environment. Sort of how you probably cannot take a chunk of equipment out of the cockpit of an Airbus 320 and expect to slot it in to a similar role in a Boeing 737.