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Ah but then you'd need to hard shut down to carry it home. The battery should keep the ram active to commute while sleeping

Heck, doing a self review when you wrote the code catches stuff like forgetting debug prints.

(tangent of the decade : prefixing your debug printfs with NOCOMMIT helps catching them before commit :) sample precommit hook and GitHub ci action I wrote is at https://github.com/nobssoftware/nocommit but it’s just a grep)

Self review should also include adding guiding comments for other reviewers.

Do you add these into the code or into the review itself? I sometimes write these into the review, but I wonder if it's a useful information that should actually be inside the code that will get lost when the PR is merged

Into the review is what I’m talking about. The diff is often a scattered collection of files missing context, and may have refactors that obscure behavioral changes.

So there is reason to add comments that address a different readers understanding than the code rest.


Hey hey, 15 = 3*5 is factoring.

my understanding is that they factored 15 using a modular exponentiation circuit that presumes that the modulus is 3. factoring 15 with knowledge of 3 is not so impressive. Shor's algorithm has never been run with a full modular exponentiation circuit.

The very first demonstration of factoring 15 with a quantum computer, back in 2001, used a valid modular exponentiation circuit [1].

The trickiest part of the circuit is they compile conditional multiplication by 4 (mod 15) into two controlled swaps. That's a very elegant way to do the multiplication, but most modular multiplication circuits are much more complex. 15 is a huge outlier on the difficulty of actually doing the modular exponentiation. Which is why so far 15 is the only number that's been factored by a quantum computer while meeting the bar of "yes you have to actually do the modular exponentiation required by Shor's algorithm".

[1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0112176#page=15


would other mersenne numbers admit the same trick? if so, factoring 2047 would be really interesting to see. it's still well within the toy range, but it's big enough that it would be a lot easier to believe that the quantum computer was doing something (15 is so small that picking an odd number less than sqrt(15) is guaranteed to be a correct factorization)

No, 15 is unique in that all multiplications by a known constant coprime to 15 correspond to bit rotations and/or bit flips. For 2047 that only occurs for a teeny tiny fraction of the selectable multipliers.

Shor's algorithm specifies that you should pick the base (which determines the multipliers) at random. Somehow picking a rare base that is cheap to do really does start overlapping with knowing the factors as part of making the circuit. By far the biggest cheat you can do is to "somehow" pick a number g such that g^2=1 (mod n) but g isn't 1 or N-1. Because that's exactly the number that Shor's algorithm is looking for, and the whole thing collapses into triviality.


You can also get a dog to factor 15, see pages 9-11 of this paper:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44608622 - Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with a VIC-20, an Abacus, and a Dog (2025-07-18, 25 comments)


Being unable to start a project without doing 5 years of legal wrangling once you put shovel to earth may not be a "ban", but it sure doesn't encourage development.


Just Devil's Advocate..

but why is this a problem?

There are other states without the regulations that these businesses apparently find offensive. Why can't the manufacturing be spun up in those states?

Serious question.


Funny you'd mention that, when Notepad had a CVE in it's markdown parsing recently.


I mean I remember when Penny Arcade Ram ads for games and such and they only ran the ads if the approved of the game. The ads were worth clicking into. They sold a real product for a cost approximating its value.

Now ads are just scams


I think bridging this syntax onto legacy checked exceptions from java would make a lot of sense.


Sounds like checked and unchecked exceptions.

I mean, this could be a syntax wrapper for java checked exceptions right?

Those are isomorphic to Result<_, Err> in that you must handle or propagate the error. The syntax is different, sure.


Correct. Although the performance characteristics are different. An exception in Java generates a stack trace, which is relatively expensive. So not a great idea in un-exceptional code paths that need to perform well.


Stack trace collection is optional. If you actually hit a performance problem on a checked exception path you just override the stack trace collection not to happen. I do this in most of my projects that use checked exceptions as domain errors. Only once you have to panic, i.e wrap in an unchecked exception, stack trace collection happens.


I tried to resize my already mostly fullscreen window now, and I cant, as it always triggers the hot corner for notes. I guess I have to have full sized windows then.


I see it too. What the heck?


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