Hacker News: linhvn

New comment by linhvn in "A misalignment of AI in mathematics"

linhvn — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 20:19:11 +0000

Reform the way math is taught and researched. Right now, the aspiring mathematicians have to follow a ritual and system for 15+ years: undergrad -> PhD -> postdoc -> faculty, specializing on very narrow fields and god forbid if they have even a slight interest in quantitative finance. You could go through 4 years of undergrad classroom and had no idea what research math is (even at top schools like MIT, Harvard or Stanford), how it's done, etc. and the people who do it are typically the one "already in the system" (e.g. parents are professors, or in academia, or have connections to do research).

In the age of AI, there's no reason one has to follow the kind of classes like Algebra, Topology or PDE. Teach just enough so that good students can understand the basic, and go straight into seminar and research math. I don't think a top student in sophomore year cannot understand or work on some combinatorics research problem and get some results, with proper mentoring and guidance.

New comment by linhvn in "A misalignment of AI in mathematics"

linhvn — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 19:04:36 +0000

And I am outraged by their dinosaur mindset and the gatekeeping mentality that force every student to follow their same archaic system that no longer makes sense 20 years ago, let alone now.

New comment by linhvn in "New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers"

linhvn — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 21:38:07 +0000

They get a special, non immigrant work visa. If they want to apply for green card they subsequently need to apply for H-1B.

New comment by linhvn in "To be great, be good, repeatably (2019)"

linhvn — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 05:11:30 +0000

This is the similar mindset in sport athletes. On a good day, a strong driver could beat Verstappen, or a chess player could beat Carlsen. Over the course of a tournament, or a season, then Verstappen and Carlsen are unbeatable. They get to the top, and go on great length to stay there.

New comment by linhvn in "Almost half of Californians speak a non-English language at home"

linhvn — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 17:02:32 +0000

That is true for the older generation (immigrating to US pre 1990-ish). The newer generation immigrating to US has a very different mindset now, and they embrace American values as much as the native born here.

New comment by linhvn in "We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT"

linhvn — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 03:45:23 +0000

Which people? If you are software engineers or AI researchers, sure. Otherwise, it probably won't matter to you.

New comment by linhvn in "Ask HN: Why are most US startups not solving novel problems?"

linhvn — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 15:33:35 +0000

I'd say it usually comes from the difficulty in hiring. Extremely difficult to convince someone to leave FAANG / quant firms to work in a no name startup with very high chance of failures, and therefore usually you need a good GTM strategy first (which often requires you have acquired customers / revenue). Often in startups, the priority is figuring GTM strategy > acquiring customers > ... > hiring.

New comment by linhvn in "He dropped out to become a poet – now he’s won a Fields Medal (2022)"

linhvn — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 13:28:32 +0000

Yes, it was lucky that he was tutored my a Fields medalist. But he did the hard work to get himself tutored: sitting in an algebraic geometry class (that saw attendances dropping from 200 to 5 within a few weeks), reaching out to the professor, traveling with him for 2 years, etc. And then he still needed to do all the work himself for his PhD, and so forth.

New comment by linhvn in "Shamir Secret Sharing"

linhvn — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 03:38:51 +0000

I'm not sure if this is intimidating. A draft implementation could be done without too much difficulty:

https://gist.github.com/ll931110/985a4ec711c6711b120846be05e...

New comment by linhvn in "Fed raises rates 25 bps"

linhvn — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 22:09:25 +0000

Traders learn bps on the first day of their job, similar to you learn version control on your first day of your SWE intern. What's the difference?

New comment by linhvn in "SpaceX hires boy, 14, who became youngest graduate at California university"

linhvn — Sat, 17 Jun 2023 18:36:32 +0000

How can he make friends with other kids? Partying, dancing, playing baseball, going to date night, etc.?

It's clear that he's not interested in those, and forcing him to do so only causes him to withdraw further to his bubble. At least a job gets him to hang out with people closer to his ability.

New comment by linhvn in "Own-goal football (2022)"

linhvn — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 19:45:18 +0000

You give the red card. Period.

Nowadays, thanks to VAR, the controversial cases can be reviewed on the replay and referees have ample of time to make the call.

New comment by linhvn in "FANN: Vector Search in 200 Lines of Rust"

linhvn — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 19:35:18 +0000

Wondering how much details you have considered on using Johnson-Lindenstrauss transform for dimensionality reduction on ANN search?

e.g. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/pubs/FJLT-sicomp09.pd...

New comment by linhvn in "Own-goal football (2022)"

linhvn — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 20:06:55 +0000

If you fake injuries, or fall in the penalty area, you might get a yellow / red card. So no cheaties here, especially with VAR now in place.

New comment by linhvn in "The Missing Semester of Your CS Education"

linhvn — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 15:07:03 +0000

MIT has an expectation that students would cover their programming skills via internships or outside jobs, and thus they focus on teaching CS which is quite hard to pick up on your own. Unlike frameworks or trends which change every 2 years, fundamentals are quite hard to change and can carry you quite far if you know how to apply it correctly.

New comment by linhvn in "Rust – What made it “click” for me (Ownership and memory internals)"

linhvn — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 06:08:48 +0000

Computer Science is not about learning to make software, although it is usually a byproduct, as strong understanding of fundamental allows you to design software correctly from the first principle. Programming; however, is usually done through training at work.

Computer Science is about understanding what computation can and cannot achieve, and more importantly, how to achieve it (that is where it differs from Mathematics, where mathematicians are usually not interested in the how part). Under this definition, we can put typical college subjects into consideration:

* Data Structures and Algorithms: about studying how to manipulate data to solve a task efficiently.

* Complexity Theory: about formal classification of hardness of problems. What makes a computational problem "hard" or "easy"?

* Computer System: about how to construct a software system to achieve certain purposes. What are the constraints in a system (performance, security, privacy, correctness, fault tolerance, etc), and how to design a system to address such constraints? What tradeoffs to be made when you cannot meet all the desired requirements?

* Distributed System: how to design system with a few to massive number of computers that are connected in a network? How do you reason about fault tolerance, consistency, sharding, and so on?

* Operating System: about how to create abstraction to the hardware, that allows for other softwares to interact with it without having to explicitly deal with the hardware?

The list could go on, but I just give a couple of examples.

New comment by linhvn in "Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python"

linhvn — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 16:27:05 +0000

I remembered Alphasheets was acquired by Google a couple of years ago for doing similar thing (they programmed in Haskell which is really cool) https://medium.com/bloated-mvp/alphasheets-mvp-review-ec328e...

New comment by linhvn in "Students suing elite U.S. colleges seek 'wealth favoritism' information"

linhvn — Sun, 12 Feb 2023 01:07:25 +0000

Yes it is small, but you want to incentivize that, because someone smart enough will make it happen. Or you can be smart enough to do both.

New comment by linhvn in "DuckDB – An in-process SQL OLAP database management system"

linhvn — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 02:43:45 +0000

What is the differentiation of DuckDB compared to previous OLAP databases such as Snowflake or Singlestore?

New comment by linhvn in "A new method boosts wind farms’ energy output, without new equipment"

linhvn — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 17:10:33 +0000

Video illustration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP2yJqGQ2FU