Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47801187

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

It is sad - but entirely unsurprising - that NYT decided to paint a big target on someone's back just for clicks. Judith Miller-tier all over again. Miller too had real evidence and junk evidence, couldn't distinguish between the two, and editors wanted a flashy headline. Carreyrou has exactly the same problem here: NYT editors need multimedia events (like junk stylometry filtering - watch the number shrink from 34,000 to 562 to 114 to 56 to 8 to 1!!!) because that's what its audience-product relationship demands. I think it not unfair to say that modern Times' editorial culture has no mechanism for distinguishing rigorous inference from merely compelling narrative. Open the front page on a random day: how often do you see the Times staking credibility on a causal claim "A causes B" vs simply "X happened. Then Y came." vibes/parataxis.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582418

Points: 88

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189766

Points: 3

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That said, the most important loss is composability: an agent can't take your Chaumian coupon escrow and snap it together with someone else's DvP protocol and a third party's rate-limiting wallet in a single atomic transaction. The power of a shared execution environment is that these interaction patterns don't need to be anticipated and designed around in advance. Agents aren't going to negotiate which custom protocol to use for every interaction (the necessary protocol might not even exist!), they will use shared infrastructure where composability of various primitives is the effortless default.

https://xcancel.com/snigdhasur/status/2014747997943238791

https://nitter.poast.org/snigdhasur/status/20147479979432387...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46739282

Points: 1

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46546527

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

https://archive.is/tKZmn

FWIW, this seems to be a Reuters report reprinted in Japan Times. Previous HN discussions got just a couple comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307819

https://old.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/1olyu7r/i_made...

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Achatgpt.com&tbs=cdr%3...

So it looks like Google uses inferred dates over its own indexing timestamps, even for recently crawled pages from domains that didn't exist during the claimed date range.

None of these documents were actually published on the web by then, incl., a Watergate PDF bearing date of Nov 21, 1974 - almost 20 years before PDF format got released. Of course, WWW itself started in 1991.

Google Search's date filter is useful for finding documents about historical topics, but unreliable for proving when information actually became publicly available online.

For example, if n = p1*p2*...*pk is square-free and not a Carmichael number, then by Korselt's criterion there exists a pi such that pi-1 does not divide n-1 (this also implies that pi>2). Use the Chinese Remainder Theorem to produce b such that b=1 (mod pj) for all j!=i, and b (mod pi) is a generator of (Z/piZ)^*. Then b is a Fermat witness: gcd(b, n) = 1 (because b is non-zero modulo every prime factor) and b^(n-1) != 1 (mod n) because b^(n-1) != 1 (mod pi) (as pi-1 does not divide n-1).

However, b "betrays" the prime factorization of n, since gcd(b-1, n)>1 (by construction b-1 is divisible by all pj with j!=i, but not divisible by pi>2), and thus gcd(b-1, n) is a non-trivial factor of n. (I assumed square-free above but if pi^ei (ei>=2) divides n, then b=1+pi^(ei-1) (mod pi^ei), b=1 (mod pj^ej) (j!=i) also would have worked.)

On the other hand, it is also known that for non-Carmichael numbers at least half of the bases b with gcd(b, n) = 1 are Fermat witnesses. So if you pick b uniformly at random, the verifier does not gain any new information from seeing b: they could have sampled such a witness themselves by running the same random test. Put another way, the Fermat test itself is an OK ingredient, but a prover who chooses b in a factorization-dependent way can absolutely leak the factors - the final protocol won't be ZK.

I especially like how he highlights that Collatz conjecture shows that a simple dynamical system can have amazingly complex behavior; also 3n-1 variant has two known cycles - so "any proof of the Collatz conjecture must at some point use a property of the 3n+1 map that is not shared by the 3n-1 map." And this property can't be too general either - questions about FRACTRAN programs (of which Collatz conjecture is a special case) can encode the halting problem.

If you haven't seen it, FRACTRAN itself is amazing - https://www.cs.unc.edu/~stotts/COMP210-s23/madMath/Conway87.... and the paper is pure joy to read.

Paper (CCS '25): https://satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu/docs/dontlookup_ccs25_fullpap...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45575358

Points: 29

# Comments: 2