MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rramadass | 2026-01-14 04:29:43+00:00
Very Nice!

> how does a program turn into qubit rotations, readouts, and other instruction executions

What is actually involved in the "instruction set" for a quantum computer? How do you "compile" to it? If i treat everything below a "logical qubit" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_and_logical_qubits) as a black-box since from programming pov it does not(?) matter can i think of it using classical computation models?

This is analogous to how one does not need to know Semiconductor Physics (which is Quantum Physics), Electronic Component Physics to understand the logical boolean framework built on top of it which is then synthesized into an instruction set to program against.
by brigandish | 2026-01-14 04:29:59+00:00
> By Cathy Young

I'm not above ad hominem, so I'll point out that Young's own views are also not without obvious political leanings.

A much better point about the poll was made in Slate[1]:

> Rasmussen said 13 percent of poll respondents were Black, so about 130 people. If we take the results entirely at face value—which I’d discourage—that means it found about 34 Black people who answered “disagree” or “strongly disagree” with the statement “It’s OK to be white.” We have no more information about why.

Although they also allow people the benefit of the doubt by presuming they know the context behind a catchphrase that a) knowledge of is a sign of being online far more than the average, and b) is designed to show bias in anyone who opposes it. That's how biased these journalists are, they don't even notice the trap, they stand in it and brazenly opine on it.

Pinch of salt liberally applied.

[1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/02/dilbert-scott-ad...
by kristopolous | 2026-01-14 04:30:32+00:00
I had a similar effect for a C program I wrote a long time ago (I think 2007?). Here's a video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4j-BkwMB20

and the code:
https://github.com/kristopolous/ascsee

I just updated it so it compiles on modern systems.
by pca006132 | 2026-01-14 04:31:07+00:00
LLM is just a tool. How the tool is used is also an important question. People vibe code these days, sometimes without proper review, but do you want them to vibe code a nuclear reactor controller without reviewing the code?

In principle we can just let anyone use LLM for medical advice provided that they should know LLMs are not reliable. But LLMs are engineered to sound reliable, and people often just believe its output. And cases showed that this can have severe consequences...
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-14 04:31:22+00:00
Your link just redirects. I think the section linked below is better. I was surprised to learn that there's at least some amount of disagreement on the details depending on the context.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Singular_nouns_endi...

The same page also covers the broader subject more generally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Possessive_apostrop...

> One would therefore say "I drank the glass's contents" to indicate drinking from one glass, but "I drank the glasses' contents" after also drinking from another glass.

Every time I stop to appreciate these details that I never really have to think about I feel sorry for those forced to pick up English as a second language. Formal latin should have remained the language of academics and international trade. We really screwed up.
by gavmor | 2026-01-14 04:31:27+00:00
Once a system has a sufficient number of users, it no longer matters what you "explicitly" promised in your documentation or contract.

Hyrum’s Law: all observable behaviors of your system will eventually be depended on by someone.

Even if you tell users not to rely on a specific side effect, once they discover it exists and find it useful, that behavior becomes an implicit part of your system's interface. As a result, engineers often find that "every change breaks someone’s workflow," even when that change is technically a bug fix or a performance improvement.

Reliance on unpromised behavior is something I was also introduced to as Kranz’s Law (or Scrappy's Law*), which asserts that things eventually get used for their inherent properties and effects, without regard for their intended purpose.

"I insisted SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 be invented for BSD. People were grabbing system signals to mean what they needed them to mean for IPC, so that (for example) some programs that segfaulted would not coredump because SIGSEGV had been hijacked.
This is a general principle — people will want to hijack any tools you build, so you have to design them to either be un-hijackable or to be hijacked cleanly. Those are your only choices."
—Ken Arnold in The Art Of Unix Programming
by zxexz | 2026-01-14 04:32:09+00:00
With regards to the microwave, here’s a token “please safely discharge and double check the cap” comment!

With regards to vapes, just look on the ground near a sidewalk. I find like 3 or 4 big depleted vapes a day in a US urban area. Closer to 15 or 20 in greater London in the UK.
by nnf | 2026-01-14 04:33:01+00:00
I've got a similarly sized ground-mount array, and I push the snow off with a triple-telescoping aluminum pole with a large squeegee on the end. An actual snow rake might be better, like the one you describe, but my setup gets it done. It takes some effort, but it's worth it to be able to collect the solar energy that would otherwise just reflect off the snow for days.
by shagmin | 2026-01-14 04:33:16+00:00
If a person immigrates to the USA due to success with onlyfans, are they not productive members of society by virtue of having taxable & disposable income from the fruits of their labor? They don't need a PHD to be productive anymore than a soccer player, mentioned earlier. In reality we already have American citizens in the US paying for their college degrees via onlyfans.
by tsunamifury | 2026-01-14 04:33:35+00:00
I believe you are belligerently missing the point and think a mere “50 incidents” of pushing people from moving vehicles is fine. As this is absurd.

Since obviously you’d not be ok with yourself or your child thrown from a moving vehicle.

Trust me when I say. ICE is not here to do what you believe. And they will come for you one way or another.
it’s naive and laughable and frankly a bit of a stain against humanity that you can’t see that
by digi_wares | 2026-01-14 04:34:00+00:00
I’ve been building, launching, and documenting a bunch of SaaS tools over the last few years. After 100+ experiments, the vast majority were good but optional- meaning people tried them once, then moved on.

In reading back over what did stick and what quietly faded, I noticed a pattern:

The winners don’t just automate tasks - they automate decisions, embed into workflows, reduce cognitive load, and earn trust over time.

In my latest article, I share what I think will work in SaaS in 2026, and what I think won’t - not theory, but patterns based on real product outcomes.

Key themes you might find interesting:
- Products that decide what to do next, not just show data.
- Tools that run in the background and plug into existing workflows.
- AI used as infrastructure, not as a hype label.
- Why many standalone dashboards and single-interface outputs will struggle.

I would love to hear what HN thinks:
- Do you agree with these predictions?
- What SaaS trends do you think will matter most by 2026?
- Am I missing anything?

Looking forward to the discussion!
by manwe150 | 2026-01-14 04:34:31+00:00
Reading the comment thread here made me realize the idea seems to be that having 2 just means double the probability of one of them failing in some undetectable way. The resulting error magnitude is reduced by half, but the probability of that error is doubled. So it gains you nothing to expected value to have 2. Unlike with 3, where the probability of undetectable failure and the error rate from partial failure are both reduced by the ability to make comparative measurements (eg pick the middle number not the average)
by mappu | 2026-01-14 04:34:46+00:00
ZLUDA implements CUDA on top of AMD ROCm - they are explicitly targetting vLLM as their PyTorch compatibility test: https://vosen.github.io/ZLUDA/blog/zluda-update-q4-2025/#pyt...

(PyTorch does also support ROCm generally, it shows up as a CUDA device.)
by evgpbfhnr | 2026-01-14 04:35:24+00:00
> I’m also intrigued by the potential that type systems have for “tagging” secrets and preventing their propagation beyond where they’re needed

facet (rust) allows tagging fields as sensitive so they won't show up in logs:
https://facet.rs/guide/attributes/#sensitive

I'm sure other languages have equivalents but I rarely see this.. for example I was about to say serde doesn't do it, but it looks like it's possible with a wrapper type? https://docs.rs/redactrs/latest/redactrs/

Anyway, this kind of tagging is good, I want more!
by tim-tday | 2026-01-14 04:35:24+00:00
My version of the atheist’s wager is:
If god exists the greatest gift he ever gave us was our minds, our ability to assess and decide. We owe it to our gift to use it wisely, carefully and judiciously. Particularly in the most important question of all, does god exist. But which god? Surely not Zeus. That one is obviously made up by men. How about Odin? Also made up. Ra? Again, made up. For thousands of years we’ve made up gods that are clearly not real. How curious would it be if for once, this time we didn’t. (Though we followed all the usual forms for the previous religions made up by men)

If we don’t apply our intellect to the most important question of all, if we don’t make the best decision possible we insult our greatest gift. Sadly the application of my reason leads me to think that all gods, deities, spirits, are made up by people. But all is not lost, it also leads me to think that the undeniable awe and mystery of the universe are vaster by far than our puny imaginations can comprehend.
by rozap | 2026-01-14 04:35:27+00:00
Correct, Iran shouldn't fund Hamas. I don't pay taxes in Iran, I am not a member of their society.

I'm American. I pay taxes in the US. I could do some math and figure out how many deaths of innocent kids I've directly funded, how many Palestinian families I've helped displace. I get to live with that knowledge.

I'm not funding Hamas terrorist attacks, but I am funding a genocide.
by wat10000 | 2026-01-14 04:36:58+00:00
Management, especially upper management, of large American companies is predominantly white men. Always has been. It was even more so back when Adams was supposedly suffering from this discrimination than it is today.

Any claim that racism against white men is common has to reconcile this fact. If the system is so biased against them, how do they end up so incredibly overrepresented? Are they so much better than everyone else that they get most of the spots despite this unjust discrimination? Or maybe the bias actually goes the other way.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-14 04:37:03+00:00
Stub

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broodfonds

Note that they go a bit above the "middle" Dunbar number..

(Has to be revamped^W tweaked for various contexts obv (mortgage, inflation, kids, etc))

In your case tho it's bit of a "regret insurance", or "cache insurance" (using your terminology perhaps)

Tho as PG would discover, the premium isn't denoted in (the usual sorts of enviable) wealth..
by jason_oster | 2026-01-14 04:37:24+00:00
You should try a similar task with a recent model (Opus 4.5, GPT 5.2, etc) and see if there are any improvements since your last attempt. I also encourage using a coding agent. It can use test files that you provide, and perform compile-test loops to work out any mistakes.

It sounds like you used an older model, and perhaps copy-pasted code from a chat session. (Just guessing, based on what you described.)
by jonah-archive | 2026-01-14 04:37:39+00:00
As a second regards the microwave, depending on the age, please be extremely careful about the magnetron the insulators on which could contain beryllium oxide, which can kill you.

There are a lot of fun parts inside microwaves (a personal favorite is the high-torque-low-speed-line-voltage motor, which I use to make creepy Halloween decorations) but the caps, transformer, and magnetron are all useful for somewhat... more dangerous... pursuits.
by michael_nielsen | 2026-01-14 04:37:55+00:00
A few comments have been kind enough to recommend the textbook I wrote with Ike Chuang. I'm glad they find it useful!

It's worth noting: the book assumes a fair bit of mathematical background, especially in linear algebra. If you don't have the equivalent of an undergrad CS/math/physics degree (with some linear algebra), it may be better to start with gentler sources.

One such gentler source is the free online text I wrote with Andy Matuschak -- https://quantum.country. I'm sure there are others which are very good, but perhaps that's helpful!

Both books focus on foundations of the field, and don't cover recent innovations -- the book with Ike Chuang is 26 years old! Still, many of the foundations have remained quite stable.
Show HN: Soulcaster – Cluster feedback, spin up an agent to fix it
by codecracker3001 | 2026-01-14 04:38:33+00:00
Free time project: Pulls in bug reports from Reddit/Sentry/GitHub/etc, clusters similar ones with embeddings, then you can trigger a coding agent to attempt a fix and open a PR.

Super early, breaks constantly. Not sure if the clustering actually works well or if the auto-fixes are useful beyond toy examples.

Curious if anyone else has tried something like this or if it's something that would be useful for you.
by trop | 2026-01-14 04:39:35+00:00
> but Darktable doesn't support Fuji raws

darktable has supported Fuji raws since 2014! It currently supports the classic "uncompressed" RAFs, as well as the newfangled "lossless" (compressed) RAFs. I do not believe that it supports the "compressed" (lossy) format. So setting "recording type" appropriately on your camera is necessary.

I'm curious where the notion comes from that there is no support for Fujifilm RAF files, as I see this in a cousin comment as well.
by chasil | 2026-01-14 04:39:42+00:00
This article does not mention that environment variables are also visible by process in /proc/*/environ (which has restrictive permissions, but is completely visible to root).

PuTTY has added a -pwfile option for use in ssh. If not exported, this interface is likely the best for non-key batch use. It seems much superior to sshpass.

The old .netrc format can be adapted for storage (which appears popular for curl), but I prefer sqlite databases, with permissions removed for all but the owner.
by rexpop | 2026-01-14 04:40:52+00:00
Your father-in-law, an Eastern European immigrant who fled communism, benefits from ongoing racialized distributions of privilege, power, and money.

So, yes, I do believe he is "cutting in line," and should have the humility to stand in solidarity with, rather than standing on the necks of, marginalized communities. Your father-in-law is not climbing out of anywhere so deep a hole as the Black and Hispanic populations on this continent. Not even close.

Even the Gulag Archipelago pales in comparison to the centuries of slavery, genocide, rape, and disenfranchisement we have visited on these peoples in order to accrue the wealth that your father-in-law now has the privilege to work for.
by ComplexSystems | 2026-01-14 04:40:54+00:00
It's really only about the flooding the marketplace part, not about the extracting volume without their consent part. The current set of GenAI music models may involve training a black box model on a huge data set of scraped music, but would the net effect on artists' economic situations be any different if an alternate method led to the same result? Suppose some huge AI corporation hired a bunch of musicians, music theory Ph. D's, Grammy winning engineers, signal processing gurus, whatever, and hand-built a totally explainable model, from first principles, that required no external training data. So now they can crowd artists out of the marketplace that way instead. I don't think it would be much better.
by serf | 2026-01-14 04:40:56+00:00
>Firstly because you think “BLM” was a someone you can attribute an opinion to

three people coined the phrase and made a lot of money on it through donations, interviews, grants, books, media, etc.

Yes, BLM the movement and actions may be decentralized -- let's not pretend there weren't profiteering ringleaders at any given point[0], and they most definitely had vocal opinions.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alicia_Garza , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrisse_Cullors , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ay%E1%BB%8D_Tometi
by parineum | 2026-01-14 04:41:15+00:00
Prohibition works to stop some people.

It doesn't stop addicts from craving and it doesn't curb the appeal of the product. People who think tobacco/nicotine bans would work are people who think they don't have any positive effect associated with them.

People don't smoke because the evil cigarette companies tricked them and now they are addicted. It's a drug, it feels good to do it.

A tobacco/nicotine ban will end up exactly like aby other recreational drug prohibition.
by evgpbfhnr | 2026-01-14 04:41:22+00:00
> This article does not mention that environment variables are also visible by process in /proc/*/environ (which has restrictive permissions, but is completely visible to root).

He's explicitly not using export, so they won't show up there. Plain variables are not in the environment.

(it's good to bring up this file as well as getting inherited by child processes though)
by codebje | 2026-01-14 04:41:54+00:00
You can't just "do good" like it's a spreadsheet, managing your karmic balance as the parent comment joked. You're only worrying about your personal consequences in that model, not the harm to others.

But I think it should be possible for a human to reflect on their actions, find remorse, and strive to do better in the future. They will always have done a bad thing, but they might not always be a bad person.
by artdigital | 2026-01-14 04:42:13+00:00
Get on medicine. It’s the thing that actually changed my life.

That, and learn what adhd actually does, stuff like issues prioritizing tasks, sudden impulsive thoughts, “the adhd wall”, RSD, weak inner voice, etc. It’s much easier to handle if you understand it and can differentiate between something like an impulse and regular thoughts.

I recommend watching videos from Dr Berkeley on YouTube on how to manage adhd. There are lots of tricks like making things physical (time, tasks), or using with external consequences to combat weak inner voice
by cons0le | 2026-01-14 04:44:28+00:00
Yeah, in my state, with disposable I can get any flavor. But if I want juice or pods, I can only get nasty tobacco flavor. It's an easy choice.

Also, when you do get juice online or from other states, it doesn't hit as hard / the same as whatever they put in the disposables. Someone told me it's because the disposables have vitamin E acetate in them that makes the nicotine get absorbed into your blood quicker.

I think the disposables go around more regulations, which mean the chinese manufacturers can put more addictive stuff in the pods / disposables.
by pazimzadeh | 2026-01-14 04:45:12+00:00
I think you're constantly making non sequiturs around details that aren't central to the point. I could answer these, but I don't want to get distracted. At the end of the day, given everything you know, you don't believe that Netanyahu wants the Iranian regime toppled?

Revolutions can have some component of foreign intervention without necessarily negating the will of the people. The French aided the US, for example. So I don't know why the idea that the Iran protests are not foreign backed is so important to you.

There is plenty of public evidence of foreign backing of Iranian opposition (which interestingly might actually play right into the Mullahs' hands https://www.meforum.org/mef-observer/has-reza-pahlavi-become...) but it would make sense for there to be orders of magnitude more activity behind the scenes vs. what is publicly stated. For example, the US didn't admit participating in the 1953 coup of Mossadegh until 2013.

So please tell me how you are so sure that there is no foreign intervention today..
by userbinator | 2026-01-14 04:45:14+00:00
the insulators on which could contain beryllium oxide

As far as I can tell, this is an urban legend. No consumer microwave oven has ever used beryllium in its magnetron insulators. Military radar ones, yes (and likely where the legend started.) Some specialist test equipment and RF transmitters too, and they all contain prominent warnings of it. Besides its toxicity, it's far more expensive than regular alumina.
by famahar | 2026-01-14 04:45:32+00:00
I don't think they're arguing about personal use of AI to make something silly shared between family and friends. It's when those songs you made in an instant start to flood platforms where people took weeks, months or years to release an album they crafted by traditional methods. I don't want to discredit the joy you have in making fun songs with your family. I'm curious what is also gained if you made the songs by making instruments out of strings and pans, and performing / improving your own song from scratch. I'm sure the end result is the same, lots of joy and laughs. But something is definitely lost when the slow process of humble hand made creativity is exchanged for polished instant results. But maybe instant gratification is just the new mode of consumption. Ai promises that with a "good enough" button and my fear is that it will be extended to every facet of life.
by ManuelKiessling | 2026-01-14 04:45:33+00:00
I guess we all know and „love“ how every five minutes, some breathless hipster influencer posts „This changes everything!!!“ to every new x.y.1 AI bubble increment.

But honestly? This here really is something.

I can vividly imagine how in a not too far future, there will only be two types of product companies: those that work like this, and those that don’t — and vanish.
by LarsAlereon | 2026-01-14 04:45:36+00:00
This was a disappointing article, primarily because it felt like the author used this as an excuse to break into Bohemian Grove and talk to rich people, rather than the stated purpose of investigating their forestry practices. It seems like in a properly managed forest you would only be cutting old-growth trees, as the point is to cut them at the point of maximum growth before they begin to decay.
by paul7986 | 2026-01-14 04:46:29+00:00
Great to see this! The flood of AI Music will bring music royalties down to zero which Im all for if it kills AI music(spammers and silly prompt engineer songwriters trying to make a buck go away)! AI trying to mimic humanity all ways needs to die! Who does AI benefit besides those at the very top?

*Note i am hobbyist songwriter (melody and lyrics) since a teen (few decades ago)and use Suno. It makes my songs sound just like everyone elses cookie cutter crap... it has no soul to it.. just the feel of tech billionaires getting filthy rich off destroying society/humanity!
by robertjpayne | 2026-01-14 04:47:12+00:00
Why though? Bottles/cans are easily recycled and I believe the small reimbursement is easily recovered during the recycling costs.

It's not profitable to recycle small electronic devices otherwise you'd see heaps of shops doing it. It's toxic, hazardous and labour intensive.

100 times the deposit amount would be like $5-10 USD per-device which is insane. I do agree that any retailers should be required to take back empties and dispose of them responsibly.
by kami23 | 2026-01-14 04:48:20+00:00
Love this, this is what I have been envisioning as a LLM first OS! Feels like truly organic computing. Maybe Minority Report figured it out way back then.

The idea of having the elements anticipated and lowering the cognitive load of searching a giant drop down list scratches a good place in my brain. Instantly recognize it as such a better experience than what we have on the web.

I think something like this is the long term future for personal computing, maybe I'm way off, but this the type of computing I want to be doing, highly customized to my exact flow, highly malleable to improvement and feedback.