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Comment by I_am_tiberius | Hacker News Reader

I find it so ridiculous that they (seemingly) forcefully try to state references to dedicated researchers who devoted much of their lives to the problem, while the LLM does not even know which trained papers were effectively used. That means likely many researchers not listed were heavily influencing this achievement, and Claude does not even know that they helped. And the world doesn't know.

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This happens in academia all the time. You read a ton of papers, chat with tons of people about tons of ideas.

Later you come up some idea, you do the experiment, write the paper, search for relevant citations when you write the intro.

Honestly I think this is actually desirable. For a mind to work well and do things creatively and efficiently it can't be a simple search engine, it needs to blend and meld and reform the information.

And that means the output can't be cleanly deterministically linked to the input. Unless you just keep a log then cite everything you've ever read in your life (and all the conversations and talks too).

> This happens in academia all the time. You read a ton of papers, chat with tons of people about tons of ideas. > > Later you come up some idea, you do the experiment, write the paper, search for relevant citations when you write the intro.

And your search includes papers mentioning the various ideas you heard about from those other people. They almost always publish _something_ about it, and in the rare cases they do not, you put them in the "thanks" section, describing which ideas they contributed to (or in very rare cases, cite an unpublished result/claim as "personal communication" from an author).

I was in academic for a number of years (Theoretical Comp Sci, then DB management systems architecture), and what I just described seems to have been the practice. It is of course possible that people neglected to cite the sources of some of their ideas, but not that I know of. The worst I could say is that several authors' work exhibited a similar approach and a person preferred to cite one of them rather than another.

This is the reason why this is desirable for humans. But I do not like extending excuses that apply to human (limitations) also to companies that could keep a log.

I think I explained poorly about the log.

The log is the training data. The impractical thing isn't keeping the log, it's including the log as citations. For an expert human, it'd be thousands of pages. For an LLM, you might as well just put "citation: all human language ever written".

This is a weak argument. Swarms of LLM agents have been regurgitating the work of academics and ruining their PhD work without attribution. It's not analogous to what you're describing.

Sounds entirely reasonable to me. They tried to give some credit. The main contribution is the solution that Claude came up with.

Maybe someone already figured it out, but it is well covered somewhere. And Claude just used it. I wonder if we ever know for sure.

Claude seems to be fairly good at bruteforcing/testing/etc on it's own, it solved a fairly intricate thing while I was busy on other things.

I've adapted a crypto-lib for TLS connections and had a mistake during negotation that truncated some algo-selection value, worked up until the other party started trialling post-quantum algorthims that apparently had algo-id's that collided with the truncated values I was using.

Claude figured out that from the code and trialling TLS handshakes.

Besides, since there was a bounty on finding the curve it seems unlikely that someone would've found out and not shared that? (unless working at a security service that figured out that it was possible to attack?)

I wonder if Claude does the brute-forcing directly. I think what's more likely is that Claude is synthesising programs that brute-force, albeit with interesting heuristics.

Wouldn't they have claimed the bounty?

If they thought it to be backdoor, why not sell for some other believer who pays more than the bounty? But anyway, not everyone is after money and fame.

> The main contribution is the solution that Claude came up with.

That's an argument that must be infuriating to all researchers who ever published a paper on that topic, because most likely Claude was trained with all of them.

I suppose so, but it's still the case.

How is that any different from a human that learned from another researcher or paper?

> That's an argument that must be infuriating to all researchers who ever published a paper on that topic, because most likely Claude was trained with all of them.

When do we call it the right time to stop with the pitchforks, torches and selfish tendencies and accept that many papers published were used to help train a tool that brings discoveries to light for the entirety of humanity to benefit?

Now?

About the same time we accept that capitalism is the best economic system possible and that banks and the stock market create value for the common man.

> banks and the stock market create value for the common man

If we got rid of the two significant ways for businesses to raise money that would be bad for everyone.

The average citizen would be far better off if we all did so.

> About the same time we accept that capitalism is the best economic system possible and that banks and the stock market create value for the common man.

Sorry what? Nice deflection but knowledge for the greater good of everyone and selfish corporate greed are not in the same camps of end results, the latter being in the same category of the original reply of individuals being selfish for their discoveries.

Unlocking knowledge is just a matter of time and effort, someone will do it. Why does it matter who when we have new technologies that allows enabling everyone in advancing human knowledge?

If this is true, NIST staff were a bunch of moron who simply used libc's default RNG(infamous for poor quality), initialize it by srand(time(NULL)) (also bad practice), and then throw out the first hundreds to thousands 20 bytes and use the 20 bytes.

NIST published recommended SEEDS in 1999 July. They spend 2 years checking 20 bytes SEEDS that were generated by casually by a hand of amateurish method.

I do not believe this claim. It just Claude hit a jackpot that happens to match 20 bytes.

I don't think you understand what NIST was doing. The quality of the random number generator does not matter for this operation. Competing curves replace the RNG entirely with mathematical constants like pi and e.

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