>While most hoaxes on Wikipedia are short-lived (90% of discovered hoaxes are flagged within one hour of creation and only 1% of hoaxes persist for more than a year), those that make it past this initial screening have an increased probability of continuing to "survive" and remain a part of Wikipedia for much longer (if a hoax survives past its first day, it has an 18% probability of lasting for a year or more).
How about the opposite direction? Instead of needing parentheses in a language with infix notation, can parentheses be removed in a language with prefix notation (like Lisp)?
Is elegant composition possible with prefix notation and some whitespace and indentation instead of parentheses everywhere?
No, they aren't. I did not say "A person's tested genetic code never changes", I said exactly what I meant, which is that genetic codes can be changed. Retroviruses do it. Further, on a grand scale, chimeras [1] exist, with human chimeras often entirely unaware of it (while my priors would suggest I am not one, I can't even come close to proving that to you with the rather meagre medical tests I've had done on me), and on a smaller scale, small mutations in cells can easily propagate out into the body over time, even before we ignore the matter of cancer.
Most of the time, this doesn't matter, but if we're talking about taking hashes for security, suddenly it does.
23andMe is not going to provide you with an "authoritative" DNA "fingerprint" because how would they tell that this genetic sequence in this chromosome from this cell is legit but this contradictory sequence in this other cell is different.
Obviously noone has the capability to do this, so they present you instead with "most likely" results. Not the level of proof I'd be looking for in a court of law.
The problem with that, of course, is that someone's DNA or fingerprint isn't a secret. There's no reason why I couldn't take your fingerprint, embed it into a signature and claim to be you.
And this is part of why authentication and identity are very difficult things to do right, mostly because very few people have thought about what it is they're verifying.
If I publish a public key and say it belongs to me, 'Bob Smith', the only practical use that has is that you can verify that a future message signed by 'Bob Smith' was signed by someone with access to the same private key as the guy who originally published the public key. Any assumption about who 'Bob Smith' actually is, and who that corresponds to in the real world (what other identities do they assert), and also that 'Bob Smith' is a single entity, are simply assumptions.
It's impossible to pin a human down to a single, guaranteed verifiable, non impersonatable and non revocable identity. 'Documents issued by men with guns' isn't foolproof, but we use it as a trust anchor mostly because everyone else does, and we don't have much alternative.
The thing about a fingerprint or even a dna sample, in this use case is that you send your signature ahead of time and verify yourself phyisically at the party. Does your fingerprint hash match your fingerprint? That is more difficult (but not impossible) to spoof. At the end of the day, this discussion stems from notion that government ids are unreliable as a means of verification. Granted, but for what we are trying to achieve in practice is preservation of privacy and data. I was trying to point out that identification of a person - true identification - can be at conflict with our ultimate goal of privacy, since we have to give up a piece of data to prove we are who we say we are, and contemplated finding a way to technically make it happen (in practice) without sacrificing PII.
I see what you mean - you could probably do something like publish your public key and then publish a signed copy of your fingerprint hash. Anyone else could do the same thing, but an imposter wouldn't be able to convincingly produce your fingerprint on demand when physically present. At least, not without a lot of funding and cleverness.
Because anything that requires running a database is burdensome, and even those of us who roll our own services are becoming less patient with software that requires hand-holding just to walk.
HN is far more coastal-liberal than any flavor of libertarian. With a few exceptions, of course: people favor some policies relating to tech on which the conventional left doesn't have a strong opinion.
Not sure -- to me it looks like at least the majority of commenters are quite strongly pro-regulation: e.g. look at all the discussions of AirBNB vs. zoning just a few weeks ago, or 23andme more recently. Sure, voter and commenter demographics could be different, but probably not that much.
