Hacker News: photon_lines

New comment by photon_lines in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

photon_lines — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:37:59 +0000

There is a chance - yes, but there's a lot of other evidence that he was involved in its creation (not just the 10+ years he talked about bit-gold prior to bitcoin). Bit-gold = bitcoin. My guess is that someone (like Hal Finny) implemented it with him but he was the originator of the idea and wrote the paper on it. Finny most likely had the original keys or he intentionally got rid of them on purpose (which explains why the wallet hasn't been active). Those are my guesses but the language in the paper very much gives me the impression that it was written by Nick Szabo.

New comment by photon_lines in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

photon_lines — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:38:20 +0000

I'm almost 100% certain he's the creator of Bitcoin. I didn't need to see his technical chops to suspect it -- all I needed was to read his article from 2002 which discusses the whole concept and key ideas that Bitcoin is currently based on: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/shelling-out/

New comment by photon_lines in "TurboQuant: Redefining AI efficiency with extreme compression"

photon_lines — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:35:15 +0000

Thank you! I'm glad you found it helpful (and that others did too)!!

New comment by photon_lines in "TurboQuant: Redefining AI efficiency with extreme compression"

photon_lines — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:21:47 +0000

The whole goal of quantisation is to put the data into 'bins' so that it can easily be 'packed' so that you can represent it using less bits (less information). You can think of it like rounding essentially (3.14159 -> 3). Now, sometimes within data, the distribution will be non-ideal for separating it out into bins (let's say that our rounding rules are simple -- we simply use a floor function so 2.45 maps to 2 and 6.4543 maps to 6 etc...) and our bins simply map to the floor -- if we had a set of numbers which look like this: [3.11, 4.43, 5.78, 12.33, 34.32], they would simply map to [3, 4, 5, 12, 34]. Now, we have one huge outlier in our data (34) so to create bins for those sets of numbers, we would need 6 bits of information (2 to the power of 6 = 64), but this is mostly due to the fact that we have one huge outlier (34.32). To get rid of this -- the algorithms applies a random rotation matrix which 'distorts' the original data so that it is more evenly distributed among the possible bins which are assigned to the data set. In linear algebra, a rotation matrix is an orthogonal matrix. When you multiply your vector by this matrix, you aren't changing the "amount" of data (the length of the vector remains the same), but you are recalculating every single number in that vector as a weighted sum of the originals. According to the Central Limit Theorem, when you sum up many random things, the result always starts looking like a bell curve. This is the magic TurboQuant relies on: they don't know what your data looks like, but they know that after the rotation, the data must look like a Beta Distribution and they use this fact to transform the original data into a more 'tightly packed' distribution which allows them to more efficiently pack (or quantise) the information. If most of the transformed data is huddled together into a predictable Bell curve shape, you can pack your bins tightly around that shape leading to much higher precision with fewer needed bits to store it. For example, after applying a rotation matrix, our original transform [3.11, 4.43, 5.78, 12.33, 34.32] might get mapped to something like [8.12, 8.65, 9.25, 10.53, 12.86] and we can crate bins which both are more accurate and need less bits in order to hold our original data set. To create the most optimal bins -- the Lloyd-Max algorithm is used. This algorithm is the gold standard for 1D quantisation. Its goal is to find the best places to put your "boundaries" (where you cut the data) and your "reconstruction values" (the number you store) to minimise the Mean Squared Error (MSE). After applying this, you have your 'rounded' values (or quantized data), but there is still an error value which is missing from our data set: and this is where the residual bit comes in. That bit doesn't represent the original data (or vector) - it simply represents our 'bias' after we apply the above algorithms. It's basically like a '1-bit note' which allows you to perfectly cancel out all the bias terms which our above quantisation algorithm produces to make the 'interactions' (or inner products) when we multiply our values together extremely accurate again even after transforming our original data. Does this make sense?

New comment by photon_lines in "Thank HN: You helped save 33k lives"

photon_lines — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 23:25:51 +0000

Thank you Chase -- I was an early Watsi supporter (and still am actually) but you just reminded me I need to donate soon haha :) Either way fantastic work and thank you!

New comment by photon_lines in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

photon_lines — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 02:51:48 +0000

I don't have a personal site at the moment, but I do have a blog: https://photonlines.substack.com/

Some of my projects: https://github.com/photonlines

New comment by photon_lines in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

photon_lines — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 02:50:06 +0000

I love your website. Very clear and to the point.

New comment by photon_lines in "Show HN: Prism.Tools – Free and privacy-focused developer utilities"

photon_lines — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 22:08:13 +0000

You do understand that you can run these tools locally right? The code is fully available and open source: https://github.com/blgardner/prism.tools

New comment by photon_lines in "Show HN: Prism.Tools – Free and privacy-focused developer utilities"

photon_lines — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 22:04:45 +0000

Ahhh OK - that makes sense - thank you.

New comment by photon_lines in "Show HN: Prism.Tools – Free and privacy-focused developer utilities"

photon_lines — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 15:40:32 +0000

I love what you have here. Thank you for open sourcing your work -- but why the custom license? Why not just do a standard MIT license?

New comment by photon_lines in "IBM to acquire Confluent"

photon_lines — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 15:55:10 +0000

If anyone is curious to see what Watson actually was you can find it here (it was nowhere near to a generalized large langue model -- mostly made for winning in Jeopardy): https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4740/2011sp/papers/AIMa...

New comment by photon_lines in "IBM to acquire Confluent"

photon_lines — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 15:21:26 +0000

Why in the world would economists need to study this? It's been known that large bureaucracies have been dysfunctional for over a couple of decades now if not centuries. The large reason is because 1) the incentives to do great work are not there (most of the credit for a huge company's success goes to the CEO who gets 100X the salary of a regular worker while delivering usually pretty much nothing) 2) politics usually plays a huge role which gives a huge advantage to your competition (i.e. your competition needs to spend less time on politics and more time on the actual product) and 3) human beings don't functionally work well in groups larger than 100-250 due to the overwhelming complexity of the communication needed in order to make this type of structure work. Incentives though I think are the primary driver - most people at companies like IBM don't have any incentives to actually care about the product they produce and that's the secret behind the ruin of almost every large company.

Edit: you also seem to be giving too much credence to Watson. Watson was actually mostly a marketing tool designed to win in Jeopardy and nothing else. It was constructed specifically to compete in that use-case and was nowhere near to the architecture of a general transformer which is capable of figuring out meta-patterns within language and structurally understanding language. You can read about Watson's design and architecture here if you're curious: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4740/2011sp/papers/AIMa...

New comment by photon_lines in "DeepSeekMath-V2: Towards Self-Verifiable Mathematical Reasoning [pdf]"

photon_lines — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 20:24:26 +0000

Exciting stuff from a fantastic team.

New comment by photon_lines in "Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving"

photon_lines — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 20:10:07 +0000

Happy Thanksgiving everyone -- I've mostly been a lurker here over the last 20 years and I'm thankful for being able to interact with such a bright and vibrant community full of thinkers, doers and explorers -- you guys definitely changed my life for the better and inspired me in many, many ways.

New comment by photon_lines in "My dad could still be alive, but he's not"

photon_lines — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 04:11:05 +0000

So if your endocrinologist was found to have ran a concentration camp in the past, it would have no effect on your decision on whether you wanted to use them as your doctor? Running a concentration camp also has no bearing on a doctor's performance.

New comment by photon_lines in "My dad could still be alive, but he's not"

photon_lines — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 03:25:09 +0000

She blamed the research fraud on her assistant when she was initially accused of it and denied all liabilities. She only admitted to it after they had her cornered. I had her as my endocrinologist for a while and I would not recommend her. Edit: if you want to have a care-taker who doesn't mind lying or is a psychopath, you do you but it's a no go for me.

New comment by photon_lines in "My dad could still be alive, but he's not"

photon_lines — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 03:10:34 +0000

This is 100% true, especially in Canada. I've had multiple encounters with doctors who were not fit for their positions and should not have been working as doctors. One of them nearly killed my mom, and another one was suspended due to malpractice and performing research fraud, but was given her license back and is back to work at the moment. Yes she is fully licensed and back to working as a regular MD in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Jamal

New comment by photon_lines in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

photon_lines — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 03:04:27 +0000

20 minutes a day is all it takes. Don't even think about it - just do it. After a couple of weeks you'll wonder how in the world you ever lived without exercise -- trust me on this one :)

New comment by photon_lines in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

photon_lines — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 02:56:07 +0000

Are you experiencing the HN hug of death or is your website down? Either way I'm super interested in what you're building and I'd love to use it but I cannot reach your link at the moment. Good luck with the endeavor either way and thank you for building this.

New comment by photon_lines in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

photon_lines — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 02:53:01 +0000

I love this - great work.