Top all-time · #9096
Bas Westerbaan
Personal blog · bas.westerbaan.name/notes · on HN as bwesterbsecurityscience
Bas Westerbaan's personal blog at bas.westerbaan.name covers security and science. Since 2026, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times, most often “Factoring is not a good benchmark to track Q-day”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-09, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite this Bas Westerbaan note, "Factoring is not a good benchmark to track Q-day", to argue that factoring records are a poor guide to when quantum computers could break cryptography.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Homepage of dr. Bas Westerbaan, principal research engineer at Cloudflare, working on making the Internet post-quantum secure
Most-linked posts?
- Factoring is not a good benchmark to track Q-day9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2026-04-03
What Hacker News says?
That's not a very useful benchmark if the thing you care about is CRQC timelines. See https://bas.westerbaan.name/notes/2026/04/02/factoring.html (which the above post links to) for an explanation of why.
Comment linking /notes/2026/04/02/factoring.html
on “Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude”Submitted Factoring is not a good benchmark to track Q-day as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe abacus thing is pretty funny, but it's dangerously uninformed. https://bas.westerbaan.name/notes/2026/04/02/factoring.html
Comment linking /notes/2026/04/02/factoring.html
on “Scott Aaronson on quantum: "Will you heed my warnings NOW?"”Submitted Factoring is not a good benchmark to track Q-day as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis article, "Factoring is not a good benchmark to track Q-day", was posted this month by one of Cloudflare's lead post-quantum researchers specifically addressing the factoring issue. https://bas.westerbaan.name/notes/2026/04/02/factoring.html It doesn't say much by itself, but it has four very good links on the subject. One of these has a picture of the smallest known factor-21 circuit, which is vastly larger tha…
Comment linking /notes/2026/04/02/factoring.html
on “Quantum Computers Are Not a Threat to 128-Bit Symmetric Keys”They're a pretty bad stopgap: https://bas.westerbaan.name/notes/2026/04/02/factoring.html . Going to RSA-32000 only buys you ~a year once QCs can factor RSA-2048. In order to get a standard that would resist quantum attacks for realistic time, we would need MB to GB keys at least (see https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/351.pdf for a hilarious post-quantum RSA attempt that used terabyte size keys)
Comment linking /notes/2026/04/02/factoring.html
on “A Cryptography Engineer's Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines”The thing is, producing the right isotopes of uranium is mostly a linear process. It goes faster as you scale up of course, but each day a reactor produces a given amount. If you double the number of reactors you produce twice as much, etc. There is no such equivalent for qubits or error correction. You can't say, we produce this much extra error correction per day so we will hit the target then and then. There is a…
Comment linking /notes/2026/04/02/factoring.html
on “A Cryptography Engineer's Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines”See https://bas.westerbaan.name/notes/2026/04/02/factoring.html and https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9665#comment-2029013 which are linked to in the first section of the article. > Sure, papers about an abacus and a dog are funny and can make you look smart and contrarian on forums. But that’s not the job, and those arguments betray a lack of expertise. As Scott Aaronson said: > Once you understand quantum fault-tolera…
Comment linking /notes/2026/04/02/factoring.html
on “A Cryptography Engineer's Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines”From the abstract: > This paper presents implementations that match and, where possible, exceed current quantum factorisation records using a VIC-20 8-bit home computer from 1981, an abacus, and a dog. From the link: > Sure, papers about an abacus and a dog are funny and can make you look smart and contrarian on forums. But that’s not the job, and those arguments betray a lack of expertise[1]. As Scott Aaronson said…
Comment linking /notes/2026/04/02/factoring.html
on “A Cryptography Engineer's Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines”
