Hitchhikers guide to the universe having 42 mentions is a cosmic level coincidence
the ultimate coincidence of life, the universe, and everything
Readit Newskaangiray26 commented on Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025 hackernews-readings-61360... · Posted by u/seinvak
kaangiray26 commented on AGI is not multimodal thegradient.pub/agi-is-no... · Posted by u/danielmorozoff
This gives very little credit to how the human mind is able to draw parallels and insights from seemingly unrelated perceptions. Newton observing an apple falling from a tree allowed cross-thinking. Watching someone juggle can help you understand a queue. Understanding a queue can help you understand juggling. Your typical soap opera can be distilled down to office dynamics. Scale is going to obliterate specialization in this regard.
everything in life is a metaphor, analogous to something else...
Some people do timelock encryption by using weak cryptography that's expected to be broken in a planned amount of time, but this project isn't doing that. It uses modern cryptography to encrypt some data to a set of public keys so that 18 of 22 nodes have to cooperate to decrypt it. Anything encrypted with modern cryptography isn't expected to be crackable in under millions of years.
Their design has the benefit over yours that people don't need to send data to peers in order to timelock some data. The timelock only needs to be sent to the peers for decryption.
Your last sentence seems just the same to me. I believe that saying something can't be cracked in under millions of years is analogous to saying that no advancements will be made in those years.
So Cloudflare suggests there are two ways of doing timelock encryption: you can rely on some proxy for the passage of time, such as repeated hashing; or you can rely on one or more trusted agents.
I don't think the 'proxy' approach is timelock encryption, because it doesn't actually rely on the passage of time. Cloudflare is relying on a network of trusted agents that 'tick' at a predictable rate.
I think I wouldn't want to rely on this network of trusted agents to preserve a long-lived secret. There's no guarantee that the network will still exist when it's time to reveal thw secret.
Is there a way to do timelock encryption that doesn't involve reliance on a third-party, and that really depends on the actual time, rather than on a proxy for time? I cn't see it, but I'm not very clever.
It's funny just thinking about it. Because if you are not depending on a third-party, then you are depending on yourself only. Which means that once you encrypt something hoping that you won't be able to decrypt for some amount of time, you accept that changing of the time has something to do with the decryption of your encrypted message. Since you can certainly know how much of time should be pass, you can't keep secrets from yourself right?
So, in a sense, in my opinion, if you want to encrypt a message and send it to someone and make it timelocked without a third-party, you might as well just keep the message secret until the desired amount of time has passed and just give it to him.
If being crackable during the time period is a concern, why not just use OTP (one-time pad, not his evil twin) and create XORed multiple keys to be shared with peers, and then use all of the distributed keys to reveal the message after some time had passed?
kaangiray26 commented on Using P2P to turn your browser into a web server kaangiray26.github.io/pag... · Posted by u/kaangiray26
I know this is not efficient by any means but being able to instantly make things publicly available from your phone is a cool trick. Just wanted to show how it's done and I'm curious about what could be built on top of this
Happy to hear your thoughts on this.