Quadratic Memory Reductions for Zero-Knowledge Proofs
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
github.comTechstory
skepticalmixed
Debate
60/100
Zero-Knowledge ProofsCryptographyDecentralized Systems
Key topics
Zero-Knowledge Proofs
Cryptography
Decentralized Systems
A GitHub repository claiming to reduce quadratic memory requirements for Zero-Knowledge Proofs sparks discussion on its validity and potential applications in decentralized systems.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Active discussionFirst comment
4h
Peak period
15
3-6h
Avg / period
3.8
Comment distribution23 data points
Loading chart...
Based on 23 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Sep 23, 2025 at 10:12 PM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Sep 24, 2025 at 1:54 AM EDT
4h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
15 comments in 3-6h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Sep 25, 2025 at 11:34 AM EDT
3 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45355514Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 12:47:39 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/search?type=3&name=L
"lnye@andrew.cmu.edu" doesn't seem to be a real user.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=loga...
There seems to be a lot of slope with no citations.
I think this submission should be flagged.
Plus the lack of scholar cites for any of the users papers is more damning than the email search - but they work together.
So I think the GitHub user logannye is most likely a real master's student at CMU, but that doesn't mean he isn't also mass-producing papers of questionable validity with AI.
The volume and breadth of publications is unreal.
e.g. Quantum Extensions to the Einstein Field Equations - 10 citations https://www.scirp.org/pdf/jhepgc2024104_362181145.pdf
He's a real person. His TedX talk is about applying AI medicine. Now medicine has so far been one of the least useful ways of applying LLMs/AI but even in areas where its been effective, it's problem is no one is that much of expert 'cause the AI is doing the "thinking" (prompt-"engineering" isn't nothing, it just isn't that hard to pick-up and has to be constantly changing and simplifying as the models improve).
And the thing about his "amazing" output is that it has all the ear-marks of someone who lightly editing "brilliant" LLM hallucinations. Just the case of Quantum Extensions to the Einstein Field Equations; this is either going to be big advance with thousands of citations or it will bogus (and paid placement - that's negative credibility, less credible than just an bare ArchiveX upload).
So, sure he's real. His claims, on the other hand...
Edit: And the thing about the stream of "genius" ideas is that LLMs seem to be inspiring many people with the approach of bouncing ideas off the chat-thing, having the chat-thing fill the ideas with seemingly plausible phrases and math (most of which makes sense) and reach the point where they seem to have created an earth shattering advance - especially in fields they didn't know in any depth. Notably, cranks have been common in many fields already but this allows cranks to proceed without the former markers of crankdom. And that presents some challenges to a variety of fields.
I gave a diagonal reading, it uses the right jargon somehow. They add some new components to the Einstein-Hilbert action they say originate from quantum complexity contributions, to be honest seems completely random, but i'm not an expert. Especially the conclusions look like they have been written with AI.
The 10 citations are almost all self-citing: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=2388097775195172652...
It would be a better foundation for the social contract than tick tock videos. But you'd need to make ZKP understandable and interactive for the average user.
Eg suppose you have one system that lets you verify 'this person has X dollars in their bank account' and another system that lets you verify 'this person has a passport of Honduras' and another system that lets you verify 'this person has a passport of Germany', then whether the authors of these three systems ever intended to or not, you can prove a statement like 'this person has a prime number amount of dollars and has a passport from either Honduras or Germany'.
I see the big application not in building a union. For that you'd want something like Off-The-Record messaging probably? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging
Where I see the big application is in compliance, especially implementing know-your-customer rules, while preserving privacy. So with a system outlined as above, a bank can store a proof that the customer comes from one of the approved countries (ie not North Korea or Russia etc) without having to store an actual copy of the customer's passport or ever even learning where the customer is from.
As you mentioned, for this to work you need to have an 'anchor' to the real world. What ZKP gives you is a way to weave a net between these anchors.
As I understand it, you can do arbitrary computations on https responses and prove that you didn't tamper with the response or the computation.
Their most believable and unsensational works are in generative histopathology
http://dx.doi.org/10.1200/jco.2023.41.16_suppl.e23500
https://doi.org/10.1200/jco.2023.41.16_suppl.e13592
Meeting abstracts (you can think of them as posters or talks given by interns)
>The trained model’s validation accuracy of 73.7% improves upon past reported methods.
Mediocre performance, but at least those papers have coauthors
Where is the problem with single-authorship?