Hacker News Reader

It’s 16 years old and just as old are the criticisms?????

It’s at odds with the philosophy of do one thing and do it well. Its monolithic feature set pushes out smaller contributors and leads to increased reliance on a singular package. This tends to self reinforce. I also use systemd in my current distro so not sure where I stand on this but it’s a fair concern.

shalgon AI and bots have officially taken over the internet, report finds

As long as humans keep using the internet I can’t see it mattering too much. Has this impacted the amount people who are using social media I wonder.

shalgon Palantir Will No Longer Profit Off of New Yorkers' Health Data

Doubt

shalgon Integrated photonic source of Gottesman–Kitaev–Preskill qubits

Photonic quantum computing is by no means at the point where it will definitely scale. I wouldn’t really say any platform is though.

shalgon Data manipulations alleged in study that paved way for Microsoft's quantum chip

There are exactly 2 reasons we might want quantum networks.

1. 100% secure communication channels (even better we can detect any attempt at eavesdropping and whatever information is captured will be useless to the eavesdropper)

2. Building larger quantum computers. A high fidelity quantum network would allow you to compute simultaneously with multiple quantum chips by interfacing them.

The thing that makes quantum networking different from regular networking is that you have to be very careful to not disturb the state of the photons you are sending down the fiber optics.

Im currently doing my PhD building quantum networking devices so im a bit biased but I think it’s pretty cool :).

Now does it matter I’m not sure. Reason 1 isn’t really that useful because encryption is very secure. However if quantum computers start to scale up and some encryption methods get obsoleted this could be nice. Also having encryption that is provably secure would be nice regardless.

Reason 2 at the moment seems like the only path to building large scale quantum computing. Think a datacenter with many networked quantum chips.

shalgon AI 'wingmen' bots to write profiles and flirt on dating apps

Probably will slightly increase old fashioned methods. More likely though it’s going to accelerate social isolation :/

shalgon Why Quantum Engineering Is Emerging as a Distinct Industrial Sector

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Computation_and_Quan...

^^ The best resource there is to start with.

shalgon Microsoft announces quantum computing breakthrough with new Majorana 1 chip

Oh also to clarify: What exactly is the device they have made? Well it's pretty complicated but one handwavey explanation is that they have created a device that splits an electron into two quasiparticles and does computations by physically moving these quasiparticles around each other. This is what they refer to as braiding.

shalgon Microsoft announces quantum computing breakthrough with new Majorana 1 chip

Some background for the unfamiliar. This is a new type of quantum computing platform that Microsoft has been pursuing almost independently. Most major research groups focus on superconducting qubits (IBM, Google) or trapped atoms/ions, (or photonics, or a lot of other things) while Microsoft has been developing topological qubits. These qubits are particularly interesting because they exhibit a natural resilience to noise that all other qubit systems lack. However, creating them has been a major challenge.In the summer of 2022, Microsoft claimed for the first time to have created a such qubit, though their results were met with some skepticism.

Now, it seems there is no longer any debate. Microsoft has successfully created and controlled topological qubits. Is this a big deal? Yes but its a far cry from a million qubits. Fair warning, this is not my area of research, so I'm unsure what developments occurred between their 2022 results and now. The relevant papers from Microsoft can be found here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08445-2 https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12252

edit:

I read the nature paper more carefully, it looks like it is still up for debate whether they have made a topological qubit, but the evidence today is considerably stronger than previous results. Anyways don't start worrying about microsoft hacking your bank account just yet.

shalgon Show HN: Play with real quantum physics in your browser

Oh and to be clear the visualization is nonsense it doesn’t relate to anything.

shalgon Show HN: Play with real quantum physics in your browser

Quantum mechanics tells us that the qubit (coin) can exist in any linear superposition of heads and tails. To express this you write a|heads> + b|tails> the only constraint is that a^2 + b^2 must equal 1. Now why would that be the constraint? It is because a^2 and b^2 are the probabilities of measuring heads and tails respectively.

In this example the coin is put into the state where an and b equal 1/sqrt(2) to give an equal probability of each outcome. So there is exactly one state associated with the coin. Now this state does lead to two possible outcomes but the underlying state (that can not be directly observed) is exactly one thing.