Hacker News: jvkersch

New comment by jvkersch in "June Huh dropped out to become a poet, now he’s won a Fields Medal (2022)"

jvkersch — Thu, 08 May 2025 02:35:03 +0000

The educational track in South Korea is extremely competitive, and everything hinges on how well you do on the Suneung (a kind of SAT on steroids). If you drop out, it is usually because you have intergenerational wealth, exceptional non-scholastic talents, or a route to study/work abroad.

Simple Denoising Diffusion

jvkersch — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 07:32:23 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/utkuozbulak/pytorch-simple-diffusion

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43554436

Points: 36

# Comments: 0

New comment by jvkersch in "Can’t Hear What Actors Are Saying on TV? It’s Not You"

jvkersch — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 15:20:52 +0000

Stranger Things exploited this to good effect, though, with descriptive captions like "tentacles wetly squelching" and the like. See https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/stranger-things-seaso....

Korea poised to enter upper tier of startup hubs

jvkersch — Mon, 16 Dec 2019 11:32:55 +0000

Article URL: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/15/with-4b-food-delivery-acquisition-korea-poised-to-enter-upper-tier-of-startup-hubs/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21802331

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by jvkersch in "From South Korea to Malaysia, ‘smart cities’ turn to ghost towns"

jvkersch — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 13:03:29 +0000

I spent a few months in Songdo visiting my in-laws (and often return) and I generally concur. Specifically, I found that the area had much more of a community feel than these articles let on (local interest groups for expats and Koreans alike, libraries, a wide variety of restaurants, meeting places) and I found the quality of life higher than in some American inner cities where I've lived (LA specifically). I found the contrast between the high rises and the parks refreshing and uplifting, and it was heart-warming to see people take advantage of abandoned land to have makeshift vegetable gardens on the outskirts of town. Both the large and the small testified to the ingenuity of the people living there.

Things that I didn't like so much: it definitely felt like there had been a shift away from bringing in businesses to housing, so that you end up with blocks upon blocks of apartments, and with empty business districts. I worked in a high-rise that had an identical 30-story building next to it, completely empty. The Incheon government is trying to turn the tide by attracting biotech and more universities, but it will probably take years before the balance is properly restored.

Lambda Calculus: PyCon 2019 Tutorial (Screencast)

jvkersch — Fri, 03 May 2019 13:18:05 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C6sv7-eTKg

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19818108

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by jvkersch in "Linux Reverse Engineering CTFs for Beginners"

jvkersch — Thu, 14 Feb 2019 02:00:17 +0000

I see the reverse engineering skillset as not essentially different from low level systems programming, and as such it's very valuable even outside of "pure" security research.

I work as a Python programmer building scientific apps (so not security-related or systems programming at all), but at work every so often we're confronted with legacy code in binary form, or particularly nasty segfaults, etc. The thing with abstractions is that every so often the lower levels bleed through. At times like these, if you know your way around gdb, the ELF format, linking conventions, and can reason in assembly, you'll find yourself highly sought-after.

It gets even more fun when things work nicely on Linux and go haywire on Windows. Often there are no docs on Windows, so you need something who is ready to crack their knuckles, fire up IDA pro, and descend into the 7 circles of hell.

New comment by jvkersch in "Neural Networks, Manifolds, and Topology (2014)"

jvkersch — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 01:10:15 +0000

A counterexample would be a dataset that forms a fractal in the ambient space. I don't know of a realistic example of this, but it seems plausible if you think of scale-invariant phenomena. Other ways of getting fractal-like structures, or at least "dust-like" structures with weird topologies, is by taking intersections of smooth structures. These things would be hard to separate...

I love notebooks

jvkersch — Thu, 22 Nov 2018 07:01:52 +0000

Article URL: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1XmbeH_sdOKqhi05_FbH2EdRw948i8IvBz1PdfJGbhf4/edit#slide=id.p

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18508378

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Computing comfortably at 30,000 feet

jvkersch — Wed, 03 Oct 2018 15:24:36 +0000

Article URL: https://mgsloan.com/posts/comfortable-airplane-computing/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18131090

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by jvkersch in "IMF staff made misjudgments in Greece, became cheerleaders for the euro (2016)"

jvkersch — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 10:14:31 +0000

Reminds me of another turbulent IMF intervention: South Korea's bailout in 1997. See https://www.koreaexpose.com/imf-economy-south-korea-asian-fi...

New comment by jvkersch in "The Admiral of the String Theory Wars (2015)"

jvkersch — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 12:05:17 +0000

That's a good point, and probably what GP was hinting at. Thanks for pointing that out :)

New comment by jvkersch in "The Admiral of the String Theory Wars (2015)"

jvkersch — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 08:02:04 +0000

It's worth checking out Peter Woit's homepage at http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/ and looking beyond the blog and his role as a string theory skeptic. He teaches a number of classes and has a book about quantum mechanics and representation theory that has gotten a lot of favorable reviews. Not sure I'd classify this guy as your average helpdesk guy ;)

New comment by jvkersch in "Georges Lemaître, the Belgian priest who discovered the universe is expanding"

jvkersch — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 14:47:48 +0000

Lemaitre was also a first-rate geometer. He wrote a paper on quaternions and elliptic geometry (geodesics on a sphere) that was published with a Latin abstract in a journal of the Pontifical Society of the Vatican. My library didn't have a copy, and so that was probably the only time in my life that I had to correspond with the Vatican to get a copy :-)

New comment by jvkersch in "Georges Lemaître, the Belgian priest who discovered the universe is expanding"

jvkersch — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 14:43:47 +0000

In the US/UK civil engineering is often taken to mean constructing buildings (very roughly, in a nutshell), whereas other countries (in particular continental Europe) use the meaning that you quote. So you can have a Belgian civil engineer who specializes in theoretical physics, and knows more about the Higgs boson than about "traditional" engineering topics.

New comment by jvkersch in "Random Points on a Sphere"

jvkersch — Wed, 11 Jul 2018 09:56:05 +0000

Not quite -- the comment refers to the fact that R^d has the structure of a normed division algebra in dimensions 1, 2, 4, and 8. This means that you can multiply things together in a nice way when you're in one of those spaces. For R^1, this is just multiplying real numbers, for R^2 it's multiplying complex numbers, R^4 is quaternions, and R^8 is octonions. As you go up in dimensionality, you lose more and more nice properties: the quaternions are not commutative and the octonions are also not associative (which is why there's no mention of them in the blog post). The point is that in dimension 1, 2, and 4 all sorts of interesting things happen. John Baez has a paper about this: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/octonions/node1.html

New comment by jvkersch in "Ask HN: Is there a new habit you cultivated recently that is really paying off?"

jvkersch — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 07:18:01 +0000

Yoga. It's the only time in the day where my brain is not in overdrive. Also, as a 36-year old with a sedentary lifestyle it's surprising/horrifying how stiff I've become. I'm just following the beginner movies on youtube and I go to the occasional class, so it's not stressful.

New comment by jvkersch in "The fifth hyperfactorial: 5⁵×4⁴×3³×2²×1¹=86400000 milliseconds is exactly 1 day"

jvkersch — Wed, 16 May 2018 15:14:02 +0000

Hence, a very poor approximation to pi is given by 365 × 5⁵ × 4⁴ × 3³ × 2² × 1¹ / 10^10.

New comment by jvkersch in "Make your own sourdough"

jvkersch — Sat, 28 Apr 2018 07:18:56 +0000

My bread has increased in quality so much by (a) mixing the ingredients (without the yeast, or with only a little bit of the sourdough starter) the night before (i.e. making a poolish), and (b) taking a full day to prepare: you knead a little, let it rest for a couple of hours, give it a few turns, rest, etc. As a result, the bread is much more flavorful, and the flavor is more delicate: not too sour, not too sweet, and you can chew it and feel the flavors develop.

New comment by jvkersch in "Make your own sourdough"

jvkersch — Sat, 28 Apr 2018 07:07:18 +0000

I agree but I do like the fact that it's written in Markdown and hosted on GitHub. I don't know many recipe books that allow for issues to be raised and that accept pull requests ;)