MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Zero-power photonic language model–code
by damir00 | 2025-11-29 18:45:49+00:00
The model uses a 1024-dimensional complex Hilbert space with 32 layers of programmable Mach–Zehnder meshes (Reck architecture) and derives token probabilities directly via the Born rule.

Despite using only unitary operations and no attention mechanism, a 1024×32 model achieves coherent TinyStories generation after < 1.8 hours of training on a single consumer GPU.

This is Part 1 - the next step is physical implementation with $50 of optics from AliExpress.
by da_chicken | 2025-11-29 18:46:09+00:00
So, the line BE is just the line CB extended. It's the same line. And we know that the angles of a triangle add up to 180. And we know that the line BD is defined as perpendicular to AB.

That means the angle ABC and angle DBE must add up to 90. But that's also true of the angles ABC and angle CAB. That means that angle DBE and angle CAB must be the same. Both triangles ABC and BDE are both right triangles, so that means angles ABC and BDE are the same. So they're similar triangles: They have all the same angles.

Additionally, the point D is just at a point so that the length of line segment BD and the length of line segment AB are both the same: c. Since we know that the hypotenuse of triangle ABC is c, and the hypotenuse of triangle BDE is also c, and we know they're both similar triangles, then these triangles must be congruent as well.
by mordechai9000 | 2025-11-29 18:47:16+00:00
Nice work!

I do want to say, I don't like having to rely on scraping ss output. But that's not a comment on this project - I have done the exact same thing. It just proved to be the most expedient way given the constraints I was under. I suspect there is a lot of devops and CI/CD code out there that relies on the output format of ss. My concern is that parsing text intended for human readability and not machine processing is brittle and prone to failure due to unforeseen circumstances, or a package upgrade that changes the behavior.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-11-29 18:47:48+00:00
or it might be changing from anecdotal human to technical research human. Here's my question - if you had read that 5 years ago would you think it was written by a human who had done some reading on the matter, or would you think they googled it and copied some of what they found.

Obviously 5 years ago we couldn't have worried it was an LLM, but if you wouldn't have thought someone just copy pasted something without understanding it, or someone was crazy on drugs when they wrote something, then it seems somewhat unfair to give people this new accusation.
by ben_w | 2025-11-29 18:48:41+00:00
His lifetime, I agree unlikely, but also I think that will be short: he's pissed off too many other powerful people and will get the western equivalent of Russian oligarchs "falling out of a window".

The economics he talks about are all nonsense. No bank will lend someone $200k for the ticket to go to Mars on the offchance they might be a successful pizza restaraunteur.

But like I said, if you're (e.g.) him and you buy your own hype…

(His grandkids' lifetimes are another question entirely. Things are changing too fast).
by dmitrygr | 2025-11-29 18:49:13+00:00
> Asked why some of the files credited Shinwell as the author, Reymont said, “Beats me. AI decided to do so and I didn’t question it.”

Any engineer who answers "beats me" to any question about code they "authored" should be permanently banned from contacting a compiler ever again. Jesus...

The shameless bragging "I did not write a single line of code" only cements my verdict.

I do applaud Gabriel Scherer (gasche@)'s and David Allsopp (dra27@)'s patience in trying to calmly explain this (https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-35565..., https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-35572...), despite clear indications that they are talking to someone with no interest in listening.

After being told that AI is not trustworthy for copyright analysis, Reymont continues unabated with "Here's the AI-written copyright analysis..." and then again with this idiocy: "AI has a very deep understanding of how this code works".

But he does not stop there...

> I tried approaching several projects this way, trying > to take care of things that bother me. The reaction is > similar across the board. Folks want a nuanced and > thorough discussion, as well as buy-in, before an > implementation is submitted. > This is incompatible with what I found to be the > most efficient way of using AI, though.

No regard given to maintenance or existing maintainers' thoughts. No sign of introspection as to why multiple projects have already told him to take his 10KLoC AI slop dumps and go pound sand. The sneer at "folks who want thorough discussion"... No shame...

I am hereby upgrading my verdict against Reymont from "no access to compilers" to "no access to computers, ever".
by E39M5S62 | 2025-11-29 18:49:28+00:00
Interesting. What kernel and distro are you running? It's been my stable daily driver with Linux 6.15/6.16/6.17 under Void Linux. It happily runs KDE and Vivaldi for me, with a few PWA's (Slack, Zoom) to bridge the gap of no closed-source software targeting aarch64.
by bee_rider | 2025-11-29 18:49:43+00:00
It’s the optimal low-rank approximation of a matrix in some norm-2 sense, it has those nice beautiful orthogonal factors on both, and it is often quite easy to compute. Why wouldn’t you use it, right? If you are going to have one trick, truncated SVD is a good pick.

Does he like Halko, Martinsson, and Tropp’s randomized SVD? It is pretty slick.
by sailfast | 2025-11-29 18:51:14+00:00
The author pretty clearly states that Agile works well and we should stick to it without deviating too much with our own processes. Your point was related to the parent post but contradicting the article and didn’t acknowledge the contradiction or why your opinion about Agile might be more correct than the author - that’s basically it.

The industry around it makes total sense - often bloated and misusing terms, but the process itself can work well as a starting point. I get the impression many engineers never attempt it because of bad experiences named Agile sometimes. Understandable of course.
by vincent-manis | 2025-11-29 18:51:18+00:00
BCD, actually, given that Fortran dates from the mid-1950s. EBCDIC only appeared more or less around Fortran IV, in the early 1960s. Many printers in those days had a 48-character chain/train. After upper-case letters, digits, and a few essential punctuation marks (like . and ,), you weren't left with many options. The 60-character set of PL/I was a luxury back then, let alone lower case.
by ben1040 | 2025-11-29 18:52:40+00:00
Much of the early part of the Human Genome Project was done using gel based DNA sequencing machines that were controlled by Classic Macs.

The rest of our shop was Solaris on SPARC/x86 and we had our own custom tool chain that crunched the data, but the sequencer itself was run by a Mac.

From 1999 or so forward the next generation of machines were Windows.
by alamortsubite | 2025-11-29 18:53:18+00:00
My gf is a doctor and rides year-round. In the winter I swap wheels with studded tires onto her bike (it takes a couple minutes). Where there's proper infrastructure, it's far safer to go out on a bike in poor conditions than it is an automobile. Plus you accumulate tremendous health benefits from not being sedentary. I'd work that into your pitch (of course, my gf is lucky to observe this first-hand at work every day, which an attorney might not).
by charleslmunger | 2025-11-29 18:53:36+00:00
>Not at all? Most memory-safety issues will never even show up in the radar

Citation needed? There's all sorts of problems that don't "show up" but are bad. Obvious historical examples would be heartbleed and cloudbleed, or this ancient GTA bug [1].

1: https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas...
by bee_rider | 2025-11-29 18:53:59+00:00
Fortran has OO features these days. It is nice.

I am kind of dumb and old-school so I wrote a bunch of code using macros to handle multiple precisions. If I could go back in time, I’d definitely just use object oriented code. In either case, though, “we can try a mixed precision implementation, I automatically generated single precision” is an incredibly liberating thing to be able to say as a computational scientist!
by sailfast | 2025-11-29 18:54:03+00:00
Fair point. It’s a record, but should not be treated as formally. Just because you are having a conversation doesn’t mean you have to breach HR guidelines.

My comment was related more to the _overhead_ required before posting. Either way best not post anything that would be an HR issue in any format. (Also your private chats will be available in discovery as well if found out)

Maybe I’m not the best to opine on this as I’ve been wildly successful at building community at companies but I’ve also been burned by this. I suppose I’m privileged enough that I’d like to work somewhere that I can still collaborate with low friction remotely - and if the company doesn’t like it then I’m not a good fit.
by Telaneo | 2025-11-29 18:54:09+00:00
The fact that they can doesn't mean they will.

On older devices the controller might make some assumptions that holds true with a new battery, but very much doesn't with an old and worn one.

My Macs have all been sensible about it, but I've seen Windows machines with batteries that just died from being plugged in all the time not even 10 years ago. Even if that specific instance was just a bad battery and not due to a charge controller, I have no faith in Random Windows or Android OEM Number 582 doing this correctly.

For devices that are fixed, I'd prefer to eliminate the potential of there even being a problem in the first place.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-11-29 18:54:54+00:00
After 2 months working at a new department, i awkwardly asked my boss what the department acronym stood for. He stared at me confused, and couldn't figure it out; hes worked there for 30 years.

Technology isn't intuitive and there ares loads of things to remember. Sometimes the dumb question is needed by more than the person that asked.
by bayindirh | 2025-11-29 18:55:25+00:00
That's true. What I wanted to point out is the fact that the most tightly integrated and arguably the most locked down platform on the market is more open than a platform designed to be adapted by others and sold by many.

I don't expect any daily-driveable alternative operating systems on Apple systems since it's a continuously moving target, yet Apple doesn't have a such heavy-handed approach. They just do their thing and do not hinder things actively like NVIDIA and Qualcomm.
by koolba | 2025-11-29 18:57:25+00:00
> Looks to me like it is accurate enough to locate even the smallest network-connected devices!

This should be a standard feature of server cages. The base rack itself could have a GPS receiver and provide the relative location of each rack.

That way when you nudge the rack over a few feet to make room for the foosball table it automatically updates its own physical location.
by Animats | 2025-11-29 18:58:27+00:00
> Is there any single entity that owns even as much as 1% of all the housing in the city?

Yes. 12 big landlords own a majority of SF bay area property.[1] The San Francisco Chronicle has an online map, but it's behind their paywall.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90792419/12-mega-landlords-own-m...
by perching_aix | 2025-11-29 18:58:31+00:00
> Back when Reddit embedded everything on Imgur, maybe fifteen years ago, it was genuinely useful.

This is true, and I learned to hate every bit of this fact. It taught me to despise hotlinking with passion.

All of those links are now down the train, and you have to pray that someone not only backed up the specific image you're looking for, but that they did so in a discoverable way.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-11-29 18:58:34+00:00
AI slop has infiltrated so many areas. Check out this article that was on the front page of HN last week, "73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering", with hundreds of points and lots of comments arguing for or against: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024644

The problem is the entire article is made up. Sure, the author can trace client-side traffic, but the vast majority of start-ups would be making calls to LLMs in their backend (a sequence diagram in the article even points this out!!), where it would be untraceable. There is certainly no way the author can make a broad statement that he knows what's happening across hundreds of startups.

Yet lots of comments just taking these conclusions at face value. Worse, when other commenters and myself pointed out the blatant impossibility of the author's conclusion, got some responses just rehashing how the author said they "traced network traffic", even though that doesn't make any sense as they wouldn't have access to backends of these companies.
by ColinWright | 2025-11-29 18:58:58+00:00
My understanding is that there is a difference between the concept of a Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP), and then the applications that such a thing is possible.

In the example given, I can prove that N is composite without revealing anything (well, almost anything) about the factors. But in practice we want to use a ZKP to show that I have specific knowledge without revealing the knowledge itself.

For example:

You can give me a graph, and I can claim that I can three-colour it. You may doubt this, but there is a process by which I can ... to any desired level of confidence ... demonstrate that I have a colouring, without revealing what the colouring is. I colour the vertices RGB, map those colours randomly to ABC, and cover all the vertices. You choose any edge, and I reveal the "colours" (from ABC) of the endpoints. If I really can colour the graph then I will always be able to reveal two different colours. If I can't colour the graph then as we do this more and more, eventually I will fail.

So you are right, but the message of the post is, I think, still useful and relevant.
by sailfast | 2025-11-29 18:59:48+00:00
Making friends is great. Talking about work with friends is good and healthy.

Moving all of your work related chats off-platform so you can “say whatever you want” about work and eventually making it into a defacto team chat is what I’m talking about here. This isn’t chatting with friends, this is creating team divisions and huge gaps in context for the rest of your team. This approach is being a poor colleague in my opinion.

You can do both things - they’re not mutually exclusive.
by PyWoody | 2025-11-29 18:59:55+00:00
I completely forgot about that.

I was thinking of the exploit back from 2023 that effected Acura, Genesis, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Infiniti, Nissan, and Porsche. I remember it being discussed on HN at the time but I can't find the relevant thread. Here is an article covering it: https://www.securityweek.com/16-car-makers-and-their-vehicle..., at the time.
by Herring | 2025-11-29 19:00:03+00:00
Don't kid yourself, all those steps have AI heavily involved in them.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing. If I set up RAG correctly, then tell the AI to generate K samples, then spend time to pick out the best one, that's still significant human input, and likely very good output too. It's just invisible what the human did.

And as models get better, the necessary K will become smaller....
by dahart | 2025-11-29 19:00:37+00:00
> the “local AQI” is usually from a single government sensor for 100 mile radius

What’s your source on this? IPhone’s AQI report says it’s from Breezometer, which links to Google’s Enterprise AQI offerings, which claim 500m resolution and multiple sources (“over 70 local indexes”). I don’t know but would speculate that Purple Air might be one of the licensed sources.

https://mapsplatform.google.com/maps-products/air-quality/
by prmoustache | 2025-11-29 19:00:48+00:00
Any modern IDE has those functionalities, and most of them run on Linux too. I don't think there is anything you have shown that warrants sticking to Tortoise Git instead of any other IDE.

Also if you don't want to use an IDE Gnome's file manager nautilus supports scripts available on right click. This would allows you to run git commands from the file manager , show the information you need using [YAD](https://yad-guide.ingk.se/#_introduction)
by moepstar | 2025-11-29 19:01:06+00:00
Don’t tell me they’ve all three been Ecovacs?

The two times I had to open my Roborock S5 (once because our cat decided to vomit when the robo cleaned up and once to replace a broken Lidar motor) I actually was very delighted by its thoughtful design - basically none of what you describe, everything was very modular.

I mean, of course, you’re right - a different model can and probably will be designed differently - but that’s what teardowns are there for - fool me once, check the next time beforehand.
by fragmede | 2025-11-29 19:01:13+00:00
There's http://v2ex.com, but, like HN, it does not focus on the American startup scene at all.

edit: tbc, it is a Chinese site for Chinese users in China to discuss tech and dev jobs and sometimes startup stuff. Crypto of course makes an appearance occasionally but I haven't tracked the site's attitude towards that as of late. Basically think of it as Chinese Reddit + HN.
by mtlynch | 2025-11-29 19:01:59+00:00
That's useful context, thanks!

Though I think the sentence immediately after the one you quoted is also relevant:

> However, practices inconsistent with the Guides may result in law enforcement actions alleging Section 5 violations.

My understanding is that there's no law that says, "You have to disclose if you're an affiliate earning commissions on a recommendation," but the FTC is saying that they interpret Section 5 of the FTC act to imply that, and they may prosecute people under that interpretation, which they have done.[0, 1]

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/160523lordt...

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/1...
by pfannkuchen | 2025-11-29 19:02:29+00:00
I’ve wondered whether vitamin D is a real time signal within the circadian rhythm regulation system. Perhaps it is released in response to sunlight in order to let other parts of the system know it is daytime.

If it were like this, bulk dosing would be expected to be better than nothing (“maximum daytime!!!! Followed immediately by a very long slow sunset at whatever curve it is cleaned up in the body), but it would be better to dose continuously in real time at a level and body location(s) that would simulate the range of sunlight throughout the day.

Can anyone professionally familiar with the research in this area comment?
by pengaru | 2025-11-29 19:02:34+00:00
I've gone through a dozen or so LiPo-utilizing portable devices at my property in the Mojave desert. All it takes is a single season for many of these batteries to swell up to such an extent the enclosures split open.

Ostensibly they contain charge controllers and temperature sensors, yet they're unable to prevent this outcome when the ambient temperature exceeds 110F day after day while the device stays on in a hot attic w/usb-c pd connected.

Fortunately I haven't had any burst into flames yet, but after a few years of seeing this pattern repeatedly I stopped deploying anything containing LiPo batteries at the property.

YMMV - but IMHO it's prudent to exclude these batteries from such unattended, powered 24x7 devices.
by gishh | 2025-11-29 19:04:15+00:00
Most people around here are too busy evangelizing rust or some web framework.

Most people around here don’t have any reason to have strong opinions about safety-critical code.

Most people around here spend the majority of their time trying to make their company money via startup culture, the annals of async web programming, and how awful some type systems are in various languages.

Working on safety-critical code with formal verification is the most intense, exhausting, fascinating work I’ve ever done.

Most people don’t work a company that either needs or can afford a safety-critical toolchain that is sufficient for formal, certified verification.

The goal of formal verification and safety critical code is _not_ to eliminate undefined behavior, it is to fail safely. This subtle point seems to have been lost a long time ago with “*end” developers trying to sell ads, or whatever.
by andai | 2025-11-29 19:04:33+00:00
Some agents integrate with code intelligence tools which do use embeddings, right? (As well as "mechanical" solutions like LSPs, I imagine.)

I think it's just a case of "this isn't something we need to solve, other companies solve it already and then our thing can integrate with that."

Or maybe it's really just marginal gains compared with iterative grepping. I don't know. (Still amazed how well that works!)
by dpark | 2025-11-29 19:04:35+00:00
This is literally the logic anti-seatbelt folks use. “I don’t wear a seatbelt because if I’m in a crash, the seatbelt could end up trapping me in a fire.”

Safety design very often involves trade offs. The chances you get partially ejected and killed during a rollover are meaningfully higher than the chances you die because you can’t break the glass to get out. Do you even keep a glass breaker in your car or do you imagine after surviving a wreck that’s trapped you inside your car that you will have the strength to just punch through a glass window?
by phendrenad2 | 2025-11-29 19:04:58+00:00
Right, and the damage Apple has done to themselves with this policy is several orders of magnitude higher than OpenGL users have suffered from not being able to use OpenGL on Mac or iOS. Apple gets: No indie games that aren't sluggish Unity or Unreal asset flips. OpenGL devs get: Now you need to pay a specialist a few $x,xxx to port your game to iOS if you ever get popular enough that you want your game on the Apple ecosystem.
by exceptione | 2025-11-29 19:04:59+00:00
Note that it currently only works with xfreerdp¹, so that means you share the X11 socket with this program. Although freerdp is also available for Wayland, the single app mode (aka RemoteApp aka RAILS) reportedly has not been implemented yet on the SDL port.

1. https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps/issues/779