Hacker News: stefanpie

Very cool to see you work! Early in my PhD I did some work with GNN accelerators on FPGAs (which I think later ended up in some form as a colab with some CERN or Fermilab folks) and have chatted a bit in the past with the FastML, HLS4ML, and HEP folks.

I have since pivoted a lot of my PhD work (still related the HLS and EDA). But I wonder what is the current main limitation/challenges of building these trigger systems in hardware today. For example, in my mind it seems like the EDA and tooling can be a big limitation such as reliance on commercial HLS tools which can be buggy, hard to use, and hard to debug. From experience, this makes it harder to build different optimized architectures in hardware or build co-design frameworks without having high HLS expertise or putting in a lot of extra engineering/tooling effort. Also tool runtimes make the design and debug cycle longer, especially if you are trying to DSE on post-implementation metrics since you bring in implementation tools as well.

But I might be way off here and the real challenges are with other aspects beyond the tools.

New comment by stefanpie in "Autoresearch for SAT Solvers"

stefanpie — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 02:18:46 +0000

Prof. Cunxi Yu and his students at UMD is working on this exact topic and published a paper on agents for improving SAT solvers [1].

I believe they are extending this idea to EDA / chip design tools and algorithms which are also computationally challenging to solve. They have an accepted paper on this for logic synthesis which will come out soon.

[1] "Autonomous Code Evolution Meets NP-Completeness", https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07367

20020 (2020)

stefanpie — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 04:41:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sbnation.com/c/secret-base/21410129/20020

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46833570

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

CSC218 Software Precognance [pdf]

stefanpie — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 04:39:53 +0000

Article URL: https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/CSC218-Software-Precognance.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46495384

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Defining and evaluating political bias in LLMs

stefanpie — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 16:42:42 +0000

Article URL: https://openai.com/index/defining-and-evaluating-political-bias-in-llms/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45791557

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Zero ASIC releases Wildebeest, the highest performance FPGA synthesis tool

stefanpie — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 03:45:40 +0000

Article URL: https://www.zeroasic.com/blog/wildebeest-launch

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45410155

Points: 187

# Comments: 54

Stealing Debug Pretty Print from Vitis HLS

stefanpie — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 03:43:03 +0000

Article URL: https://stefanabikaram.com/writing/vitis-hls-debug-pretty-print/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45410143

Points: 11

# Comments: 1

High-Level Synthesis Synthesis

stefanpie — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 03:42:12 +0000

Article URL: https://stefanabikaram.com/writing/hls-synthesis/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45410134

Points: 27

# Comments: 1

Starfront Observatories

stefanpie — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 02:59:13 +0000

Article URL: https://starfront.space/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45271108

Points: 51

# Comments: 15

IEEE International Conference on LLM-Aided Design 2025

stefanpie — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:29:44 +0000

Article URL: https://iclad.ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44279756

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

TimeGuessr

stefanpie — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 05:56:23 +0000

Article URL: https://timeguessr.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44233063

Points: 328

# Comments: 64

New comment by stefanpie in "Getting a paper accepted"

stefanpie — Thu, 22 May 2025 03:43:26 +0000

I am not the original author, but I posted this since it mirrors some experiences I have had in my PhD so far submitting papers. This kind of tweaking in paper and writing even happens when writing the first draft or sometimes even in the conception of the research idea or how to go about the implementation and experimentation.

There is a half-joke in our lab that the more times a paper is rejected, the bigger or more praised it will be once it's accepted. This simply alludes to the fact that many times reviewers can be bothered with seeing value in certain ideas or topics in a field unless it is "novel" or the paper is written in a way that is geared towards them, rather than being relegated to "just engineering effort" (this is my biased experience). However, tailoring and submitting certain ideas/papers to venues that value the specific work is the best way I have found to work around this (but even then it takes some time to really understand which conferences value which style of work, even if it appears they value it).

I do think there is some saving grace in the section the author writes about "The Science Thing Was Improved," implying that these changes in the paper make the paper better and easier to read. I do agree very much with this; many times, people have bad figures, poor tables or charts, bad captions, etc., that make things harder to understand or outright misleading. But I only agree with the author to a certain extent. Rather, I think that there should also be changes made on the other side, the side of the reviewer or venue, to provide high-quality reviews and assessments of papers. But I think this is a bit outside the scope of what the author talks about in their post.

Getting a paper accepted

stefanpie — Thu, 22 May 2025 01:19:41 +0000

Article URL: https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/how-to-get-a-paper-accepted/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44057841

Points: 219

# Comments: 129

High-Level Synthesis Synthesis

stefanpie — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 18:25:12 +0000

Article URL: https://stefanabikaram.com/writing/hls-synthesis/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43814026

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

The Xilinx ISE Installer Lies

stefanpie — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 02:03:17 +0000

Article URL: https://stefanabikaram.com/writing/xilinx-ise-installer/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43747943

Points: 13

# Comments: 3