MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2025-12-25 16:13:05+00:00
As another poster has said, SPICE is used for simulating the analog blocks of an integrated circuit and it is also used by those who design the components of a library used by the digital designers, which contains blocks like logical gates and flip-flops, to simulate such blocks, e.g. for estimating the time delays through gates or the maximum clock frequencies for flip-flops.

When an IC includes analog blocks, not only digital (but most digital ICs also include a few analog blocks, e.g. voltage regulators or oscillators for clock generation), the design of the analog blocks passes through a few stages.

First the schematics of the analog blocks is designed. Then it is simulated with SPICE or similar programs, in order to verify if it satisfies the design criteria and to optimize the values of the component parameters. The simulation results cause the redesign of the schematics, until all seems fine. Then the geometric layout of the analog blocks is designed.

After that a dedicated program analyzes the layout and it computes the value of parasitic components, e.g. parasitic resistances, capacitances, self inductances and mutual inductances. All the parasitic components are back-annotated on the initial schematics. Now the analog blocks are simulated again with SPICE and this time the simulations take a longer time as there are a lot of extra components. If the results are not acceptable, the schematics is redesigned and all the cycle is repeated.

The simulations with SPICE usually include Monte Carlo simulations that verify that the designed blocks satisfy the performance criteria even when the values of all parameters are varied randomly, like they will vary as a consequence of the production processes. The environmental conditions, e.g. temperature and supply voltages can also be varied randomly in such simulations. Therefore the total number of simulations of a circuit, resulting from the need to search optimum parameters and the need to search the worst cases during Monte Carlo simulations, can be very large, thus the simulation times, even on server farms, can reach weeks. Modern SPICE programs usually run only the GUI on the workstation of the designer, while the actual simulations are distributed on multiple servers.

When the simulation with the schematics back-annotated from layout succeeds, and the concurrently designed digital blocks of the IC are also finished, then the whole integrated circuit must be simulated. Because this is very time-consuming, usually only simple things are simulated, like the booting sequence of a CPU.

For the simulation of a whole IC, one typically uses a mixed-mode simulator, which uses a Verilog/VHDL simulator for the digital blocks, coupled with a SPICE simulator for the analog blocks. To couple the blocks, special digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital components are incorporated in the schematics of both the analog and digital blocks.
by isubkhankulov | 2025-12-25 16:13:20+00:00
There have been at least a half dozen of these deals in the past 1-2 years including Google “licensing” CharacterAI to pull their founders back into Google as valued employees.

In the deal mentioned above: my guess is that preferred class shareholders and common shares got paid out but the common shareholders had such a low payout that it rounded down to zero for most employees.

This can happen even in a regular acquisition because of the equity capital stack of who gets paid first. Investors typically require a 1x liquidation preference (they get their investment back first no matter what).
by neonoperator | 2025-12-25 16:13:42+00:00
Hey everyone, I just built an online tool to help users do Bitcoin RBF (Replace-By-Fee) transactions.

- Transaction data is fetched via the mempool.space API

- Right now it only supports RBF; I plan to add more features later (e.g., Inscription and Runes support)

The site relies on browser BTC wallets for signing. Currently supported:

OKX Wallet, UniSat, Bitget Wallet, Leather, Xverse, Magic Eden

The site is not open-source yet, but it displays the PSBT and wallets also show the transaction details before signing, so you can verify the transaction content before approving.

If you are interested in using it, please try it and share feedback (features, UI, flow, error messages, etc.). Also let me know what else I should add to the intro.

Thanks!
by nextworddev | 2025-12-25 16:14:31+00:00
Is there a simple, serverless version of deploying Pipecat stack, without:
- me having to self host on my infra

I just want to provide:
- business logic
- tools
- configuration metadata (e.g. which voice to use)

I don't like Vapi due to 1) extensive GUI driven experience, 2) cost
by scsh | 2025-12-25 16:14:42+00:00
> Veritasium has some of the worst horseshit "clickbait"

This really isn't a defense of Veritasium, but this has become the case with most videos where the creator makes a living off their channel. Everything is poorly named like this just so they can at least continue getting the same amount of views, because most views come from Youtube recommendations. It's only anecdata I have, but I've heard a lot of creators say that these days recommendations is the only way they get views, even channels with tons of subscribers. I personally rarely get recommended content from channels I actually subscribe to. It's really a lamentable state.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-25 16:15:50+00:00
> But supposedly neurotypical people demonstrate what seems to me like a stunning lack of empathy (or more generally, ability to comprehend other worldviews) all the time. Especially when politics is involved.

Politics is about power fights: whose argument will convince the mass that in this case violence (laws -> state authority) is appropriate or not appropriate.

So even if the other person is able to comprehend other worldviews (which I would claim is actually often, though not always, the case), there exist very strong incentives to ignore these other world views in your actions when politics is involved.
by dahart | 2025-12-25 16:16:40+00:00
Depends on what aspects of your scientific training you want to re-engage with. Do you want to be writing & publishing, giving talks, doing experiments, or building predictive statistical models? And what kind of software do you want to continue writing? Application development? More full-stack, with both backend and frontend? It is indeed hard to imagine places where you can find a strong mix of both.

If you want to mix earth sciences with development, you could look for positions on the Google Earth Engine team, or check out weather companies that do R&D like Purple Air. I imagine there’s plenty of software work mixed with earth sciences in the oil, gas, and mining industries; aviation & ocean shipping; hydroelectric, solar, and wind power maybe.

Being an earth sciences researcher is highly likely to involve writing software, whereas the average SWE role is not likely to need research, so my instinct would be to say just look research roles. Do most of today’s earth sciences researchers not spend a lot of their time at least writing statistical software in Python or R? My brother’s an anthropologist, and over the last decade his job has become more and more writing software to process datasets and do statistics.

If you’re just looking for a scientific mindset and a role that does experimentation, many companies (especially growing startups) have data science departments that, at a minimum, drive A-B testing experiments. Occasionally you can find applied research positions that are listed as just SWE roles, but those might be hard to find - I’d start by asking academic departments for leads.
by paulryanrogers | 2025-12-25 16:17:00+00:00
> But supposedly neurotypical people demonstrate what seems to me like a stunning lack of empathy (or more generally, ability to comprehend other worldviews) all the time.

IME religion facilities this phenomenon. In-group members (esp men) get forgiveness and freedom from consequences (perhaps conditioned on saying magic words). Whilst out-groups get "forgiveness" with extra consequences.
by rfl890 | 2025-12-25 16:17:04+00:00
Are you sure? This code snippet reeks of AI hallucination:

// 3. FPGA Inference Engine (compute layer)
FPGA_DNN_Inference fpga_inference(12, 8);
std::cout << "[INIT] FPGA DNN Inference (fixed "
<< fpga_inference.get_fixed_latency_ns()
<< "ns latency)" << std::endl;

What's going on here? Are you simulating an FPGA? In software? To guarantee a fixed latency? It's named confusingly, at the very least. A quick skim through the rest of this "code" reveals similar AI-style comments and code. Certainly not "only for unit tests and documentation".
by jp57 | 2025-12-25 16:17:05+00:00
“Bridging the gap between PhD and SWE” would be a good subtitle for my career.

I started out writing software for scientists, psychologists, first at a university, then a small company. After eight years of that I went to grad school and got a PhD in CS (ML/AI), and did a postdoc, before going into industry, and eventually landed a role in what was then called “data mining”, later “data science”, then “machine learning engineering”. In the beginning when the team was small, we were all generalists, doing both the science work and the engineering. As we grew, specialized roles developed, but I was able to chart a course somewhere between a SWE and a scientist, doing a lot of knowledge work, experiments, measurement, and presentation, but also building common tools that the rest of the team can use.

I’ve been out of the job market for 15 years now, but I think any company that does science and builds software would value your skillset. In fact, when I was shifting from academia to industry, I started out determined to be a “scientist”. After all, what was my PhD for, anyway? But my SWE chops were pretty evident on my resume, and I had a hard time getting traction. Then I got brought in for an interview at a company that had a team of scientists and a team of engineers and they brought me in for a split interview with both teams. It was clear by the end that they wanted me as an engineer, but I was insistent on wanting to be a scientist. They didn’t offer me a job, and I was disappointed. The disappointment was educational for me, and I rewrote my resume to put more emphasis on my SWE skills, and that made it easier to find a role that fit me.
by m4ck_ | 2025-12-25 16:17:22+00:00
Might want to take a gander at the sentence before:

>Where we can actually take the government out of the equation and actually help people: Zoning

Fixing the fucked up zoning & other regs that force housing prices to only ever move in one direction is not the same as advocating for elimination of government or suggesting Haiti is something to aspire to. Insert any country where people live on a fraction of US minimum wage, and you'll find folks don't typically live in 4br/5ba houses w/ 2 car garages in perfectly manicured subdivisions that look like some copy and pasted the same house 800 times. The way they live would be illegal in most populated area in the US today, although it was perfectly acceptable for older generations.

As long as a house is primarily considered an investment, and not a just a structure to keep us safe from the elements and a place to raise a family, housing will only ever become more expensive and less available.
by xhkkffbf | 2025-12-25 16:18:56+00:00
The worst problem for all of us humans is that we go "all in" on the company that hires us. If the company suffers a big loss in another division, we can lose salary, raises or our jobs, all through no fault of our own. Yes, it sometimes works in the other direction. A big profit in one division can be reinvested in ours. But much of our fate depends upon the larger company.

So you can't say this is about merit when so much of the equation depends upon others who many have nothing to do with your daughter.
by websiteapi | 2025-12-25 16:19:47+00:00
weird - even if AI was literally omnipotent and omniscient, you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do. Unless you're of course, willing to YOLO the entire company on output you haven't actually checked yourself.

for that reason alone humans will always need to be in the loop. of course you can debate how many people you need to the above activity, but given that AI isn't omniscient, nor omnipotent I expect that number to be quite high for the foreseeable future.

one example - I've been vibe coding some stuff, and even though a pretty comprehensive set of tests are passing, I still end up reading all of the code. if I'm being honest some of the decisions the AI makes are a bit opaque to me so I end up spending a bunch of time asking it why (of course there's no real ego there, but bare with me...), re-reading the code, thinking about whether that actually makes sense. I personally prefer this activity/mode since the tests pass (which were written by the AI too), and I know anything I manually change can be tested, but it's not something I could just submit to prod right away. this is just a MVP. I can't imagine delegating if real money/customers were on the line without even more scrutiny.
by belter | 2025-12-25 16:20:10+00:00
Executive compensation is justified by "...enormous impact leadership decisions have on company outcomes..." yet when those decisions blow up spectacularly, the accountability somehow evaporates.

If your pay is 400 times average employee salary because of your unique strategic vision, surely firing 4000 people based on faulty assumptions should come with proportional consequences?

Or does the high risk, high reward, philosophy only apply to the reward part?
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-25 16:20:26+00:00
I wouldn’t go that far. I moved from South GA in 1996 a week after graduating college. I am now back home visiting my parents for Christmas. Everything I hated about living in rural America is even worse now, the economy is even more hallowed out after the factories left and it’s more culturally backwards as all of the people who could leave - did.

My parents retired in their 50s in the early 2000s - mom a teacher and dad a factory worker and they are doing well.
by billy99k | 2025-12-25 16:20:28+00:00
"My daughter followed the playbook everyone here recommends. MIT. Programming olympiads. Strong internships. No shortcuts."

I never had any of this and I managed to find work in tech in 2000, 2008, and even now (during the worst down markets in my lifetime), when everyone says that 'nobody is hiring', I had 5 interviews (I only applied to 10 or so jobs) and an offer in less than a month.

Education has never guaranteed you a job. The key is to be able to stay positive, even with rejections. I've never had the luxury of having an internship or network at a well-known university.

Getting a job is all about getting yourself in reduced in a smaller pool of candidates that the company will choose from. Education, experience, being personable can all do this.

The economy is rough right now. You also have do things that can set yourself apart from the rest. I got my latest offer by calling the person that posted the job directly and had a second interview by the end of the week.

"She spends most days in her room applying, "

Mass applying will almost never get you the job. She should be focused on customizing her resume and trying to get in touch with the person posting the job and getting face time.

"It’s Christmas and we aren’t celebrating. No decorations. No pretending things are okay. I’m completely shattered as a parent, mostly because I don’t have answers. I told her for years that merit would protect her. It didn’t."

This is an odd response from a parent. Why are you wallowing in her sorrow? You should be showing her that life can still be good and she will eventually find work again.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-12-25 16:20:35+00:00
Merit is one of those things that helps in the long run but can't be guaranteed to help at any one specific time. So you need to trust it even when it seems unhelpful.

But on the other hand, software dev seems to be racing in the direction of replacing developers with fungible AI operators. It's too soon to tell how it will end, but whatever labor can replaced or reduced will be. A long-standing equilibrium of labor is gone.
by itishappy | 2025-12-25 16:20:48+00:00
100% agree. Box of blocks cannot be beat. My sister and I used the hell out of ours: we built towers, cantilevers, mazes, Rube Goldberg devices, houses for rodents, vehicles, elaborate locks, catapults, you name it. They're still in the same condition as day 1, ready for our children.

Bonus: You can roll a lot more down those long rubber racetracks than just cars.

Bonus 2: Why did these go away? https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/chubs-baby-wipes-stac...
by JohnTHaller | 2025-12-25 16:20:56+00:00
They make hideously complicated software to help businesses manage their business. You need consultants to help integrate it and to make any changes to it. The interfaces are convoluted and require learning how they work rather than having any kind of discoverability. Switching to their systems often involves a dip in customer satisfaction. Switching off of their systems is nearly impossible by design.
Show HN: Buoy – A persistent, status-bar web server for local utilities
by codazoda | 2025-12-25 16:21:24+00:00
I’m constantly building small web-based tools for my own use. Usually, my workflow ends with a dilemma: do I keep a terminal tab open forever running `npx http-server -p 8080`, or do I spend time configuring a Caddyfile for a 50-line HTML tool?

Nothing felt right. I wanted something that felt like a native, always-on, utility that was easily accessible but invisible.

I built Buoy. It’s a minimal server that:

Lives in the status bar: I can see that it's running at a glance without hunting through ps aux.

Is persistent by default: It starts with macOS and keeps my utilities alive in the background.

Zero-config: It points at a XDG‑Standard www folder so I can create a symlink and be done.

Small: I wanted to avoid the modern bloat. Buoy is a single, self-contained binary that's under 10MB.

It’s a minimal tool that lets me build many small things and move on to the next.
by ento | 2025-12-25 16:21:52+00:00
> people will always end up being frightened of "the difference"

I've also come to accept this about myself, but I had to stumble through a dark tunnel of feeling inadequate and feeling like an inhuman monster.

The typical list of traits that should not be used as a basis for discrimination is on a spectrum of how instinctual or fear-based it is, which I don't think have seen mentioned in training materials on unconscious bias.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-25 16:22:09+00:00
Yeah, I’ve noticed the classic line showing up on shelves and they seem a ton better, but I don’t recall seeing them several years ago when we were doing lots of Lego-buying. Really limited selection and mostly big, expensive sets too, not many mid-sized ones. But glad to see them releasing sets that seem more focused on play than sitting on a shelf.
by ptero | 2025-12-25 16:22:14+00:00
I would use your software skills to get in the door as a software engineer, then weasel into a sciencey position. That is:

1. Find a company that has non-software jobs that you like. Look at what companies advertise on their web sites; go to a few conferences (or watch talks) to see if some talks strike you with "ah, I can and want to do this" vibe; reach out to folks you went to grad school with, etc.

2. Apply and join as a software engineer. Don't try to sit on both chairs (software and science) during the application. You can apply to a science role, but this is likely much harder after 8 years of software focus.

3. Once in, chat with folks working on what you want to work on. Talk to folks you saw give talks. Go to internal presentations, post cool plots in slack, etc. In most companies it is pretty easy to move within roles. Plus, HR is no longer in the filtering pipeline and is not tossing resumes of anyone they think does not have the chops for the position.

Good luck!

As a personal data point -- I decided, late in my math PhD, to switch from academia to the industry after completion. A few times I switched jobs I went in as a software engineer, but within a few months moved to working on things I wanted to do beyond software (algorithms for tracking, perception, signal processing, sensor fusion, etc.).
by boogieknite | 2025-12-25 16:23:00+00:00
this is quite close to my boss's experience. he was an ecology major and phd in geography. i think you probably have about twice the software experience he had before merging the two

his application is quite simple and repeatable: optimizing field measurements through apps. or more simply, really good forms and reports. we focus on forestry but have been able to repeatedly repackage and adjust our software for clients who need to go someplace, fill out a form, and then report on that later and/or submit it to some unique system (etl stuff)

a phd proves you mastered a language and knowledge of process applicable to communicating with subject matter experts. youre certified in the scientific method. even when my boss doesnt have direct experience in a specific field, he can make an analogy to other client or phd work. clients are confident you can meet with members across their team to plan, implement, and test software to optimize their workflow without much hand holding

another thing: he does a lot of talks. after a few talks now he's asked all the time and one of ESRI's first calls for an alternate at conferences. a lot of this is the phd title. if you dont loathe public speaking too much than this can open doors to conversations with clients, professional partners, or institutions developing new tech
by card_zero | 2025-12-25 16:23:48+00:00
I don't think statistics are relevant at all. Suppose the stranger is wielding a kopesh, an ancient Egyptian sword. What we want to know is not "how many murderers use kopeshes?" (none of them), but "is this guy a murderer?", and that seems in line with what you're saying about statistics. However, the question "how many wielders of kopeshes are murderers?" is also irrelevant, and the answer is still none of them. Similarly, "how many strangers in your house have been murderers?" is irrelevant, even if the answer is "all of them so far". Perhaps you only ever let one stranger into your house, and once inside she killed somebody with an arquebus, and you said "never again" - but that would be paranoia. Perhaps you look at country-wide statistics for the average stranger (these aren't kept), but you are not personally country-wide, and the specific stranger is not an average. What's more, if you befriend the stranger, what statistic do you want to use then? The thing to do is reason, not count. I think the 76%, 56% statistic (although irrelevant to a decision) is attempting to say a lot of murderers are motivated by interpersonal relationships, you know, and get you to think about what a given person might be up to, or might want, and the extent to which you can even tell, and the value of risking the unknown.
by gradus_ad | 2025-12-25 16:23:50+00:00
It's not even about humans "needing" to be in the loop, but that humans "want" to be in the loop. AI is like a genius employee who has no ego and no desire to rise up the ranks, forever a peon while more willful colleagues surpass them in the hierarchy.

Until AI gets ego and will of its own (probably the end of humanity) it will simply be a tool, regardless of how intelligent and capable it is.