MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by krastanov | 2025-12-23 01:02:36+00:00
This is completely missing the point. There is nothing fundamental to an amplitude. The amplitudes are this small because you have chosen to work in a basis in which they are small. Go to the Hadamard basis and the amplitude value is exactly 1. After all, the initial state of Shor's algorithm (the superposition of all classical bitstrings) is the perfectly factorizable, completely not entangled state |+++++++>
by whstl | 2025-12-23 01:03:17+00:00
The arbiter of what can be accessed should be the user, and always the user. The OS should be merely the enforcer.

Currently OSs are a free-for-all, where the user must blindly trust third-party apps, or they enforce it clumsily like in macOS.

This was fine in 1980 but isn't anymore.
by underlipton | 2025-12-23 01:03:25+00:00
>Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such?

BDS is a thing. It toppled South Africa's regime and makes Israelis gnash their teeth. Part of the "sell" for investing in China, and buying Chinese products, was that we were bringing them Capitalism, which would bring them wealth and freedom. The alternative is that you're fueling a Communist regime that is going to become your rival and adversary. Maybe I'm mixing up which was explicit and which was implicit, but there's no way Americans would have been on board with everything if the latter was seen as a real possibility. So either big business knew and suppressed it, or they genuinely themselves believed that they could do business in China and not support strengthening the CCP. (And, before Xi rose to power, that was not an completely unreasonable thought.)
by StanislavPetrov | 2025-12-23 01:03:25+00:00
As O’Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap. The voice had stopped.

Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.

‘You can turn it off!’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said O’Brien, ‘we can turn it off. We have that privilege.’
by exmadscientist | 2025-12-23 01:03:47+00:00
FPGAs need their "Arduino moment". There have been so, so, so many projects where I've wanted just a little bit of moderately-complicated glue logic. Something pretty easy to dash off in VHDL or whatever. But the damn things require so much support infrastructure: they're complicated to put down on boards, they're complicated to load bitstreams in to, they're complicated to build those bitstreams for, and they're complicated to manage the software projects for.

As soon as they reach the point where it's as easy to put down an FPGA as it is an old STM32 or whatever, they'll get a lot more interesting.
by Phemist | 2025-12-23 01:04:58+00:00
> What's frightening is it's not rare, it actually happens constantly, and this is just within the systems which have a high level of internal logging/user-tracking.

Would not be surprised if these types of abuse serve to obfuscate other abusive uses as well and are thus part of the system operating as it should. Flood the internal logging with all kinds of this "low-level" stuff, hiding the high-level warrantless tracking.
by exmadscientist | 2025-12-23 01:05:08+00:00
The main advantage to VHDL is the style of thinking it enforces. If you write your Verilog or SystemVerilog like it's VHDL, everything works great. If you write your VHDL like it's Verilog, you'll get piles of synthesis errors... and many of them will be real problems.

So if you learn VHDL first, you'll be on a solid footing.
by refurb | 2025-12-23 01:05:11+00:00
I think your perspective is biasing you.

The US has a massive number of small and medium companies. For example small part machining there are dozens per city.

43% of US GDP is small and medium size business. That’s effectively 50% of China’s entire GDP.

Sure China has more, but it also has 4x the population and an economy more focused on labor intensive industry.
by Rochus | 2025-12-23 01:05:39+00:00
Ada and Wirth’s languages (including Modula-2) represent fundamentally opposing schools of thought regarding language design, despite their shared ALGOL-60 heritage and partly related syntax.

Ada is in every aspect a much bigger and more powerful (e.g. concerning the ability of the compiler to assist you in writing safe low-level code) language than any of the Wirth languages. Wirth famously criticized Ada as being "uneconomical"; he believed that because Ada’s requirements were so "baroque" and contradictory, the resulting language was inevitably overloaded with features whose marginal benefits did not justify their complexity (https://archive.org/details/Computer_Language_Issue_09_1985-...). But when you e.g. study the Oberon system, you see that it depended on "tricks" (e.g. SYSTEM.PUT/GET, VAR ARRAY of SYSTEM.BYTE) which were not properly integrated in the language concepts and had to be used without any typechecking support by the compiler.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-12-23 01:06:05+00:00
It is more difficult than you may be assuming. How do you know the hits are false? These "hits" are collections of samples at points in time, not continuous tracks. The "tracks" are reconstructed by making inferences from the samples.

Determining whether any pair of sequential samples represents the same entity or two unrelated entities is an extremely difficult inference problem with no closed or general solution. If there is too much clutter, it becomes almost unresolvable. Aliasing will create a lot of false tracks.

History has shown that any heuristic you use to filter the clutter will be used by your adversary as an objective function to hide from your sensors once they know you are using it (e.g. doppler radar "notching").

For this reason the inference algorithms are classified but they will degrade rapidly with sufficient clutter no matter how clever. It is a limitation of the underlying mathematics.
by slg | 2025-12-23 01:06:14+00:00
I'm reminded of the Letter on Justice and Open Debate[1] that Bari Weiss signed only a few years ago, now she's spiking stories like this one on CECOT for showing the current administration in a negative light.

I also wonder if this story will get the type of leeway to stay on HN to collect the 200+ upvotes and 300+ comments of that previous example or if it will be flagged off the front page within minutes like so many other similar stories.

EDIT: No idea how long this post actually lasted, but checking in an hour later to see this has been flagged completely off the first 10 pages of HN despite getting close to that 200 point total.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23759283
by stephen_g | 2025-12-23 01:06:25+00:00
New coal data is out just a few days ago [1], it's plateaued globally and expected to start to decline.

China's consumption this year was about the same as last, and looking to drop a bit, so likely old coal plants were being retired at about the same rate as newer ones were built, and that will start to go the other way (more retired than built).

1. https://www.iea.org/news/global-coal-demand-has-reached-a-pl...
by ben_w | 2025-12-23 01:06:42+00:00
Correct operation of a coal plant has global impact, and therefore coal should be phased out entirely.

Absent that, when a coal plant goes badly wrong, the damage is small enough and localised enough to be affordable.

When a nuclear plant goes wrong, the upper bound for error includes both Chrenobyl and also "unknown parties stole the radioisotopes" followed by terrorists repeating the Goiânia accident somewhere.

Making all the failure modes not happen is expensive.
by canyp | 2025-12-23 01:07:41+00:00
Soon the only way to assure your readers that your writing is human is by calling them a motherfucker in the opening sentence.

But then, you'd only be sure that the first sentence was legitimate and not the rest of the article. That is why I constantly reassure my readers that they're some goddamn motherfuckers throughout my writing. And you, too, are one, my friend.
by macNchz | 2025-12-23 01:08:20+00:00
It's surprisingly good! I wouldn't want to type on it all day long, but it works pretty well for me. I just did a cold typing test, not having typed on it in a few days, and got 55wpm touch typing the normal way, and 40wpm with thumbs. On a regular keyboard I can type >100wpm, so it's clearly not quite there, but I much prefer it to a smartphone keyboard, and I can be much more accurate on it without any sort of autocorrect.
by alhazrod | 2025-12-23 01:08:35+00:00
This is an excerpt from the book “README
A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines” by W. Patrick McCray.

MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553483/readme/

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/README-Computing-Electronic-Everythin...
by autoexec | 2025-12-23 01:09:10+00:00
> Ultimately, I don't think it matters much what he says or has said, he won't clearly say what he/they are planning, obviously.

Honestly they're pretty open about their plans. They laid most of them out in Project 2025. They just sometimes carry out those plans while also denying that they are following the playbook. Trump in particular will be surprisingly candid about what he's doing in between bouts of lies and denials.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-23 01:09:13+00:00
I don't think this is a security vs usability thing. A lot of UIs are intentionally confusing.

Apple wants you to use iCloud passkeys, Microsoft wants you to use Microsoft Account passkeys, Google wants you to use Google passkeys. Even if you have a dedicated USB device plugged in, browsers keep defaulting to the cloud accounts.

Bitwarden's approach is to simply hijack the passkey request before the browser can respond and throw itself front and center. It's a terrible hack but it works on every browser at the very least.

If these companies cared about their users more than they cared about throwing up walled gardens, they wouldn't put a USB key behind "Choose another method" -> "Dedicated device" -> "Security key" -> "Confirm" while offering one-click login with their cloud account. And they would offer a proper API for third party applications to integrate into the native passkey storage.
by krackers | 2025-12-23 01:10:58+00:00
I think there are two key differences though: 1) Attention doesn't doesn't use fixed distance-dependent weight for the aggregation but instead the weight becomes "semantically-dependent", based on association between q/k. 2) A single convolution step is a local operation (only pulling from nearby pixels), whereas attention is a "global" operation, pulling from the hidden states of all previous tokens. (Maybe sliding window attention schemes muddy this distinction, but in general the degree of connectivity seems far higher).

There might be some unifying way to look at things though, maybe GNNs. I found this talk [1] and at 4:17 it shows how convolution and attention would be modeled in a GNN formalism

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1YCdVogd14
by Cadwhisker | 2025-12-23 01:10:59+00:00
This article is a rant about how bad tools are without going into specifics. "VHDL and Verilog are relics", well so is "C" but they all get the job done if you've been shown how to use them properly.

"engineers are stuck using outdated languages inside proprietary IDEs that feel like time capsules from another century.". The article misses that Vivado was developed in the 2010's and released around 2013. It's a huge step-up from ISE if you know how to drive it properly and THIS is the main point that the original author misses. You need to have a different mindset when writing hardware and it's not easy to find training that shows how to do it right.

If you venture into the world of digital logic design without a guide or mentor, then you're going to encounter all the pitfalls and get frustrated.

My daily Vivado experience involves typing "make", then waiting for the result and analysing from there (if necessary). It takes experience to set up a hardware project like this, but once you get there it's compatible with standard version control, CI tools, regression tests and the other nice things you expect form a modern development environment.
by coldpie | 2025-12-23 01:12:34+00:00
> If you're finding workarounds to violate the security design, you're not gaining any advantage by using passkeys.

The trouble is, if websites are allowed/encouraged to ban clients, then the advantages you're talking about come with the downside of hard-tying yourself to one of 3 US-based Big Tech companies, because those will be the only ones who will ship clients declared "secure." That's not a trade-off I'm willing to make for something as critical as my service logins. You can already see this happening, almost every article talking about passkeys assumes you're logging in with an Apple, Google, or Microsoft device.

> Then you follow the procedure you would follow for when you'd forget your password. Probably a password reset through email, maybe calling customer support.

This is a downgrade from passwords (and exportable passkeys), where I can just restore it from a backup.

> Just use a password if you want to use a password.

Yeah, that's what I plan to keep doing, unfortunately. What I'm worried about is a password-less future where that's no longer an option and we all have to submit to using one of Android, iOS, or Windows to log in to everything because those are the only clients that can be trusted(TM) to handle the user's data as the big tech companies and governments desire it to be handled. This is a dark future.
by WahyuS002 | 2025-12-23 01:13:30+00:00
I resonate with the "honeypot for nerds" sentiment mentioned by others here.
There is a distinct difference between "being public" as a performance (influencer style) and "working with the garage door open." The author seems to be advocating for the latter.

I've found that publishing raw notes, half-baked projects, or niche interests acts as a high-quality filter. It might not get mass engagement, but the few people who do reach out are almost always high-signal connections. The fear of surveillance is valid, but the cost of total obscurity is missing out on that serendipity.
by albert_roca | 2025-12-23 01:13:36+00:00
The calculation uses m_p , which is independent of G. Deriving G to 8 ppm from m_p is not necessarily "meaningless", or at least it's statistically non-trivial. It is not just "G = G".

You mention the "uncharged case", but ordinary matter is not mathematically neutral. By focusing on the uncharged case only, you ignore that this is an attempt at unification. The model proposes that geometry explains both interactions. You cannot remove one of them, because in nature they happen at once.

The rest of your remarks don't seem "uncharged" at all, but the opposite.
by mothballed | 2025-12-23 01:13:41+00:00
They'd have not forced license plates to be displayed at all times to begin with, as they are a search of your papers without probable cause your vehicle is unregistered. Private ships in those days (probably the closest equivalent of something big and dangerous that could do tons of damage quickly on the public right of way) did not have required hull numbers or anything like that. Of course that doesn't totally solve the flock problem, but makes it a lot harder.
by no-name-here | 2025-12-23 01:14:02+00:00
But none of those would have helped in this case, where each dev/user intentionally installed the package specifically so it could retrieve data from the WhatsApp API.

What would have helped is if the dev/user had the ability for the dev/user to confirm before the code connected to a new domain or IP - api.WhatsApp.com? Approve. JoesServer.com or a random IP? Block. Such functionality could be at the OS or Docker level, etc.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-12-23 01:15:38+00:00
Fair call out but if I am a firebase customer, as I have been in the past but less frequently so, I treat them as a singular entity. In other words, there’s no situation I would use firebase and not use its auth, because the reason I might use firebase is Because Of the auth, not In Spite Of. There’s no world for me where firebase is the preferred option that doesn’t use auth, the integration like that is literally the only reason I would ever consider ClosedSourceOwnedByGoogle over alternatives
by the_af | 2025-12-23 01:15:42+00:00
> I definitely am privileged

It shows! And condescending too, I'd add.

> The only thing I have left to say is: Try not to confuse obligations with choices.

That is meaningless, though doubtless it seems very deep to you.

Look, you made the bizarre argument people always have choices because feeding your kids is a choice. In whatever alien world you live in that might be a clever argument. Meanwhile, in the real world...
by anonymousiam | 2025-12-23 01:16:09+00:00
Thanks for the clarification. They're so close to being the same thing that I always call it CSMA/CD. Avoiding a collision is far more preferable than just detecting one.

Yeah, many enterprise switches don't even support 100Base-T or 10Base-T anymore. I've had to daisy chain an old switch that supports 100Base-T onto a modern one a few times myself. If you drop 10/100 support, you can also drop HD (simplex) support. In my junk drawer, I still have a few old 10/100 hubs (not switches), which are by definition always HD.
by cdrnsf | 2025-12-23 01:16:12+00:00
Additional context:

> The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that the men sent to El Salvador were overwhelmingly violent criminals; Pro Publica reported that the administration knew at least 197 of the men had not been convicted of crimes in the United States, and six had been convicted of violent offenses.

https://www.404media.co/archivists-posted-the-60-minutes-cec...
by youarentrightjr | 2025-12-23 01:17:08+00:00
Not to pile on, but this is a similar vibe to people telling others to stop complaining about gas prices and just get an EV.

Some people can't afford a $38k car, heck, for some even $10k for a car is out of reach. There are people who have no choice but to buy a 20 year old ICE vehicle and pray it doesn't die. These same folks suffer due to the regressive nature of fuel tax.
by mvkel | 2025-12-23 01:17:08+00:00
the main summary of 1984: "neighbors are encouraged, via telesecreens, to spy on one another to enforce conformity."

There thing to fear isn't some higher state; it's each other. We happily will surveil each other under the auspices of safety.

Hell, these days, our kids grow up with cameras pointing at them in their own rooms. What did we expect?

Until we are willing to accept more "risk" in exchange for more privacy, this will only get worse. (It's why I believe most tech/services that tout privacy are DoA, because nobody actually cares)
by Cadwhisker | 2025-12-23 01:17:17+00:00
# Here's the general flow for Vivado TCL projects that takes you from source code to a bit-file with no interaction. Read UG835 for details.

create_project -in_memory -part ${PART}

set_property target_language VHDL [ current_project ]

read_vhdl "my_hdl_file.vhd"

synth_design -top my_hdl_top_module_name -part ${PART}

opt_design

place_design

route_design

check_timing -file my_timing.txt

report_utilization -file my_util.txt

write_checkpoint my_routed_design.dcp

write_bitstream my_bitfile.bit
by makestuff | 2025-12-23 01:17:36+00:00
Yeah I agree it is a lack of understanding on how to use the tools. The main issue I ran into in my undergrad FPGA class as a CS student was a lack of understanding on how to use the IDE. We jumped right into trying to get something running on the board instead of taking time to get everything set up. IMO it would have been way easier if my class used an IDE that was as simple as Arduino instead of everyone trying to run a virtual machine on their macbooks to run Quartus Prime.
by alyson-rodrigo | 2025-12-23 01:17:46+00:00
Hi everyone,I'm conducting a research to better understand the challenges that tech teams face with software documentation on a daily basis. The goal is to map the main pain points and explore new approaches to solve them, possibly using AI to automate the process.If you are a tech leader, architect, or senior developer, your perspective would be incredibly valuable. Could you spare 3-5 minutes to answer this anonymous survey? https://tally.so/forms/zxNLeM/insights Thank you for your help!
by kjkjadksj | 2025-12-23 01:18:07+00:00
Wasn’t the first edition of the TSA scanner straight up showing pretty much nude photos of people? I seem to remember something like that. Now a days at least it just flags a region on a generic human model for more investigation.

The funniest part though is you pay $80 every five years and just bypass it entirely. I guess they assume terrorists are too stupid to figure out TSA precheck is available.
by fragmede | 2025-12-23 01:18:09+00:00
Basically that, but the entire project directory got wiped out, not just .git/. Backups are your friend (Arq gets my vote), as well as commiting often and pushing branches to the remote server that aren't my supposed to get reviewed, just so you have a recent off-machine copy. Claude has a way to deny rm and unlink and you can find other various protections, up to actually sandboxing your yolo session in a VM.

For Claude Chrome, I highly recommend using a separate profile. I also blocked my bank.com (not just via /etc/hosts but as this message is going to get harvested for training days, I unfortunately won't say what it is here. Email me if you really have to know - and promise you'll not just turn around and tell the whole Internet to AI) out of extra paranoia. Better paranoid and not got, than getting got, imo.

My rm interdiction script (which is far from 100%).
https://gist.github.com/fragmede/96f35225c29cf8790f10b1668b8...
by WahyuS002 | 2025-12-23 01:19:02+00:00
It really does feel like the Innovator's Dilemma playing out for JetBrains. They have the best semantic understanding of code (PSI) locked away in their proprietary engine, but they seem too attached to the traditional "human-driving-the-IDE" paradigm.

Tools like Claude Code (and Cursor) are treating the editor/CLI as a fluid canvas for the AI, whereas JetBrains treats AI as just a sidebar plugin. If they don't expose their internal refactoring tools to agents soon, the friction of switching to VS Code/CLI becomes negligible compared to the productivity gains of these agents.
by autoexec | 2025-12-23 01:19:07+00:00
Generally I'd agree. The threats here are larger. That said China isn't powerless to hurt you either. I haven't seen much of it happening, but in theory China could blackmail you. They can manipulate and influence you and your children through social media and advertising, even encouraging kids to harm themselves/others.

They can also fill the products they make for us with heavy metals and other poisons while building them to break draining our finances and filling our country with trash. The worst thing they could do though is just stop producing crap for us entirely since we're basically dependent on them for just about everything.
by Tracy978 | 2025-12-23 01:19:19+00:00
Super interesting project. For a first version, I’d focus on the “feels great” basics: no flicker, smooth transitions with hysteresis (no hunting), and consistent color between modules (calibration + temperature drift compensation). Also, CCT alone isn’t enough—color quality (especially R9/R12) often explains why the same “Kelvin” still looks wrong:
https://suntechlite.com/r12-and-r9-in-cri-why-these-importan...