Hacker News: fsh

New comment by fsh in "Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?"

fsh — Sun, 24 May 2026 09:04:15 +0000

The users are paying plenty of money for AMD FPGAs.

New comment by fsh in "Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?"

fsh — Sun, 24 May 2026 06:50:56 +0000

This is terrible news for university users trying to professionalize their FPGA development with CI/CD. Which is probably the point of the change.

New comment by fsh in "Through the looking glass of benchmark hacking"

fsh — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:51:07 +0000

I don't get the point. The model has presumably been trained on all public GitHub code, so the evaluation is tainted anyway.

New comment by fsh in "Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) and Quantum Cryptography (QC)"

fsh — Wed, 06 May 2026 05:20:35 +0000

At that point you can just pre-share a key and use AES.

New comment by fsh in "Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants"

fsh — Fri, 01 May 2026 07:09:47 +0000

Chernobyl was supposed to be an economically viable means of generating electricity. Comparing a tiny billion-dollar submarine reactor to a power plant simply doesn't make any sense.

New comment by fsh in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

fsh — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:19:07 +0000

I find these posts hilarious. LLMs are ultimately story generators, and "oops, I DROP'ed our production database" is a common and compelling story. No wonder LLM agents occasionally do this.

New comment by fsh in "I'm never buying another Kindle"

fsh — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:15:20 +0000

AZW is clearly not PDF based. Try opening an actual PDF on a Kindle and compare the experience.

New comment by fsh in "Why Japan has such good railways"

fsh — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:18:11 +0000

Japanese public transport is good, but no match for the Swiss system. Outside of big cities, the coverage is spotty, and even reasonably large towns are only connected by reserved-only trains every couple of hours that get booked out days in advance. The almost complete lack of digitization is also remarkable (reservations have to be made with machines in the stations). There are other annoyances such as the public transport in Tokyo shutting down completely at midnight. In contrast, the Swiss government-owned system delivers usable connectivity to almost any human settlement, even most mountain villages. The ticket prices are also not so different, which is surprising considering the large difference of salaries in the two countries.

New comment by fsh in "Team from ETH Zurich make high quality quantum swap gate using a geometric phase"

fsh — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 08:57:57 +0000

I find the editorialized title misleading. They trapped 17000 atom pairs in an optical lattice and demonstrated a high-fidelity quantum gate between the atoms of each pair in parallel. There is no interaction between the atoms of different pairs and no individual control. The experiment demonstrates a very robust gate scheme, but is a long way from a programmable computer.

New comment by fsh in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

fsh — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:32:25 +0000

It is his real name, and he also used his real surname in early blog posts.

New comment by fsh in "F-35 Got Hit"

fsh — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:38:45 +0000

"Quantum radar" is a toy experiment with zero practical applications. The experiments achieved a "quantum advantage" by using entangled photons which only works in the single-photon regime. Since microwave photons are pretty small, this implies incredibly low transmission powers. With the typical return loss of an airplane (stealth or not) detected by a radar antenna, one would have to average for centuries to detect something (assuming the airplane stays there for said centuries). This assumes perfect entanglement with no other imperfections.

New comment by fsh in "Artemis computer running two instances of MS outlook; they can't figure out why"

fsh — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 07:41:29 +0000

To send email.

New comment by fsh in "Data centers are transitioning from AC to DC"

fsh — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 05:42:55 +0000

Essentially none of this is true. The war of the currents was between Edison and Westinghouse, not Tesla. Tesla's downfall was that he turned into a crackpot who rejected modern science, such as Maxwell's equations, and started defrauding investors. Edison was an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, and the electric chair used AC simply because it is much more deadly.

New comment by fsh in "In Edison’s Revenge, Data Centers Are Transitioning From AC to DC"

fsh — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 05:37:45 +0000

It was Westinghouse who pushed the AC grid against his rival Edison's DC approach. Tesla was a minor figure working for both of them for a bit.

New comment by fsh in "Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia"

fsh — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 10:01:28 +0000

Many airports have ADS-B transponders in their ground vehicles. You can see them on flightradar or adsbexchange.

New comment by fsh in "Italy, Belgium set to lose gas supply after biggest LNG plant bombed"

fsh — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 10:07:44 +0000

China has a larger population density than the EU. There is more empty land in Europe.

New comment by fsh in "Italy, Belgium set to lose gas supply after biggest LNG plant bombed"

fsh — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 09:49:57 +0000

In 2024, China produced 8 times more electricity from renewables that from nuclear [1], and the renewable share is growing much more quickly. Nuclear is as dead in China as it is elsewhere in the world.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

New comment by fsh in "Italy, Belgium set to lose gas supply after biggest LNG plant bombed"

fsh — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 09:24:28 +0000

The French energy sector is more than 50% fossil [1]. If France decarbonizes over the next decades, it will be due to renewables, not nuclear. While the government and population have been extremely pro-nuclear for a long time, the economics just don't work out. The current plan is to barely build enough reactors to replace old ones going off-line over the next decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France

New comment by fsh in "Italy, Belgium set to lose gas supply after biggest LNG plant bombed"

fsh — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 09:10:08 +0000

The real problem are transport and heating. In most countries, those consume significantly more primary energy than the electricity sector and are still mostly fossil fueled. For example, more than half of the primary energy consumed in France is oil and gas. Heat pumps and electric vehicles or trains can now finally change this, but the transition is very slow.

New comment by fsh in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

fsh — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:41:38 +0000

I don't find it reasonable that Google wants to make me wait 24h to install software on a device I own.