MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Strilanc | 2025-09-03 18:15:04+00:00
Realistic Shor circuits have depth polynomial in n, but you can easily construct ones whose depth is polylogarithmic in n. Just do the multiplications as a binary tree instead of in a linear order, using log depth multiplication circuits, and then do the frequency basis measurement using a low depth QFT [1]. The only part that isn't known to be doable in polylog depth is the classical GCD computation hiding in the classical postprocessing, to find the closest fraction to get the period.

The result is that, if you keep adding qubits that can be operated on in parallel, Shor's algorithm basically just keeps getting faster and faster and faster. The energy cost doesn't go down, and the number of qubits required becomes frankly absurd, but the time can go really really low.

1: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0006004
by kqr | 2025-09-03 18:15:08+00:00
It depends on how variable the load is, compared to how fast the servers can scale up and down, etc. I often have as a rule of thumb to have enough headroom to be able to deal with twice the load while staying within a triple of the response time. You can solve the equations for your specific case, but eyeballing graphs such as [1] I end up somewhere in the area of 40 %.

The important part is of course to ask yourself the question "how much increased load may I need to handle, and how much can I degrade system performance in doing so?" You may work in an industry that only ever sees 10 % additional load at timescales where scaling is unfeasible, and then you can pick a significantly higher normal utilisation level. Or maybe you're in an industry where you cannot degrade performance by more than 10 % even if hit by five times the load – then you need a much, much more conservative target for utilisation.

[1]: https://erikbern.com/assets/wait-time-2.png
by j1elo | 2025-09-03 18:15:19+00:00
What's really a meme is:

"I got 32 GB of RAM, who cares?"

I see a parallel with networked services being developed and tested under "works for me" lab conditions without latency, jitter, or reduced bandwidth.

"It works fine on my 10 Gbps network, who cares about 2 extra MB of Javascript?"

For one, because the very moment you have that line of thought, you're probably already an outlier.
by fooker | 2025-09-03 18:15:34+00:00
> turn the cam itself into a star tracker

Hmm, that's a neat idea. The better language for it is 'auto guider'. Auto guiding is basically supplying correction information to the mount when it drifts off.

Most mounts support guiding input and virtually all astrophotographers set up a separate tiny camera, a small scope, and a laptop to auto guide the mount. It would be neat for the main camera to do it. The caveat is that this live view sampling would add extra noise to the main images (more heat, etc). But in my opinion, the huge boost in convenience would make that worth it, given that modern post processing is pretty good for mitigating noise.

The signals that have to be sent to the mount are pretty simple too, so I'll look at this at some point in future. The bottleneck for me is that I have ever got 'real' auto guiding to work reliably with my mount so if I run into issues it would be tricky as there's no baseline working version.

> Maybe an auto image upload service?

This sounds pretty useful, even uploading seamlessly to a phone or laptop would be a huge time saver for most people! I'll set up ML on my 6D and try out some of the demo stuff that use the network stack.

Is there a sorted list of things that people want and no one has got around to implementing yet?
by Barrin92 | 2025-09-03 18:15:42+00:00
>All other IDE features like auto-completion happen asynchronously

in the technical sense, but you as a developer don't use auto-completion asynchronously. It's not like you autocomplete and continue typing and then come back to the completion. When you complete at point you have wait. Whether that keypress takes 2 or 3 milliseconds isn't going to make a difference when the inter-process communication of your editor and its services is magnitudes slower. It's not like programming is like playing an FPS game. You're not in any meaningful sense limited by your mechanical input speed.
by skhameneh | 2025-09-03 18:17:31+00:00
I like Zed in concept. I like Zed in the architectural and foundational aspects. I want more tools like Zed to exist.

But, I find Zed challenging to adopt due to random nuances. First, settings management is a mixed bag and sometimes I just want a quick way to open the "settings.json" from the settings pane without fussing around. Then I'd like the "settings.json" to stay open (reopen) on a restart of Zed. Then I'd like the ability to use an LLM that doesn't have native tool calling support, which Zed seems to be the only app I've used that doesn't have a workaround. Then I'd like the UI to be a little easier to navigate as a new user, it feels a bit scattered and overwhelming at times.

I haven't used Zed much and I may give it another shot (soon), but it very much feels like a tool built by engineers for engineers... Which is great for power users, but seems not so great for new adopters.

I don't think the shortcomings are a blocker, but they are the reason I haven't adopted Zed. The shortcomings are just enough for me to take a step back and say "maybe I'll try again later".
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-03 18:18:00+00:00
Helix seems to have good LSP support from what I can tell? The only language I use at $WORK that doesn't have full support is GraphQL which lacks auto indent.

If you want to try something similar to Helix in emacs, there's meow-mode. While I'm not a helix user myself, it shouldn't be too difficult to get meow to work like helix.
Show HN: A Tetris finesse inspired Vim game
by isomierism | 2025-09-03 18:18:09+00:00
Since VIM seems to be inspired by efficiency, I was curious what the "most efficient" way to solve any particular challenge would be. It was really nontrivial to make significant progress on a proof based approach so it seemed like a leetcode style community ranking driven leaderboard would be a pretty good proxy for what seems to be accepted on as "goodness"
by codedokode | 2025-09-03 18:18:42+00:00
> Most Unix syscalls use C-style strings, which are a string of 8-bit bytes terminated with a zero byte. With many (most?) character encodings you can continue to present string data to syscalls in the same way, since they often also reserved a byte value of zero for the same purpose

That's completely wrong. If a syscall (or a function) expects text in encoding A, you should not be sending it in encoding B because it would be interpreted incorrectly, or even worse, this would become a vulnerability.

For every function, encoding must be specified as are specified the types of arguments, constraints and ownership rules. Sadly many open source libraries do not do it. How are you supposed to call a function when you don't know the expected encoding?

Also, it is better to send a pointer and a length of the string rather than potentially infinitely search for a zero byte.

> and the result is that if you want UTF-16 support in your existing C-string-based syscalls

There is no need to support multiple encodings, it only makes things complicated. The simplest solution would be to use UTF-8 for all kernel facilities as a standard.

For example, it would be better if open() syscall required valid UTF-8 string for a file name. This would leave no possibility for displaying file names as question marks.
by ux266478 | 2025-09-03 18:18:49+00:00
> But you still can’t have repercussions from the government for your speech in America.

You absolutely can. The obvious example most frequently talked about is that there are plenty of things you can say, which if the wrong person hears them or they trigger automated alarms, it will get you an unfriendly visit by people flashing badges. They might be there to give you a threatening talking-to, or they might be there to arrest you full-stop.

The less obvious example is that even if you don't cross any lines to trigger a direct response like that, it's recorded all the same. It will shape future interactions with law enforcement agencies. You will be flagged as a person of interest, as a hostile actor, etc. Legal speech can very easily make you suspicious and law enforcement will treat you accordingly before they've ever met you. It's not a recipe for a good outcome when the people with badges start off thinking you're likely to pull a gun on them.

At times, it's been far worse than this. I'll direct you to COINTELPRO, or any of the other mryiad of historical instances where the US government has protected its interests by going after domestic elements it sees as subversive.

> On this issue Europe is definitely backsliding

Europe never had free speech to the degree that America did. In many countries, it's unlawful to speak ill of royal figureheads for example.

> for example, see UK police showing up at doorsteps for social media posts

This absolutely happens in America, as I mention above. You might say it's to a different degree, but the end result is the same.

> You can be jailed for years for political speech or wrongthink.

All it takes is for you and your ideology to be labelled as extremist and terrorist, which is a wholly arbitrary line to draw.
by solatic | 2025-09-03 18:19:10+00:00
So if you want to target an infra engineer at a growth company, usually in growth companies where there is only one, maybe two infra/non-product engineers, I would recommend that you start from the following axioms:

1. Infra engineers always want to apply changes by themselves, but tooling can always recommend changes 2. What are all the kinds of work that infra engineers would love to do, that *do* add value, but that they haven't built yet because they can't prioritize it? 3. How do you build an agent that: a. Understands architectural context b. Offers to set up (i.e. Terraform PR) value-adding infra c. That the human infra engineer can easily maintain d. That the human infra engineer will appreciate as being value-adding and not time-wasting or unnecessary-expense?

Maybe the key isn't to provide an agent that will power a PaaS; maybe the key is to give early infra engineers the productivity to build their own in-house PaaS. Then your value-add above Claude Code is clear, because Claude Code is a generic enough tool that it doesn't even make any recommendations; because a DevOps agent works within an axiomatic framework of improving visibility, reducing costs, improving release velocity, improving security, etc., so it can even start (after understanding the architecture, i.e. by hooking up MCP servers and writing an INFRA.md) by making recommendations and then just ask the customer if they like the PRs it is proposing. Does that resonate with you?
by ch4s3 | 2025-09-03 18:19:14+00:00
> Can you rent without a four times yearly inspection by the landlord?

I've literally never heard of this.

> Can you not bank, if all the banks are colluding against you? And still have the rest of your rights?

All the banks? There are 3,917 commercial banks and 545 savings and loan associations in the US. It's probably the most banks per-capita of any country. You'd be hard press to not be able to even work with a local credit union.
by toofy | 2025-09-03 18:19:16+00:00
i’m not sure what this list is, why investigate vpn companies yet dont even look at nordvpn, pia, express, or others that are wildly popular yet still shady af with their real world origins?

i mean, those companies are so popular they’re almost normie household names. the couple i looked at from the papers list have a small fraction of downloads compared to the above.

i agree that we absolutely need a deeper dive and a lot more transparency on who owns these companies but i’m curious why they chose to avoid the elephants in the room.
by ruszki | 2025-09-03 18:19:20+00:00
As an outside observer, it absolute looks like that the American government punish people for their speech. Of course, they say something else, like we just kidnap you from the street, or we just revoke your grant, or we just force your university to kick you out. Or simply flat out ban your free speech, like teachers’ one in schools. And even if they do it illegally, and they give you the opportunity to use your rights, lawsuit themselves can be still damaging.

Also, there were several news in the past decades about cases when police was even at the doorsteps of perpetrators before their mass shooting because of their social media posts (but more times, Americans were disappointed that police didn’t prevent the shooting even when there were incriminating social media posts). The problem is not social media posts, it never was. It’s their content. And also, it’s not just social media posts most of the time when the police come to your doorsteps even here in Europe. But that cannot be made to sensationalist headlines.

It’s still worse the law situation in Europe, but an adversarial government can find ways to circumvent even the better laws. And from the outside, it looks like that this would happen exactly in the US.
by eggy | 2025-09-03 18:19:26+00:00
I had my Commodore PET for 10 years from 1977 to 1987 until I went away and my cousin borrowed it, and then believing I was not coming back to the US from Spain, sold it!

I loved the cassette drive and all-in-one chassis. Ah, typing in programs from magazines and creating programs from scratch with PET graphics on the keys! I miss those days. So much wonder and fun.
by corimaith | 2025-09-03 18:19:43+00:00
>If you give most people the choice between a place that has jobs, clean trains and where women can walk safely at night and one that looks like the Purge but you can insult the prime minister we can make a bet how people will vote with their feet.

Well, umm, far more people (rich, middle, poor) are emmigrating out of China with preference for Western Liberal Democracies than Westeners immigrating in. The thing is, in terms of job opportunities, the USA still far surpasses China for same amount of individual effort. And if I want to just live comfortably, Japan, Australia, Korea are all valid options.

Like even the abysmally poor birthrate dosen't reflect on China with regards to the long viability of what you describe.
by PhantomHour | 2025-09-03 18:20:02+00:00
The distinction is that you cannot make the LLM do the drilling. And the way these tools are designed is to train the user to use the LLM rather than their own brain, so they'll never learn it themselves.

A big problem with the "Just read the code" approach is that reading the code at the level deep enough to truly understand it is at minimum equally time-consuming than writing the code in the first place. (And in practice tends to be significantly worse) Anyone who claims they're reading the LLM's code output properly is on some level lying to them.

Human brains are simply bad at consistently monitoring output like that, especially if the output is consistently "good", especially especially when the errors appear to be "good" output on the surface level. This is universal across all fields and tools.
by abxyz | 2025-09-03 18:20:44+00:00
What you’re describing doesn’t make much sense: why would a registrar lock your account? Why would a registrar change your domain’s nameservers? If you have direct contact with the CEO then you’re already far ahead of wherever people here can get you.

You said “backup codes” so I’m going to guess what’s actually happened is you lost access to your second factor, your domain has expired and you’re unable to log in to your account to renew it. Does that accurately reflect the situation?
by everforward | 2025-09-03 18:20:46+00:00
I think this is semantically the same thing, though I'm sure your terminology is more correct (not an expert here).

If you do `someOtherAsyncFunction()` without await and Python tried to execute similarly to a version with `await`, then the one without await would happen in the same task and event loop iteration but there's no guarantee that it's done by the time the outer function is. Thus the existing task/event loop iteration has to be kept alive or the non-await'ed task needs to be reaped to some other task/event loop iteration.

> loop.create_task(asyncFunc())

This sort of intuitively makes sense to me because you're creating a new "context" of sorts directly within the event loop. It's similar-ish to creating daemons as children of PID 1 rather than children of more-ephemeral random PIDs.
by sillyfluke | 2025-09-03 18:21:23+00:00
The principle of proportionality comes to mind. Added to the fact that this admin has no respect for due process or providing a modicrum of info or evidence for anything else domestically let alone anything that occurs in foreign lands or waters. Is the penalty for trafficking cocaine in the US death by the way? How about the names of these dead people? I vaguely recall Obama era drone strikes providing names of the targets at least.

A bit amusing that you reference the Barbary wars, where an "anti-Christian" (aka anti-organized religion) president Jefferson had the decency to go with John Adams to meet with the ambassad of Tripoli in order to understand what the fuck kind of justification they had for kidnapping American ships and sailors. The ambassador succinctly informed them that it was their right as "it is written in the Koran." [0]

Contrast this with an evangelist boosted admin with a serial adulterer Secretary of Defense (or is he now officially called the Secretary of War?) drunkenly shouting "Kill all Muslims" in a bar [1] or adrenaline tweeting the latest wacko shit from his weird ass pastor.

[0] https://www.city-journal.org/article/jefferson-versus-the-mu...

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secre...
by derefr | 2025-09-03 18:21:25+00:00
So this is essentially a Popcorn Time-type-thing, but aping Soundcloud rather than Netflix. Cool, I guess?

But also too bad! Because when I first read the headline (and the Github description: "Streaming music player that finds free music for you"), I had imagined this to be something entirely different, and much more interesting to me: a "streaming service" that brings together various types of copyright-free and "abandonware" music.

Think:

• pre-1930s public-domain recordings from Archive.org

• chiptunes from modarchive.org

• songs/albums available for "free" or "pay-what-you-want" on Bandcamp

• "doujin music" (https://doujinstyle.com/, but I'd also include e.g. OCRemix in this category)

• various royalty-free music libraries

• Creative-Commons-licensed AI-generated music (if you like that kind of thing)

• rips of "background music" and "muzak" from long-out-of-business companies who specialized in producing that kind of thing

• free public-shared performances of non-IP-burdened plays / musicals / opera

...but presenting all of that, through a slick, Soundcloud-like interface.

Wouldn't that be neat?
by 5f3cfa1a | 2025-09-03 18:21:29+00:00
The answer is always "maybe" until you bring your threat model to the table.

I use a VPN to watch IPTV & download torrents without my ISP sending me nasty letters. Mullvad is great for that.

I would trust it in conjunction with Tor to protect me from low-level crimes. I wouldn't run trust either it or Tor, alone or in combination, to run a marketplace the DEA would become interested in.

If your threat model is obscuring your home IP to hide your IP from above board HTTPS sites, a DIY VPN probably is great. If it's to do low level crime, a cheap VPN is probably enough. Anything else, good luck.
by baranul | 2025-09-03 18:21:30+00:00
The article author, Kris Tun, agrees you - "I like V a lot. The abstraction over the syntax is so nice that made me enjoy writing the syntax as a whole. It makes me wish that Go could do more with what they have, but you and I know that Go would never."

What also comes across is his open-mindedness and enthusiasm for the language. There have been many Golang developers, including those who created and joined the V (Vlang) project, that wanted particular features. After being able to get what they wanted, they are happy about it.
by gspencley | 2025-09-03 18:21:32+00:00
What a weird straw-man. I said that, on an individual by individual basis, people get to decide what criteria are important to them and can discriminate (or not) accordingly. That if one entity doesn't want to work with another, there are lots of other permutations that an environment of liberty allows for. As opposed to a government mandated system where everyone is forced into the same criteria under threat of penalty.

I did not say, or even suggest, that the absence of a social credit system somehow results in everyone wanting to do business with you under any circumstance, and that you can opt out of the criteria that someone else uses to decide if they want to associate with you.

I really cannot understand how you were able to twist the meaning of what I had written so dramatically. Or are you just trolling?
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-03 18:21:56+00:00
Artists making a living will in no way be impacted by the use of this software. The only way for artists to make a living through their art would be changes through IP/copyright reform (politics and policy, which will take years if not decades) and the operation of platforms where they can get a more fair share of compensation [1] [2]. One can think a musician's response to this software is absurd and still believe they should be able to live comfortably and with dignity while creating art. Pay these folks UBI if we have to, but the problem is not this software is my point.

[1] Spotify Alternatives That Pay Artists... - https://cutoffthespigot.substack.com/p/spotify-alternatives-...

[2] How To Support Artists As They Withdraw From Spotify - https://www.nylon.com/entertainment/delete-spotify-alternati...
by breadwinner | 2025-09-03 18:22:32+00:00
I don't see any credit being given to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) upon whose work this is based [1] [2] [3].

The quotes below only talk about OS source code, but they found language interpreter source code as well, see register story.

> "So, for a few years that is where I spent my time. I'd skip out on athletics and go down to this computer center. We were moving ahead very rapidly: BASIC, FORTRAN, LISP, PDP-10 machine language, digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those. Really not just banging away to find bugs like monkeys[laughs], but actually studying the code to see what was wrong." [4]

> "While his parents were concerned with his slipping grades, there was no slowing him down. He and Bill would go “dumpster diving” in C-Cubed’s garbage to find discarded printouts with source code for the machine’s operating system"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC-PLUS#Comparison_to_MS_BA...

[2] https://everybasic.info/doku.php/basics/decbasic#influence_f...

[4] https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm

[3] https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/29/bill_gates_roots/

[5] https://paulallen.com/Futurist/Microsoft.aspx
by aborsy | 2025-09-03 18:22:45+00:00
Do people here trust their ISPs more than their VPN providers? That’s the question!

On the other hand, as far as privacy from the end point is concerned, users can be identified regardless of IP addresses. Visit fingerprint.com, you will get an identifier, then connect to a privacy VPN and change servers once in a while. The website will identify you, tell you are the same user visited last week from such location, and the number of times you visited.

Browsers (except Tor) send so much data that accurate identification is possible without IP address. And services could refuse to work if users don’t provide the required information, although that info could be randomized.