Claude cracks NIST curve seeds & Mercor maps AI benchmark gaps - Hacker News (Oct 17, 2026)
The Automated Daily - Hacker News Edition

Claude cracks NIST curve seeds & Mercor maps AI benchmark gaps - Hacker News (Oct 17, 2026)

C1AdvancedOctober 17, 20267 min
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We've got a cryptography cold case, a reality check on AI benchmarks, a game console running

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For decades, cryptographers suspected something shady behind the numbers that secure much of the internet. It now looks like the real answer may be an old Unix random number function. And a clock. More on that in a moment.

0:15

Welcome to The Automated Daily, Hacker News Edition, the podcast created by Generative AI. I'm Trend Teller, and today is October 17, 2026. We've got a cryptography cold case, a reality check on AI benchmarks, a game console running language models, and a verdict on image formats.

0:34

Let's get into it. Our lead story comes from Anthropic. The company says Claude has solved a decades-old puzzle. How the seed values behind the NIST elliptic curves were actually generated.

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