Hacker News: kvathupo

New comment by kvathupo in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)"

kvathupo — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 21:48:34 +0000

This is awesome! Cigarette ads are so seductively cool, yet the embodiment of selling you a fantasy

New comment by kvathupo in "Quantum Speedup Found for Class of Hard Problems"

kvathupo — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:39:06 +0000

Ah, walking across glued trees [1]! Not sure of its practical merits however, aha...

[1] - https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0209131

New comment by kvathupo in "Quantum Speedup Found for Class of Hard Problems"

kvathupo — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:34:25 +0000

They're not easily comparable since quantum complexity refers to the upper bound on queries to some black-box "quantum oracle", which exists on the gate-level. A classical parallel would perhaps be queries to a translation lookaside buffer, which can be regarded as a gate-level black-box (I'm sure people who actually work in hardware already smell blood!).

By contrast, classical complexity, as in sorting algorithms, is reasoned about in higher-level programming languages, whose operational complexity is hard to describe down to the bit-level.

I'm curious if anyone more knowledgeable could argue one-way-or-another if this is a boon to the quantum-computers-will-probably-be-faster-in-realization camp.

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

kvathupo — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 19:57:46 +0000

Possibly of interest, but I wrote a (hopefully approachable) report on quantum perceptrons a few years back [1]. Perhaps it's found elsewhere, but I was surprised by how, at least in this quantum algo's case, the basis of training was game theoretic not gradient descent!

[1] - https://kvathupo.github.io/cs/quantum/457_Final_Report.pdf

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

kvathupo — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 19:40:22 +0000

The bar for entry is surprisingly low, you just need to brush up on intro abstract algebra. I recommend the following:

1. Kaye, LaFlamme, and Mosca - An Introduction to Quantum Computing

2. Nielsen and Chuang - Quantum Computation and Quantum Information (The Standard reference source)

3. Andrew Childs's notes here [1]. Closest to the state-of-the-art, at least circa ~3 years ago.

[1] - https://www.cs.umd.edu/~amchilds/qa/

New comment by kvathupo in "Microsoft stock drops over 6% after results fall short in AI disappointment"

kvathupo — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 22:18:58 +0000

As a young dev, interested in your point about 1996. Mind elaborating?

Ray Ozzie – Dawn of a New Day (2010)

kvathupo — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 01:24:23 +0000

Article URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20101129225934/http://ozzie.net/docs/dawn-of-a-new-day/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39949179

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Ask HN: In the 90s, did programmers job-hop frequently?

kvathupo — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 22:45:11 +0000

I've only been out of college for a few years, but my engineering friends who stay at a company for at least 4 years seem more the exception than norm. Was it like this in the pre-Linkedin-recruiter-spam and pre-Glassdoor-interview-question days?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39622742

Points: 30

# Comments: 40

Ask HN: Early Amazon Culture?

kvathupo — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 18:41:07 +0000

Nowadays, Amazon is often invoked negatively with phrases like "PIP", and "Amazon managers". But I'm curious how different the culture was during Amazon's early years. Anyone stay long enough to notice a shift?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39207597

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by kvathupo in "Garry Tan tech CEO and campaign donor wishes death upon SF politicians"

kvathupo — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 05:13:22 +0000

As a Tupac fan and lover of print news, I think this article encapsulates what's wrong with modern media: the selective use of context to engender a political stance, from which outage is engendered

The problem isn't social media or long-form print news, but the 24-hour news cycle in my humble opinion. As we saw in the case of that shocking bombing of a Palestinian hospital, I've increasingly felt that once reputable media companies have prioritized returns (eyeballs) over news. Indeed, many of these paragraph long 24-hour updates reuse the same sentence structure I noticed.

New comment by kvathupo in "Google lays off hundreds working on its voice-activated assistant"

kvathupo — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 09:15:26 +0000

I wonder if layoffs will affect company loyalty in the future? I'm leaning towards not, given the frequency of turnover at big tech companies for higher TC

New comment by kvathupo in "Lapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order"

kvathupo — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 18:17:52 +0000

I would be inclined to agree, but I'm reminded of passages from Edwin Black's book [1] depicting the capriciousness of medical providers. E.g. a board of doctors was typically responsible for sterilization decisions in America when eugenics was mainstream during the early 1900s. It seems reasonable that doctors should be final arbiters of medical decisions, as in releasing this aforementioned hacker from a mental hospital. But the book revealed how these doctors would often inconsistently apply their sterilization standards to favor prominent local families whilst punishing the usual victims, i.e. minorities and poor whites.

In this regard, I find this case deeply disturbing, and would prefer if he simply got a definite sentence.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Against_the_Weak

New comment by kvathupo in "Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet"

kvathupo — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 22:55:21 +0000

I like this.

That said, I doubt we'll ever escape towards subscription-based social media models due to the prohibitive costs of CDNs, bandwidth, and storage for video/images. But I suppose it's a question of ends: do we want everyone on social media?

New comment by kvathupo in "Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down"

kvathupo — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 05:58:21 +0000

Completely disagree: Yann LeCun, John Carmack, Rui Ueyama, Andrei Alexandrescu, Matt Goldbolt, Horace He, Tarun Chitra, George Hotz, etc.

New comment by kvathupo in "Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted"

kvathupo — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 07:59:25 +0000

Even more interestingly, Anthropic isn't traditionally structured: it's a Long-Term Benefit Trust [1]. That's not say shares can't be sold, but, rather, shareholders have very little governance rights. Debatable whether this is good, e.g. Meta's success being tied to Zuck's large holdings. On the other hand, you have WeWork.

[1] - https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23794855/anthropic-ai-ope...

New comment by kvathupo in "Java implementation of a quantum computing resistant cryptographic algorithm"

kvathupo — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 18:48:47 +0000

I'd agree. I'd say adversaries are unlikely to steal data now, wait a decade or two, and then decrypt on a quantum computer for _most_ private company ip. It's only relevant to government at this stage, yet Congress is, unsurprisingly, out-of-touch (or perhaps age?) in this regard.

Fun fact: I emailed my senator, chair of the foreign relations committee, on concerns over China's heavy investment here. I got a reply from an overworked intern about banning Tiktok !

New comment by kvathupo in "Financial anxiety: The alarming side effect of inflation"

kvathupo — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 17:22:25 +0000

As the child of blue-collar parents, I'd agree that there's a lot of price anxiety in their neck of the woods.

I'd also add that the statistics can be misleading: of the jobs added, many are in food services and front-line healthcare. For the former, the positions don't provide hours and pay poorly. Not a great area to be adding jobs in amidst high inflation and depressed lending.

New comment by kvathupo in "Dave Clark’s tumultuous last days at Flexport"

kvathupo — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 00:15:27 +0000

I'd suggest changing the headline to the original, more sensationalized one.

It certainly went against my initial impression that an Amazonian brought Amazon culture to a startup, and got booted for it. In this regard, I'd imagine Meta's concurrent efforts to slash management provided a convincing pretext.

New comment by kvathupo in "Meta releases Intermediate Graphics Library"

kvathupo — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 18:20:20 +0000

Another cheeky comment from Meta devs: The location for pytorch's git repo is listed as "where the eigens are valued" : ^)

New comment by kvathupo in "Every person on the planet should have their own website"

kvathupo — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 15:44:29 +0000

This discussion brings to mind the monastic practice of copying texts for the purpose of preservation [1]. An interesting practice I learned from the sci-fi classic "A Canticle for Leibowitz" [2].

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptorium

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz