MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Ket – quantum circuit simulator, TypeScript, 3 back ends, 14 formats
by dmvjs | 2026-03-08 15:00:46+00:00
I built a quantum circuit simulator that runs entirely in Node.js or the browser with no Python dependency.

The core problem: every serious quantum tool requires Python. If you're building a web app, an educational tool, or just want to work in TypeScript, you're stuck either shelling out to Python or using libraries that are years stale.

Three simulation backends in one library:
- Statevector — sparse Map<bigint, Complex>, practical to ~20 qubits
- MPS/tensor network — O(n·χ²) memory, runs GHZ-100 in 30ms
- Exact density matrix — per-gate depolarizing noise, no Monte Carlo

14 import/export formats — OpenQASM 2/3, Qiskit Python, Cirq, IonQ JSON, Quil, Q#, pyQuil, Braket, CudaQ, TFQ, Quirk, LaTeX, native JSON. Round-trips its own format losslessly.

IonQ hardware targeting — validate circuits against real device specs (aria-1, forte-1, harmony) before submitting. Published noise figures built in.

717 tests covering analytic correctness, gate invertibility, BigInt correctness at qubit indices 30/31/40, and full round-trips for all formats.

npm install @kirkelliott/ket

GitHub: https://github.com/dmvjs/ket
by andai | 2026-03-08 15:01:01+00:00
I made a couple 2D browser games a few years ago in various WASM languages. I used C++, Zig, Odin, and Rust.

(Including a game with online multiplayer! Though only the client, I did the server in TS ;)

Now a disclaimer, I experienced most of these languages for the first time during the jam, which biases me towards confusion and suffering. That being said, there was still a big gradient, and it does give us useful data on "how easy is it to get started with the basics and achieve basic tasks" (my games were like, 1970s level complexity).

Spent the last day of the C++ one dealing with a weird Emscripten bug. 12 hours left in the jam and suddenly the whole thing refused to compile, but only with Emscripten.

Spent most of the Zig jam trying to find up to date libraries and documentation. (Stuff changes fast apparently. This was 2024 though so maybe different now).

The Rust one was the most painful because I kept running into "I know what I want to do, and it's correct, and it works in every single other programming language, but rust is an authoritarian nanny state and won't let me."

(That's not WASM specific, I had similar problems when making native games in Rust. But WASM does make that aspect of the Rust experience worse, unless, I'm told, you go for one of the well supported WASM games libraries, in which case it should be relatively smooth.)

I found this too bad because overall Rust should have been the winner, in terms of cool language features. It's just a bad match for "yes I know what I'm doing and this over-cautious compiler case genuinely doesn't apply to me and there's no way to configure that so it actually lets you do your job". Also probably not ideal for game jams where dev speed and flexibility matter more than correctness.

Zig was similarly suboptimal for game jams (though I imagine it would be fine for longer projects). Where I had 6 hours left and it was forcing me to think about what kind of division operator I wanted to use xD

Odin, I found surprisingly pleasant, even in the context of a very short jam. Very pleasant syntax. Nicest I've seen by far. (Well, I hear Jai is nice too, being Odin inspired, but no invite from Jon yet ;)

Odin's also very nice for game dev, being batteries included. For wasm there wasn't native support for game libraries at the time, but I found a GitHub repo that let you do it with a C wrapper.

Overall a fun and educational experience (and I definitely want to give Rust another go, in a less time sensitive context — it's the one language you can't just hope to wing it ;).

I did, I must admit, switch back to JS/TS and just use that for the last few games I made, because the truth is you're going to be writing it anyway for web games (unless you're using an engine or heavyweight library / toolchain), and the interop gave me more headaches than the nicer languages solved.

Depending on your scale or timeline, (or deep seated feelings about JavaScript!) that may work for you though :)
by cfbolztereick | 2026-03-08 15:01:20+00:00
Timely management of external resources is what the `with` statement has been for since 2006, added in python 2.5 or so. To debug these problems Python has Resource Warnings.

Additionally, CPython's gc is also only eager in a best effort kind of way. If cycles are involved it can take long to release memory. This will become even more the case in future versions of CPython, in the free threading variants.
by Zigurd | 2026-03-08 15:01:28+00:00
Coding agents work well enough to be useful because they can check their own work. Nevertheless it is too generous to call that reasoning. If they're right 80% of the time and they rerun a prompt if the project won't build, they might be right 95% of the time, or even 99% of the time on the third try. And if you know a bit about coding you're probably able to recognize when to intervene.

That's not to denigrate a real productivity booster. It is however a warning to anyone applying LLM-based AI to use cases where you don't have the kind of training corpus and formal framework around correctness that characterizes coding.

Coding surely matters. But it also might be a truly unique use case.
by UncleMeat | 2026-03-08 15:02:21+00:00
Babies are incredibly difficult even in the best case. Sleep deprivation is intense. Breastfeeding is difficult. Adding in small additional difficulties adds up. "This is a bit more difficult" becomes a huge mess when you are on three hours of sleep and there are 10 different "this is a bit more difficult" things that people are suggesting to you.

Add this on top of any sort of complex baby (illness, allergies, colic, slow weight gain, etc) and suddenly the slightly less complex disposable diaper becomes a godsend just to save a few minutes or a bit of mental load.
by kannanvijayan | 2026-03-08 15:03:18+00:00
We used cloth diapers for our son for about 8 months, and then it just got to be too much of a hectic nightmare washing the poop cloths between work and other issues. So we did disposables for about two years. We were having a hard time getting him trained off of the diapers, until one day we just decided to follow some advice we'd heard and took them off and let him go diaperless on the floors (thankfully wooden).. and he trained in a couple days.

Just thought I'd pass along the one training suggestion I have. Cloth or disposable.. when you're ready for them to move off it - it really helps if they're able to see and associate their bowel and bladder movements with the physical artifacts.

I suspect it helps it click faster that yes, "this is the stuff that needs to go into the potty and not pooling around my legs in a clammy cold puddle".
by dmonterocrespo | 2026-03-08 15:03:29+00:00
Hi HN!

I built Velxio to explore how microcontroller emulators work internally.

It's an Arduino environment that runs entirely in the browser. You can write sketches, compile them with arduino-cli, and simulate circuits using a real AVR8 CPU emulator.

Features:
- Arduino Uno / Nano support
- Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040)
- GPIO, SPI, I2C, UART, ADC peripherals
- interactive electronic components

The goal is to create an open-source environment for experimenting with embedded systems without installing anything.

I'd love feedback from embedded developers!
by margaritaP | 2026-03-08 15:03:43+00:00
I am a 69 yr old female. I don't remember a time without tinnitus, even as a child. In the last two years I had a couple of scary episodes where the whooshing, whistling, ringing ,buzzing, heart pulse became a HORN. In my right ear. It was driving me crazy, making me cry because it wouldn't stop. Nothing would cover the noise. I ended up at a neurologist. I found out I had a cyst in a pineal gland, that I didn't know about. But no answer to the horn sound, migraine and nausea. eventually after about a week it stopped. The second time was only a day. It is a frustrating ongoing situation, but I guess others have far worse problems.
by ncruces | 2026-03-08 15:04:48+00:00
Wasm 1.0 (and 2.0) is a fairly straightforward portable assembly.

It's a great target for a simple language (unless you insist on someone else doing your GC for you, which mandates their design on your language).

And it's also fairly easy to build a Wasm interpreter, or an AOT compiler.
by petterroea | 2026-03-08 15:04:54+00:00
I have to admit I haven't looked at house pricing much yet, mostly because buying isn't something I am planning on doing until I commit to permanent residency. But I can say the rumor that Japanese houses decrease in value seems to not count closer to Tokyo city center, so it isn't necessarily a bad investment. Talking to Japanese it seems they move out into the suburbs when they transition into the house buying part of life, because that's where it is affordable.

Renting apartments is also relatively affordable. I rented a standard 1k(bedroom + kitchen in the hallway) 14sqm apartment near the yamanote line (look it up "Tokyo 1k apartment" and you will see some floormaps). This cost 85k yen/mo, or ~650 USD in 2022 money.

When it comes to the free houses (akiya), there is apparently often a catch that you are expected to renovate them within a deadline, so you don't just get free property.

Greg from "Life Where I'm From" is a reputable source, and he has a lot of experience with property "out in the sticks". I recommend watching this, and maybe some other videos he has made regarding Nikko: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3I9KXkJFPU
by dd8601fn | 2026-03-08 15:05:00+00:00
Tax and accounting is rule based reporting. With formal authorities and openly available rulesets on right and wrong. There’s judgement in it, but that’s even less true than in development. Maybe someone makes the case that there’s art and ergonomics in it too, but not more than swe.

Professional accreditation and responsibility is its only real moat. And those are “yeah but!” issues we hand-wave in discussions around swe too.

Otherwise those are more vulnerable.
by gpvos | 2026-03-08 15:05:25+00:00
I have something similar, I tend to describe it to people as a light tinnitus. It's a permanent high tone, but I don't usually notice it unless it's very silent around me or I intentionally tune into it, and even then it's not very loud. Never mentioned it to a doctor. I think I know which loud disco I got it from when I was about 7.
by RunningDroid | 2026-03-08 15:05:57+00:00
> They really want to get rid of everything beyond what they consider the default human experience although getting them to agree on that would go about as well as getting them agree on the right kind of Christian.

The term they've been using for the "right" kind of person is "Heritage American", allegedly meaning people whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. That apparently does not include people whose ancestors came to the Americas via the Bering Land Bridge.

I would not be surprised if the "right" kind of Christian ends up being the one that believes the Prosperity Gospel.
by mendyberger | 2026-03-08 15:08:00+00:00
Things are slowly getting better in wasm world.

The c-style interface of wasm is pretty limiting when designing higher level interfaces, which is why wasn-bindgen is required in the first place.

Luckily, Firefox is pushing an early proposal to expose all the web apis directly to wasm through a higher level interface based on the wasm component-model proposal.

See https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/02/making-webassembly-a-first...
by sph | 2026-03-08 15:08:08+00:00
Also it might be hard to grasp for most of us, used to constant stimulation and lack of space for contemplation and incorporation of information (I recommend the works of philosopher Byung-Chul Han on the matter) with yet unknown effects on our psyche and creative output. It takes days or weeks for one to sit and digest novel viewpoints; asking a machine to skip all that work for us is just another example of seeking instant gratification. I have no time to think, do it for me, so I can scroll to the next post already.
by 52-6F-62 | 2026-03-08 15:09:19+00:00
Absurd. A guitar within tolerance is in tune. It's a fundamental feature of the instrument. Not a flaw.

Music doesn't live in an abstract realm of perfections, it is an expression however formed. The fact that we can measure it is one thing. But the music or instruments do not need conform to discrete measurements to satisfy.

I know engineers hate this, but ask any musician. It's like arguing that a sitar and its scales aren't right. Absurd.
by treetalker | 2026-03-08 15:09:26+00:00
> Do people like the Macbook Neo?

At the time of our writing, it is a new product and was announced about a week ago, to be released on March 11. By Thursday of last week, Costco had essentially sold out of preorders for both models. (I think a few of the pink color remain.)

So I think there is incredible demand — especially when memory prices are skyrocketing, everyone stores most of their data in the cloud, most LLM inference is also on remote machines, and the chip can handle most if not all typical office and web tasks (pretty much anything except running local models and demanding video editing).

I'm interested in one myself for law work on the couch, and I'm eager to read the first reviews.
by eudamoniac | 2026-03-08 15:10:05+00:00
I don't know, that set of requirements sounds like containers are a good fit. I don't have an alternative for you. I would just ssh into the server and run the commands needed to update/start the services; it wouldn't be one command and it is not impossible to mess up.

I will say that consuming other people's services that I don't intend to develop on is easier with containers. I use podman for my jellyfin and Minecraft servers based on someone else's configs. My only issue with them is the complexity during development.
by hagbard_c | 2026-03-08 15:10:06+00:00
> They have shown that the information density in our existing languages is extremely low: small prompts can generate very large programs.

"Write a book about a small person who happens upon a magical ring which turns out to be the repository of an evil entities power. The small person needs to destroy the ring somehow, probably using the same means it was created"

...wait a few minutes...

THE LORD OF THE RINGS

http://lotrproject.com/statistics/books/wordscount
by satvikpendem | 2026-03-08 15:10:17+00:00
This is a rose tinted glasses take. I guarantee if you took anyone from the past they'd want to live our lives today, and that's not to even say anything of being in a developing country today with lack of access to adequate supplies and medicine.

> also so-called "breaking your back" has the same effect as going to the gym

I can tell you've never worked a manual labor job in your life. The workload definitely does not have the same workload as just "going to the gym."
by fallingfrog | 2026-03-08 15:11:00+00:00
Yeah at my last job at a larger organization they would occasionally get us all in the big auditorium and start showering us with this sort of language. I would excuse myself to use the restroom then go back to my desk and get some work done. Peace and quiet! Never got called out on it, they don't need me sitting there rolling my eyes and grimacing through the whole thing anyway.
by mushufasa | 2026-03-08 15:11:09+00:00
This is mathematically possible, but not for certain (market performance et all). Moreover: practically -- onboarding and taking on the risk of a new system and having to manage that is definitely not worth the 1-2 weeks of the founder, or an ops person's time. That 50-75k is more like $5k/month out of what is typically a ~200-400k monthly burn, within which there are almost definitely other ways to save more than 5k if you pay a similar amount of attention (e.g. cloud costs, wrong go to market strategy wasting time, etc). But optimizing deck chair placement on a burning ship is ultimately a distraction anyways -- everything should be focused on growing revenue. Startup founders need to think in 6-month increments to get to the next rung.
Ask HN: Why Is Phil Wang / Lucidrains Off GitHub?
by vessenes | 2026-03-08 15:11:44+00:00
I was thinking about hooking up Karpathy’s autoresearch tool to Lucidrain’s repositories as a way to let someone smart pick what’s interesting and new in ML research, and I learned that he is off github, says his account was canceled and is ‘pretty sure there’s something wrong at github.’

Any backstory / information on this?
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-08 15:11:56+00:00
Most people aren’t writing game engines. Hell most people at BigTech aren’t worried about scalability. They are building on top of scalable internal frameworks - not code frameworks things like Google Borg.

The reason your login is slow is not because someone didn’t use the right algorithm.

Most game developers are just using other company’s engines.

While yes you need to learn how the architecture, the code isn’t the gating factor.

One example is the Amazon Prime Video team using AWS Step functions when they shouldn’t have and it led to inefficiencies. This was a public article that I can’t find right now.

(And before someone from Amazon Retail chimes in and says much of Amazon Retail doesn’t run on AWS and uses the legacy CDO infrastructure - yes I know. I am a former AWS employee).
by GeekyBear | 2026-03-08 15:11:56+00:00
The rumor from Gurman is that the M5 Ultra Mac Studio ships in the first half of this year.

This may just be a sign that the M5 Ultra Mac Studio is shipping sooner rather than later, as it's common for Apple to push out ship dates for soon to be replaced products.

We do have leaked benchmarks showing that the M5 Max outperforms the M3 Ultra currently shipping in the Mac Studio, so buying an M3 Ultra Studio right now would be a terrible idea.
by barneybooroo | 2026-03-08 15:12:32+00:00
Absolutely. I look forward to a time where we have on-device small models as an OS-level service you can rely on (a bit like what Apple's doing with Foundation Models). I was recently playing around with some game dev prototyping where I wish I could rely on a player having access to a local model for doing some classification tasks or generating small amounts of playthrough-specific copy without just populating the same few templates.
by amluto | 2026-03-08 15:12:59+00:00
On the flip side, it’s easy to get a bit stuck down the road by the mere fact that you have a singleton. Maybe you have amazing performance and very carefully managed safety, but you still have a single object that is inherently shared by all users in the same process, and it’s very very easy to end up regretting the semantic results. Been there, done that.
by asingh_oppla | 2026-03-08 15:13:20+00:00
Interesting approach — sitting as a runtime layer between agent output and the user is cleaner than trying to bake reliability into the model itself. A few questions:

How does the verification engine determine what counts as a hallucination? Is it RAG-based (grounding against source docs), a separate LLM judge, or something else?
What's the latency overhead of the verify step in production? For real-time chat agents this could be a dealbreaker.
The "auto-correct" capability is the most interesting and the least explained — does it re-query the agent, rewrite the response, or fall back to a safe default?

The dual licensing (Apache for SDKs, AGPL for services) is a reasonable choice for keeping the core open while protecting the managed offering.
by em-bee | 2026-03-08 15:13:53+00:00
that's pretty much the chinese way of doing it. i don't know about the schedule or starting time though, actually i think they start almost right after birth. since traditionally the grandparents help with taking care of children they have more time to sit around with a baby in their lap.

the chinese also invented split pants that are open at the bottom making it possible to just grab a child when you see it ready to go without having to hassle with undressing. and once the children can walk they just need to squat down to go on their own. i did a quick look on wikipedia. apparently in europe it was common for young kids of both genders to wear dresses which i suppose also made that easier. (although dresses were worn much longer than necessary for toilet training, so they must have had another purpose or benefit too)
Show HN: Drop-in analytical replacements for standard PyTorch layers
by fakesum | 2026-03-08 15:14:10+00:00
Instead of gradient descent, each layer solves for optimal weights directly via ridge regression in a single forward pass. Works as a warm start before Adam — same final accuracy, fraction of the total training time.

Repo: https://github.com/infiplexity-pixel/to_the_point/
by bitroughj | 2026-03-08 15:14:43+00:00
The Zionist influence on our government, is not Christian Zionism. Focusing on that is totally ineffectual and that’s the whole point. Those who focus on that issue are doing it to further Zionist influence over policy, either intentionally or out of useful idiocy. Rubio is Catholic, as is Vance, 100% opposed to Christian Zionism. Kushner is not a Catholic, nor Witkoff, nor Epstein, nor Lutnick, nor Blinkin. Btw it’s possible to be a Zionist Christian who believes in Israel’s right to self defense, but Christia Zionism (the fringe theology) is not representative of the vast majority of Christian’s views. I mean, are Palestinian Christians Christian Zionists? How about Lebanese or Iranian or Assyrian Christians? How about the Pope or Archbishop of Canterbury? Don’t be an unwitting tool of the (non-Christian) Zionists deflection campaign; it’s a shell game.
by stockresearcher | 2026-03-08 15:14:56+00:00
It’s a fine computer. “Tech Bros” say stupid things about low-cost Windows computers too.

If I had a complaint about the Neo, it’s the screen aspect ratio. The smaller the screen, the closer you need to be 3:2. Open a Google doc on a school-issue Chromebook. It’s laughable how little space is available for the actual content on those junk 16:9 screens. This Neo is 16:10. Better, but not a whole lot. A 13” iPad in landscape mode is ~4:3 and an 11” iPad is ~3:2. It’s not like Apple didn’t know, and it’s not like Apple didn’t have access to displays that are better suited to a small machine.
by alecco | 2026-03-08 15:15:32+00:00
AFAIK post-training and distillation techniques advanced a lot in the past couple of years. SOTA big models get new frontier and within 6 months it trickles down to open models with 10x less parameters.

And mind the source pre-training data was not made/written for training LLMs, it's just random stuff from Internet, books, etc. So there's a LOT of completely useless an contradictory information. Better training texts are way better and you can just generate & curate from those huge frontier LLMs. This was shown in the TinyStories paper where GPT-4 generated children's stories could make models 3 orders of magnitude smaller achieve quite a lot.

This is why the big US labs complain China is "stealing" their work by distilling their models. Chinese labs save many billions in training with just a bunch of accounts. (I'm just stating what they say, not giving my opinion).
by satvikpendem | 2026-03-08 15:15:38+00:00
Well in practice the async_trait crate worked just fine. If Rust delayed the whole async feature I'd have thought they'd have better been able to handle the function coloring problem via something like OCaml's algebraic effects rather than following the trend of JS and C# back then, as OCaml's came along much later after more research into the model.
by gpvos | 2026-03-08 15:16:03+00:00
At the time it was introduced it was understandable, and Microsoft also needed some time to implement it before that of course. But by about 2000 it was clear that UTF-8 was going to win, and Microsoft should have just properly implemented it in NT instead of dithering about for the next almost 20 years. Linux had quite good support of it by then.