Hacker News: gauge_field

New comment by gauge_field in "A 10x Faster TypeScript"

gauge_field — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 23:01:41 +0000

I am not sure if we see the same thread. There is one reaction from "Rust" dev (who seems have a very new account on github) on why not rust. Most of the others seem to be from C# side. The pattern also seems to be the same on reddit thread. There is one post about why not rust, equally (or more depending how you weigh) is how other people react to this news.

What is weird is how much people talk about how other people react. Modern social media is weird

New comment by gauge_field in "Why Quantum Engineering Is Emerging as a Distinct Industrial Sector"

gauge_field — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 17:59:02 +0000

You also need some foundation in Linear Algebra if you want to have better formal understanding of its underlying framework( which is Hilbert Space).

New comment by gauge_field in "API design note: Beware of adding an "Other" enum value"

gauge_field — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 23:07:48 +0000

Sometimes, one case where I made use of this is enumeration of uarch for different hardware to read from the host machine. The update for for new uarch type is closed ended until there is new cpu with new uarch, which is long time. So, for a very long time it is open-ended with very low velocity in change. It is ideal for enums (for a very long time), but you still need to support the change in list of enum variants to not break semver.

New comment by gauge_field in "Effective Rust (2024)"

gauge_field — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 21:53:53 +0000

Yeah I feel that, not the entire language but, many of its choices, like error handling, sum types (with exhaustive enum matching) especially when writing in python.

New comment by gauge_field in "Effective Rust (2024)"

gauge_field — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 19:11:43 +0000

Rust's design is designed to be more in the mentality of if it compiles that it is good enough, leaving less for runtime issues to occur unexpected, dictated by type and memory safety. So, it requires more type info (unless you use unidiomatic unsafe code) and talking with borrow checker. But, once you internalize its type system and borrow checker, it pays off if you care about compiler driven development (instead of dealing with errors in runtime).

New comment by gauge_field in "Microsoft is Getting Rusty [video]"

gauge_field — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 21:12:44 +0000

The stable ABI is really tricky. Another pointer from another talk was about how stabilizing ABI might reduce the performance hash functions (which is used by the compiler) by 0.5%. So, it is really a tricky decision to make that involves doing the right tradeoff at the right point in time.

New comment by gauge_field in "Math Academy, part 1: My eigenvector embarassment"

gauge_field — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 19:31:04 +0000

For me, it was introductory quantum mechanics (QM) books, you can go with MIT online course from Barton Zwiebach and online course from BLIS (This is for Rust/C implementation of BLAS). If you fall in love with QM and go for more rigorous formulation of its mathematical structure, you can follow it up with An Introduction to Hilbert Space by N. Young, which was the book used in my next semester for Hilbert Space Course.

Hilbert Space is the mathematical framework to describe QM systems.

New comment by gauge_field in "Math Academy, part 1: My eigenvector embarassment"

gauge_field — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 11:46:37 +0000

On what topic? Linear Algebra, Quantum Mechanics?

New comment by gauge_field in "Math Academy, part 1: My eigenvector embarassment"

gauge_field — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 11:13:53 +0000

For me, the main solution was to apply it to another problem that uses Linear Algebra as Application, which in my case was Introductory Quantum Course and implementing BLAS using Rust and C. That way you keep thinking and using this info. Otherwise, information in vacuum seems to abstract to care about.

New comment by gauge_field in "FAQ on Microsoft's topological qubit thing"

gauge_field — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 14:27:53 +0000

If you are shocked by this, I suggest not reading his other recent topics.

New comment by gauge_field in "First hybrid quantum supercomputer Reimei activated in Japan"

gauge_field — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 04:18:02 +0000

A few main reasons:

- Quantum Hardware is tough scale up (not impossible) due to decoherence of quantum systems, you need quantum error correction.

- Finding an application that justifies it economically (against SOTA methods in classical part) is hard except for a few areas, (Cryptography, simulation of quantum systems that are not already solved by classical simulation methods)

- Hype seems to be working (see the stock prices of several quantum companies after the announcement of Willow chip, one of which had only the word quantum in its name despite not being QC hardware company) (which I dont approve of)

New comment by gauge_field in "Undergraduate shows that searches within hash tables can be much faster"

gauge_field — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 21:31:25 +0000

A contributing factor is how complex/smart the current hardware is. It can have cache line size, different forms of hardware/software prefetching, different ports for different ops, memory latency, simd extensions. These leave many opportunities for algorithms to be optimized over. There is also the issue of real life scenarios not matching with asymptotic ones (due to e.g., size of input), which when coupled with previous factors, leads to even more potential optimization schemes. Obligatory reference: https://agner.org/optimize/

New comment by gauge_field in "Noether's Theorem Revolutionized Physics"

gauge_field — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 08:15:29 +0000

Another point to appreciate is how universal this principle of symmetry is. It is used in every branch of physics going from Classical Physics (Lagrangian Formulation) to quantum physics (with Feynman's Path Integral Formulation), from conservation of momentum to conservation of electric charge in (U(1) Symmetry) of fundamental particles. The fact that she was able to do this as a woman 100 years agos is also amazing.

New comment by gauge_field in "Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel"

gauge_field — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 14:06:56 +0000

Agree with that. His statements are available on youtube. I was suprised how positive and eager to the change he was.

New comment by gauge_field in "Roc rewrites the compiler in Zig"

gauge_field — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 23:54:08 +0000

I am also curios about at least some benchmark even if it is not one-to-one perfect comparison. There should be at least one case-study where they have shorter feedback loop with Zig than with Rust. It would be interesting to see that.

New comment by gauge_field in ""We're building a new static type checker for Python""

gauge_field — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 23:45:53 +0000

Yeap, type provides a really good baseline for a documentation. A good documentation is really needed when debugging dynamically typed language python.

New comment by gauge_field in "Promising results from DeepSeek R1 for code"

gauge_field — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 21:34:52 +0000

+ Deepseekai recently being in the headlines + Lack of knowledge around simd extension. Modern social media is interesting...

New comment by gauge_field in "Promising results from DeepSeek R1 for code"

gauge_field — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 18:27:15 +0000

That is what I am struggling to understand about the hype. I regularly use them to generate new simd. Other than a few edge cases (issues around handling of nan values, order of argument for corresponding ops, availability of new avx512f intrinsics), they are pretty good at converting. The names of very intrinsics are very similar from simd to another. The very self-explanatory nature of the intrinsics names and having similar apis from simd to another makes this somewhat expected result given what they can already accomplish.

New comment by gauge_field in "A Faster Quantum Fourier Transform"

gauge_field — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 03:53:23 +0000

Generally speaking, Scott Aaronson has been really fun to listen to on variety of topics. I would suggest listening a few recent podcast he appeared on youtube. He has this really nice combination of no-bullshit and rigorous attitude.

New comment by gauge_field in "Robotics 101 at UMich: Applied numerical linear algebra as intro linear algebra"

gauge_field — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 16:47:07 +0000

In terms of books, I would say Linear Algebra Done Right. The book requires some background to understand efficient. But, once you have some background, it is very good for having a systematic and rigorous understanding of Linear Algebra theory