Hacker News: nehan

New comment by nehan in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

nehan — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 17:27:17 +0000

"While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models."

I think they should be able to unravel whether or not any sessions by Tristan or Levent went into the training data for this model.

Bitcoin sidechain Liquid hacked for ~4k BTC

nehan — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 16:57:19 +0000

Article URL: https://nehanarula.org/2026/09/07/liquid-hack.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49600421

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

New comment by nehan in "Bitcoin and Quantum Computing: A Roadmap"

nehan — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:13:29 +0000

excellent point! I agree.

Bitcoin and Quantum Computing: A Roadmap

nehan — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:46:56 +0000

Article URL: https://nehanarula.org/2026/04/20/bitcoin-and-quantum-a-roadmap.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47837968

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

New comment by nehan in "Bitcoin and quantum computing"

nehan — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:58:18 +0000

I can't think of heuristics available on the Bitcoin P2P network that would be helpful for this, but I'm curious if you have any in mind.

New comment by nehan in "Bitcoin and quantum computing"

nehan — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:02:15 +0000

Sorry I wasn't clear there. Because most of the short-depth is controlled by centralized exchanges, there's a risk you won't be able to actualize your short (withdraw, either in crypto or to a bank account), even if it's successful -- they could just block you from withdrawing and/or report you for fraud.

New comment by nehan in "Bitcoin and quantum computing"

nehan — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:59:14 +0000

The point is you can't distinguish transactions that are from an "attacker" when the underlying signature scheme is broken. The Bitcoin P2P network has some metrics to disconnect from nodes that might be trying to DoS you, but if a transaction has enough fees, is spending unspent coins, and has a valid signature, it's valid.

New comment by nehan in "Bitcoin and quantum computing"

nehan — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:43:58 +0000

Also, LetsEncrypt is very cool! Thanks for working on it.

New comment by nehan in "Bitcoin and quantum computing"

nehan — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:33:18 +0000

This work is important, and I'm looking forward to forming an opinion on it. Maybe a future post! For those who are interested, this is what I'm aware of:

- Tim Ruffing proved that Taproot's commitment scheme was quantum-resilient: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1307

- Jonas Nick and Mikhail Kudinov have proposed SHRINCS: https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/shrincs-324-byte-stateful-post-... and SHRIMPS: https://x.com/n1ckler/status/2038695067754328095.

New comment by nehan in "Bitcoin and quantum computing"

nehan — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:28:03 +0000

two things:

1) Short markets in Bitcoin don't have unlimited depth, and the centralized ones are KYC'd so there's some risk there 2) What if it doesn't tank the price? One thing people have suggested is just burning all the vulnerable coins[1]; it reduces supply so maybe the price will... go up? The point is there's uncertainty.

[1] https://x.com/lostbutlucky/status/2040878873731080681

Bitcoin and quantum computing

nehan — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 20:56:23 +0000

Article URL: https://nehanarula.org/2026/04/03/bitcoin-and-quantum-computing.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47681274

Points: 170

# Comments: 138

The Technology Underlying Stablecoins

nehan — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 14:53:06 +0000

Article URL: https://nehanarula.org/2021/09/23/stablecoins.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28671363

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by nehan in "The potential Orwellian horror of central bank digital currencies"

nehan — Mon, 12 Jul 2021 17:26:38 +0000

This isn't a proposal for a US CBDC. It's research on technical tradeoffs that might need to be addressed in a hypothetical CBDC.

MIT DCI and Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Collaborate on Digital Cash

nehan — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 20:28:42 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/mit-media-lab-digital-currency-initiative/digital-currency-initiative-and-federal-reserve-bank-of-boston-announce-cbdc-design-collaboration-39041d8fe2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24275735

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

Cryptographic vulnerabilities in IOTA

nehan — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 17:11:28 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-iota-9a6a9ddc4367

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15193798

Points: 138

# Comments: 68

CSAIL PhD Students Do a Reddit AMA

nehan — Sat, 13 Dec 2014 00:07:00 +0000

Article URL: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2p3lzc/were_3_female_computer_scientists_at_mit_here_to/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8743459

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by nehan in "If Eventual Consistency Seems Hard, Wait Till You Try MVCC"

nehan — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 02:12:33 +0000

No. In serializable mode it simply appears that one thing is happening at a time. You can touch unrelated data concurrently with no performance impact.

New comment by nehan in "If Eventual Consistency Seems Hard, Wait Till You Try MVCC"

nehan — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 02:09:41 +0000

serializability != one giant lock around your database.

concurrency and serializability go together great. it's only if transactions actually read/write or write/write the same data that they are done one at a time (and even that's not exactly true, depending on the concurrency control algorithms). MVCC often provides better performance because read-only transactions will not block writers.

and achieving serializability across database nodes is DEFINITELY NOT impossible.

MIT McGovern Institute Star Trek Seasons Greetings

nehan — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 20:23:38 +0000

Article URL: http://mcgovern.mit.edu/news/videos/live-long-and-prosper-in-the-new-year/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8718929

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by nehan in "Cache is the new RAM"

nehan — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 22:19:17 +0000

re: materialized views -- you can kind of fake them in PostgreSQL by creating a view, populating it, and then defining triggers on insert, delete, and updates to your source tables.