frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Making Democracy Work: Fixing and Simplifying Egalitarian Paxos

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02743
59•otrack•5h ago

Comments

max_•1h ago
>Egalitarian Paxos introduced an alternative, leaderless approach, that allows replicas to order commands collaboratively.

This is exactly how bitcoin works.

Every 10 minutes the network elects a leader to assort & order transactions and also throw out fraudulent transactions.

If he fails to do this, he is not allow to claim his block reward (technically the "coinbase" transaction)

I keep telling people the future of politics is markets & Blockchains.

Its hard to explain comprehensively and what's strange is that no one has written a thorough book on the topic.

I am happy there are people actually writing such material on this topic.

Albeit its a bit too technical.

Computer science is the future of politics & governance. (I don't think AI is any useful but rather distributed systems)

RobotToaster•1h ago
> the future of politics is markets & Blockchains.

That just sounds like robber barons with extra steps?

nathias•19m ago
you don't understand why technology of public ledgers would benefit public ledgers?
paulryanrogers•17m ago
Please go on
roenxi•1h ago
>> Egalitarian Paxos introduced an alternative, leaderless approach...

> Every 10 minutes the network elects a leader to...

From that it sounds like it is completely different to how Bitcoin works. Bitcoin "elects" a leader node once every so often and this paper claims its protocol does not have a leader node. It is pretty easy to imagine a day passing in the Bitcoin world where one node is in control of all the transactions for that day with no ability for any other peer miner to have any influence at all in what transactions end up in the blockchain.

FridgeSeal•1h ago
> the future of politics is markets & Blockchains.

“Hi everyone, I’m here to excitedly talk about the hyper-capitalist-hellscape I’d like to sell you all! Wait, why are you all leaving?”

beeflet•48m ago
The network does not elect a leader. that is a mischaracterization of the PoW process.

It's not like you are hashing based on your public key or something and then you get to sign a block afterwards. You have to commit to a block template before every hash. And also the miner is decided randomly by a weighted hashrate.

Imagine applying this to anything else. The group with the most (extremely specialized) computer power just gets to decide everything?

mariusor•34m ago
> I keep telling people the future of politics is markets & Blockchains.

I hope that you don't mean just things related to cryptocurrencies, because as soon as you demand monetary investment for something, it ceases to be democratic.

keiferski•49m ago
There is a recurring trend of interpreting democracy to mean "leaderless consensus-based decision-making", which really doesn't work and never has. That's why Occupy and pretty much every other similar bottom-up movement failed: leaders are necessary. People follow other people, not algorithms or groups.

"Making democracy work" should be about training better leaders and getting them into the system.

kachapopopow•43m ago
I think EU federation is pretty good, but I feel very dumbfounded every time dumb decisions that do not benefit member states are made, too much empathy too early I guess.
keiferski•39m ago
The EU is pretty good at its intended purpose, which is to tie together European countries in a non-hostile and economically-productive way.

But it seems pretty obviously not very good at any real executive action. Which is, again, by design.

dandanua•31m ago
I wouldn't say so. The first years of the largest war in Europe since WWII have shown that a leaderless EU is incapable of making important decisions crucial to its own survival, as a fallen Ukraine would have led to a divided EU where many countries would be governed by authoritarian fascist regimes, such as the one in Hungary led by Orban.
arielweisberg•41m ago
“Classical state-machine replication protocols, such as Paxos, rely on a distinguished leader process to order commands.”

Isn’t that multi-Paxos? Paxos is leaderless.

Very odd opening sentence.

Kagi Small Web

https://kagi.com/smallweb
29•stranges•49m ago•3 comments

My friends and I accidentally faked the Ryzen 7 9700X3D leaks

https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1orc6jl/my_friends_and_i_accidentally_faked_the_ry...
87•djrockstar1•1h ago•6 comments

Why is Zig so cool?

https://nilostolte.github.io/tech/articles/ZigCool.html
374•vitalnodo•14h ago•280 comments

Valdi – A cross-platform UI framework that delivers native performance

https://github.com/Snapchat/Valdi
328•yehiaabdelm•12h ago•124 comments

Making Democracy Work: Fixing and Simplifying Egalitarian Paxos

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02743
60•otrack•5h ago•13 comments

Friendly attributes pattern in Ruby

https://brunosutic.com/blog/ruby-friendly-attributes-pattern
39•brunosutic•5d ago•19 comments

Becoming a compiler engineer

https://rona.substack.com/p/becoming-a-compiler-engineer
246•lalitkale•15h ago•118 comments

Cekura (YC F24) Is Hiring

1•atarus•1h ago

Reverse engineering a neural network's clever solution to binary addition (2023)

https://cprimozic.net/blog/reverse-engineering-a-small-neural-network/
15•Ameo•4d ago•1 comments

Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

https://github.com/sayyadirfanali/Myna
292•birdculture•18h ago•138 comments

Immutable Software Deploys Using ZFS Jails on FreeBSD

https://conradresearch.com/articles/immutable-software-deploy-zfs-jails
101•vermaden•12h ago•32 comments

The Initial Ideal Customer Profile Worksheet

https://www.reifyworks.com/writing/2023-01-30-iicp
58•mrbbk•4d ago•4 comments

How did I get here?

https://how-did-i-get-here.net/
241•zachlatta•17h ago•45 comments

Why I love OCaml (2023)

https://mccd.space/posts/ocaml-the-worlds-best/
340•art-w•23h ago•246 comments

Ruby already solved my problem

https://newsletter.masilotti.com/p/ruby-already-solved-my-problem
230•joemasilotti•18h ago•96 comments

Local First Htmx

https://elijahm.com/posts/local_first_htmx/
61•srid•10h ago•30 comments

Mullvad: Shutting down our search proxy Leta

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/shutting-down-our-search-proxy-leta
125•holysoles•12h ago•81 comments

Running a 68060 CPU in Quadra 650

https://github.com/ZigZagJoe/Macintosh-Q650-68060
53•zdw•11h ago•22 comments

YouTube Removes Windows 11 Bypass Tutorials, Claims 'Risk of Physical Harm'

https://news.itsfoss.com/youtube-removes-windows-11-bypass-tutorials/
683•WaitWaitWha•16h ago•261 comments

Cerebras Code now supports GLM 4.6 at 1000 tokens/sec

https://www.cerebras.ai/code
103•nathabonfim59•13h ago•70 comments

Apple's "notarisation" – blocking software freedom of developers and users

https://fsfe.org/news/2025/news-20251105-01.en.html
143•DavideNL•7h ago•93 comments

A rats to riches story: Larry the Downing Street cat finds place in TV spotlight

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/08/a-rats-to-riches-story-larry-the-downing-street-...
21•zeristor•3h ago•5 comments

Venn Diagram for 7 Sets

https://moebio.com/research/sevensets/
139•bramadityaw•4d ago•36 comments

Angel Investors, a Field Guide

https://www.jeanyang.com/posts/angel-investors-a-field-guide/
151•azhenley•20h ago•38 comments

Dark mode by local sunlight (2021)

https://www.ctnicholas.dev/articles/dark-mode-by-sunlight
5•gaws•4d ago•3 comments

Can you save on LLM tokens using images instead of text?

https://pagewatch.ai/blog/post/llm-text-as-image-tokens/
30•lpellis•6d ago•10 comments

FSF40 Hackathon

https://www.fsf.org/events/fsf40-hackathon
92•salutis•5d ago•2 comments

Copy button added to Stack Overflow

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/414573/results-of-the-october-2025-community-asks-sprint...
12•exploraz•1h ago•13 comments

Ribir: Non-intrusive GUI framework for Rust/WASM

https://github.com/RibirX/Ribir
67•adamnemecek•16h ago•13 comments

VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025

https://fsfe.org/news/2025/news-20251107-01.en.html
374•kirschner•16h ago•73 comments