Hacker News Reader

oldgradstudenton Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships

> Like Billy G selling DOS before he owned it

DOS actually existed. It just had a different owner.

oldgradstudenton Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships

Controlled by a quantum computer, obviously.

oldgradstudenton US Judge invalidates blood glucose sensor patent, opens door for Apple Watch

You can, but a patent is still limited to around 20 years. How can a 1972 invention be still be patented in 2004?

oldgradstudenton US Judge invalidates blood glucose sensor patent, opens door for Apple Watch

> Note how similar this is to the pulse oximeter, which was invented in Japan in 1972 and patented in the US in 2004.

How could an invention from 1972, which I assume was publically disclosed around that time, be patented in 2004?

Were the details kept secret for 32 years?

oldgradstudenton Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

> It’ll provide mesmerizing computational properties

Maybe, one day, or never.

In the mean time, it will generate a lot of hot and humid hype.

oldgradstudenton “A calculator app? Anyone could make that”

> This means a calculator built on floating point numbers is like a house built on sand.

I've taken multiple numerical analysis courses, including at the graduate level.

The only thing I've learnt was: be afraid, very afraid.

oldgradstudenton Tell HN: Title: The UC Berkeley Job Market Meltdown–What No One Wants to Admit

This industry is cyclical.

People forget that because this cycle was so long and so deep.

UC Berkeley produces more CS graduates than it ever did. So does every university, and every bootcamp.

The market cannot grow forever. And things that can't go on forever, eventually stop.

oldgradstudenton Mark Zuckerberg messages Facebook engineer

From Zuckerberg's messages, it appears that an important motivation for buying Instagram was to limit the competition facing Facebook.

Thanks Obama for enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act:

> SECTION 1. Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal. Every person who shall make any contract or engage in any combination or conspiracy hereby declared to be illegal shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on con-viction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.

oldgradstudenton A FPGA friendly 32 bit RISC-V CPU implementation

Just curious, do they have a migration plan? Have they started new designs using Verilog/SystemVerilog/VHDL?

oldgradstudenton A FPGA friendly 32 bit RISC-V CPU implementation

I'm pretty sure they're going to say they don't regret it at all. Either because it's true, or because they are too invested in it.

When I've started doing FPGA consulting a few years ago I've started using Chisel, but eventually had to go back to SystemVerilog due to client reluctance.

I was dramatically more productive with Chisel than with SystemVerilog.

oldgradstudenton A FPGA friendly 32 bit RISC-V CPU implementation

No is a good first approximation.

There is a little bit of industry usage, with the biggest user being SiFive - the founders come from the UC Berkeley group that developed Chisel.

Also, VexRiscv has some industry presence.

oldgradstudenton Show HN: Open-source AI video editor

Cool project, I played with it a bit a few hours ago.

A small bug report: if you have both a still image and a video in the timeline, the video does not play in the preview.

oldgradstudenton Robert K. Brayton, pioneer in logic synthesis and formal verification, has died

He and his research group developed several highly influential tools for logic synthesis and verification, including Espresso, MIS, SIS, MVSIS, VIS, and ABC. These tools were released under permissive licenses, and widely adopted across the industry.

Bob remained active in research until just a few years ago.

For more about his life and contributions, see the Oral History of Robert "Bob" Brayton at the Computer History Museum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rImWxJVirwE

oldgradstudenton Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M

As a work of art, sure. But as books containing information, printing presses produced superior products.

oldgradstudenton Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M

Usually, though, errors are corrected and every every printing has fewer errors than the previous one.

oldgradstudenton Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M

There's a big difference.

Printing presses produce superior products.

A mediocre audiobook is certainly better than no audiobook at all, but it is an inferior product to a well produced audiobook.

oldgradstudenton Missiles are now the biggest killer of airline passengers

> But, yeah, let's call it joint Russian-Ukrainian to shift the blame towards Russians.

No, I mentioned it because a joint Russian-Ukrainian exercise is unthinkable now.

oldgradstudenton Missiles are now the biggest killer of airline passengers

In 2001 we also had Siberian Airlines flight 1812 from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk was shot down by Ukrainian S-200 during a joint Russian/Ukrainian exercise!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812

oldgradstudenton Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

Havana syndrome can have a far less charitable explanation.

There is no objective test for Havana syndrome, but being diagnosed with it grants significant financial and non-financial benefits.

oldgradstudenton Ilya Sutskever NeurIPS talk [video]

> There are massive proprietary datasets out there which people avoid using for training due to copyright concerns.

The main legal concern is their unwillingness to pay to access these datasets.

oldgradstudenton The Google Willow Thing

> Oh yes, Zapata Computing, the best funded company in quantum algorithms just went under this year.

It's kinda hard to make money by developing algorithms for imaginary magic computers.

oldgradstudenton Willow, Our Quantum Chip

> Also, what is the relationship, if any, between quantum computing and AI? Are these technologies complementary?

AI is quite good in producing the meaningless drivel needed for quantum computing related press releases.

oldgradstudenton Quincy Jones has died

He also wrote the memorable Soul Bossa Nova used in Austin Powers.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FF258xH5bNw

The video is not authentic, but it should have been.

oldgradstudenton The revival of the beach in twentieth-century Los Angeles

It seems reasonable to apply to NGOs the same skepticism you would apply to anyone else trying to sell you something.

If the same level of fluff was written by a crypto startup, would you accept it at face value?

oldgradstudenton In SSRI withdrawal, brain zaps go from overlooked symptom to center stage (2023)

This is gross.

> “There was an emphasis both within the [psychiatric] profession and pharmacological companies to make these medications sound not addictive,” he told Psychiatrist.com. Therefore, when SSRIs first became popular, very few systematic studies were conducted on antidepressant discontinuation effects.

Reminds me of the Feynman quote:

> For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

oldgradstudenton Is Tor still safe to use?

> Tor's development team aren't on the payroll of the US gov't, and their funding comes from many sources.

That's not serious. From the Tor official blog:

> U.S. Government (53.5% of total revenue)

> Individual Donations (28.5% of total revenue)

> Non-U.S. Governments (7.5% of total revenue)

> Foundations (6.4% of total revenue)

> Corporations (3.4% of total revenue)

> Other (0.6% of total revenue)

https://blog.torproject.org/transparency-openness-and-our-20...