Hacker News: quantumgarbage

New comment by quantumgarbage in "[dead]"

quantumgarbage — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 13:22:04 +0000

"it is a shot across the bow of the entire software industry"

New comment by quantumgarbage in "Raising money fucked me up"

quantumgarbage — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 21:40:13 +0000

Loved it, understanding and working through your vulnerabilities is super hard but ultra rewarding. Bold but very altruistic move to publish this

New comment by quantumgarbage in "Accepting US car standards would risk European lives"

quantumgarbage — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 12:22:54 +0000

I think the point was not about truck culture, but anti-social behaviours

New comment by quantumgarbage in "On the Distribution of the Distances of Random Words"

quantumgarbage — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 12:20:15 +0000

A result proving that the capacity conjecture of Ben-Sasson, Carmon, Ishai, Kopparty and Saraf (J. ACM '23) is false. This conjecture is being used by quite a few zkVM projects, to reduce their proof size and verifier time.

On the Distribution of the Distances of Random Words

quantumgarbage — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 12:20:15 +0000

Article URL: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/2010

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45789783

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by quantumgarbage in "Show HN: Oh Yah – Routine management app I built for my sons"

quantumgarbage — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 18:15:07 +0000

nice, my kids are going to have so many fond memories of their childhood thanks to your app

New comment by quantumgarbage in "The collapse of the econ PhD job market"

quantumgarbage — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 11:23:53 +0000

We are questioning the assumptions themselves, not the act of making them.

(I don't feel like anyone is upset?)

New comment by quantumgarbage in "The collapse of the econ PhD job market"

quantumgarbage — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 09:35:43 +0000

Sure, that does not mean all models are equal.

Economics both describe and prescribe, so those models should be evaluated on their predictive power and on whether they have actually done any good.

New comment by quantumgarbage in "The collapse of the econ PhD job market"

quantumgarbage — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 07:09:00 +0000

That isn't a vague strawman, that's a great point. Economists work from assumptions, which can be flawed in two ways: they can be blatantly wrong (see the work Kahneman and Tversky did on the rational individual hypothesis) and they can be unfalsifiable (you can't always gather data about the assumption itself). There is a good essay on this from Tirole (yet a very mainstream economist) here: https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/...

Did the HHS Just Explain Autism?

quantumgarbage — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 07:05:15 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/did-the-hhs-just-explain-autism

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45343715

Points: 38

# Comments: 6

New comment by quantumgarbage in "Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says"

quantumgarbage — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 08:00:53 +0000

Sure, show us the numbers you got from your "further readings".

Plenty of peeps are being much more factual below, compared to the gvt linguo that you are just rehashing rn

New comment by quantumgarbage in "Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo"

quantumgarbage — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 18:51:42 +0000

Not only tether is a "thing", its actually in the top 10 US bonds buyer. So this "thing" isn't a business anymore, but an actual, proper, geopolitical actor.

New comment by quantumgarbage in "How to prove false statements: Practical attacks on Fiat-Shamir"

quantumgarbage — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 11:34:34 +0000

This is not an attack on hash functions in general. In this paper, the authors build a statement (or "circuit") which should, by construction, not have any accepting claim. Yet, they show that when using GKR along the FS transform, you can still get accepting proofs.

This has to do with "how an hash function behaves" in the sense that, in the context of a specific protocol (GKR), it is possible to bake in the circuit the ability to predict the randomness obtained from hashing the statement itself and the public values satisfying it.

New comment by quantumgarbage in "How to prove false statements: Practical attacks on Fiat-Shamir"

quantumgarbage — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 18:58:19 +0000

By "easy" I mean straightforward.

Previous examples which showed how instantiating Fiat Shamir leads to an unsound protocol were so contrived that people use to think that they were a testament to how unlikely breaking FS would be [1].

In "How to Prove False Statements", you can actually build what they show.

[1]: e.g. see https://eprint.iacr.org/1998/011.pdf

New comment by quantumgarbage in "How to prove false statements: Practical attacks on Fiat-Shamir"

quantumgarbage — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 18:45:16 +0000

The protocol is in charge of producing the proof. Fiat Shamir is a heuristic, some kind of rule of thumb, which consists in using a hash function as a source of randomness.

Cryptographic protocols often feature coin tosses. The idea is that if we replace a hash function in place of the protocol coin tosses, it should still be hard for a malicious prover to craft a false statement with an accepting proof - making the protocol unsound.

Roughly, the meat of the attack consists in baking in the statement being proven the ability for the prover to predict upfront how the hash function is going to behave - hereby breaking the Fiat Shamir heuristic and making the prover able to craft a false statement with an accepting proof.

That’s it, this is “How to Prove False Statements“!

New comment by quantumgarbage in "How to prove false statements: Practical attacks on Fiat-Shamir"

quantumgarbage — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 15:18:04 +0000

Yes, what you are missing is that attacks on Fiat Shamir were very contrived up to now.

However the paper shows that there in fact exists a pretty simple way to break the Fiat Shamir heuristic, for a protocol operating in the RO model. And such kind of efficient attacks are rather concerning in cryptography land.

So this isn't about the attack per se, rather it's about the existence of such an easy one.

New comment by quantumgarbage in "A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs"

quantumgarbage — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 10:18:55 +0000

> A modern sparse Transformer, for instance, is not "conscious," but it is an excellent engineering approximation of two core brain functions: the Global Workspace (via self-attention) and Dynamic Sparsity (via MoE).

Could you suggest some literature supporting this claim? Went through your blog post but couldn't find any.

New comment by quantumgarbage in "A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs"

quantumgarbage — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 10:10:39 +0000

I think s/he meant swans instead (in ref. to Popperian epistemology).

Not sure though, the point s/he is making isn't really clear to me as well

New comment by quantumgarbage in "Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology"

quantumgarbage — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 20:10:30 +0000

Look for the "Fiat Shamir heuristic" to understand the non interactive part.

It basically consists in the prover getting its random challenges from hashing public inputs, rather than from the verifier's coin tosses.

New comment by quantumgarbage in "Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology"

quantumgarbage — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 20:05:42 +0000

Ofc, since approx the 80s