Hacker News: deepburner

New comment by deepburner in "Spaghettifying DRAM"

deepburner — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:13:57 +0000

I came to the comments to complain about how unreadable it was, saw that it was the movfuscator guy, went back to check if I somehow made a mistake but no, if anything that writeup is one of the egregious ones I've seen recently. What a shame, I really liked his talks.

New comment by deepburner in "Worse on Purpose"

deepburner — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:18:36 +0000

I understand vibe coding a website if you only care about putting out the info but this is sloppenheimer levels of garbage. It reeks of stunted, far up its own ass Claude-isms everywhere and none of the prose is remotely readable without wanting to running headbutt a wall. Seriously, "Private Equity" was too long so you decided to write "Ownership Type: PE-owned"? I despise ai writing so much and shame on you.

New comment by deepburner in "The Dark Night of Mathematics"

deepburner — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 04:32:48 +0000

I'm no ai maximalist, quite the opposite in fact, and I have a great deal of sympathy for the author as a person from a similar trade. However perhaps he is being overly emotional in his response. Purists have been decrying the defilement of the trade for millennia - "but this time it's different!" no. you think the purest form of math is the one you were born into because you didn't know any other way. people were doing math before the abacus and will continue to do so afterwards. here a hot take even: there's no finite amount of math, if you really cared about math you would be excited about all the math you could uncover. the computer solving the jacobian conjecture isn't fulfilling enough for you? maybe start thinking about what this discovery implies then!

Besides, doing pure math as a vocation was and still is an incredibly niche and privileged profession that 1-O(e^-n) of the population had access to anyways. If anything we will need more mathematicians, more engineers and more physicists to keep up with the increased throughput. Maybe journals will finally start EMPLOYING (gasp!) some referees instead of relying on free labor from broke graduate students even!

New comment by deepburner in "What is going on right now?"

deepburner — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 14:08:53 +0000

I'm rather tired of this ai apologism bit where every downside is explained away as "it would've happened anyways". AI destroying people's brains and causing paychosis? They would've gone psychotic anyways! AI causing company culture problems? The company was toxic anyways!

Instruments are not inculpable as you think they are.

New comment by deepburner in "Let's properly analyze an AI article for once"

deepburner — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 13:23:48 +0000

I dont know where that “Those who cannot do, teach” bullshit came from but it's absolute nonsense someone made up to dunk on teachers.

It doesnt even make sense in your post because "programming" isn't "doing computer science". You're not better than a teacher in any notion because you asked chatgpt to generate some slop.

New comment by deepburner in "Deep Learning Is Applied Topology"

deepburner — Tue, 20 May 2025 16:40:18 +0000

This whole article is just a nothingburger. Saying something is applied topology is only one step more advanced than saying something is maths - duh. These mathematical abstractions are incredibly general and and you can pretty much draw up anything in terms of anything, the challenging part is being able to turn around and use the model/abstraction to say things about the thing you're abstracting. I don't think scholars have been very successful in that regard, less so this article.

Yeah deep learning is applied topology, it's also applied geometry, and probably applied algebra and I wouldn't be surprised if it was also applied number theory.

New comment by deepburner in "Assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 Canada deaths"

deepburner — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 12:17:05 +0000

Good luck helping somebody paralyzed from the neck down live a fulfilling life.

New comment by deepburner in "Willow, Our Quantum Chip"

deepburner — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 21:49:40 +0000

it... doesn't? threshold theorems are well known.

New comment by deepburner in "Willow, Our Quantum Chip"

deepburner — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 21:39:01 +0000

I'm sorry if this is nitpicky but your comment is hilarious to me - doubling something is doubling something, "changing the order of magnitude" would entail multiplication by 10.

New comment by deepburner in "Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport"

deepburner — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 22:24:26 +0000

Not only you're responding with an ad-hominem, which is blatantly bad enough; but you're doing it against Benjamin Franklin? One of the most influential thinkers of his time who has contributed to the liberty of way more people than you ever will?

New comment by deepburner in "Why is Sweden paying grandparents to babysit?"

deepburner — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 05:04:18 +0000

Did you really think "they just call them grandma/pa" was a good argument against people not knowing their grandparents' names? What do you think people in other parts of the world call their grandparents?

New comment by deepburner in "I was an MIT educated neurosurgeon – now I'm alone in the mountains [video]"

deepburner — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 16:36:32 +0000

"Maybe this person who did this for 20 years did not know what they were doing" is such an HN take.

New comment by deepburner in "A Model of a Mind"

deepburner — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 00:26:26 +0000

Nowhere in the text you quoted (nor in the article body) it is said that simulation of this device can not be done. Had you read the paper you'd see that it _is_ about simulating this device. From the introduction: "After students are introduced to several projects in quantum computer simulation, they write code to simulate the operation of Mermin’s quantum device."

This is immaterial, however. It is a well known fact that BQP is in PSPACE and Clifford circuits (a subclass of quantum circuits) can not only be simulated classically, but done so efficiently. It is not controversial.

New comment by deepburner in "A Model of a Mind"

deepburner — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 20:48:20 +0000

The first reference in the article you linked is titled "Computer simulation of Mermin's quantum device".

New comment by deepburner in "A Model of a Mind"

deepburner — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 20:30:56 +0000

> there are known physical phenomena, such as quantum entanglement

QC researcher here, strictly speaking, this is false. Clifford circuits can be efficiently simulated classically and they exhibit entanglement. The bottom line is we're not entirely sure where the (purported) quantum speedups come from. It might have something to do with entanglement, but it's not enough by itself.

Re: about mermin's device, im not sure why you think it can not be simulated classically when all of the dynamics involved can be explained by 4x4 complex matrices.

New comment by deepburner in "ArVid: Russians squeezed 4 hard drives into one VHS tape in the 90s"

deepburner — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 16:46:39 +0000

I am not an expert on this but my suspicion is that human ear is not a linear time invariant system and thus it does not make sense to place a hard cutoff at some frequency over which you can not hear. The response might change wrt to the spectral content of the overall sound.

New comment by deepburner in "Disney, Netflix, and more are fighting FTC's 'click to cancel' proposal"

deepburner — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 13:16:09 +0000

What is the point of this comment?

New comment by deepburner in "Hype vs. Practicality: On Realistically Achieving Quantum Advantage (2023)"

deepburner — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 14:32:54 +0000

Quantum Computing is a topic that makes it to the front page from time to time and garners a lot of attention. I find this breakdown of short-term prospects of from QC very concise and readable.

Hype vs. Practicality: On Realistically Achieving Quantum Advantage (2023)

deepburner — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 14:32:53 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.00523

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36667041

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by deepburner in "Google claims to have proved its supremacy with new quantum computer"

deepburner — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 02:44:39 +0000

You're talking in very vague terms here, what does """interesting""" mean?

Let me give you some numbers. Factorising RSA is order 10^6 logical qubits (and I'm being charitable here), simulating FoMoCo is around 10^7. The state of the art error correction is around (again, charitably) 10^3 physical qubits per logical qubit at the moment, that gives us 10^9-10^10 qubits necessary for the simplest quantum application. We're at order 100 right now.

Peter Shot thinks that error correction can go down to 100 physical-per-logical, that's an order of magnitude shaved off there, but the algorithm itself is pretty basic, i don't see it getting any better there. Simulation algorithms have much better odds in seeing improvements as I think the gates used there are rather non-standard and have avenues for better gate compilation techniques.