Hacker News: lkm0

New comment by lkm0 in "Replace IBM Quantum back end with /dev/urandom"

lkm0 — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 16:38:22 +0000

"dequantization" is a thing and it's a very legitimate part of quantum information research. It's useful to probe if something was truly quantum or just smokes and mirrors, because it helps us understand where the boundary between quantum and classical lies. Another dequantized result from the past days: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21908

New comment by lkm0 in "Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica"

lkm0 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 09:37:15 +0000

A very simple addition that makes casual browsing much more fun is to add a menu with adjacent articles, as is done in this reconstruction of Littré's 19th century french dictionary: https://www.littre.org/ (see mots voisins)

New comment by lkm0 in "A Periodic Map of Cheese"

lkm0 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:00:27 +0000

Why put comté and gruyère in two different categories? I just realized that in France the categorization of cheeses is closer to how they are prepared:

- fresh

- soft

- hard but not cooked

- hard and cooked

and it results in entirely different groupings. This will surely make some people unhappy.

New comment by lkm0 in "GitHub's fake star economy"

lkm0 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:23:55 +0000

We're this close to rediscovering pagerank

New comment by lkm0 in "AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing"

lkm0 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:33:43 +0000

These economic frameworks sure look like pareidolia to me

New comment by lkm0 in "A truck driver spent 20 years making a scale model of every building in NYC"

lkm0 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 21:02:14 +0000

A swiss architect did the same in the mid 19th century with Geneva, specifically to preserve an image of the city right before the entirety of the city walls were to be razed

pics: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Relief_Magnin

New comment by lkm0 in "Computational Physics (2nd Edition) (2025)"

lkm0 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:33:51 +0000

There's actually a source tex file bundled with exercises with a custom setup.tex which makes me believe the whole thing is bespoke. Might be wrong though

https://websites.umich.edu/~mejn/cp2/exercises.html

By the way, I use typst now, so I don't have to worry about highlighting anymore!

New comment by lkm0 in "People Love to Work Hard"

lkm0 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 07:31:14 +0000

Takeaway from the comments is that "work hard" is ill-defined and there's no effort done to fix that

New comment by lkm0 in "Computational Physics (2nd Edition) (2025)"

lkm0 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:39:57 +0000

The matplotlib chapter seems fairly barebones but I remain in awe at this gorgeous latex work

New comment by lkm0 in "Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools"

lkm0 — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 06:39:34 +0000

To put this in context, we've had a streak of improvements to Shor's algorithm that have put the horizon much closer. In 2022, people from Microsoft estimated that it would take more than 10M (physical) qubits to implement factoring. We're now standing at a 1000x improvement. It's still years away for sure, but who can be unhappy with all that progress?

ms paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.07629

New comment by lkm0 in "What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?"

lkm0 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:31:10 +0000

Beyond the data science interest, isn't this sort of charting powered by the "my time's running out and I still haven't left my mark in history" intrusive thought? Purely from a fitting perspective I'd wager the correlation is close to zero, because "major works" will be different in a century, and again changed in two. Shakespeare was not very popular in the 17th per wikipedia. As George Orwell put it, it's much easier to write when you do it for a purpose that matters to you. Hugo wrote Notre-Dame mostly to rant about architecture; creating a major work for the purpose of staving off fears of being forgotten I feel is not enough in itself

New comment by lkm0 in "Personal Encyclopedias"

lkm0 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:23:47 +0000

I wanted to do exactly that with a bunch of old pictures and you beat me to it. Love it!

New comment by lkm0 in "“Collaboration” is bullshit"

lkm0 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:49:38 +0000

The segue from "last ditch effort to save the third reich" to "jira and slack" feels like it's trying to say something deeper.

New comment by lkm0 in "2025 Turing award given for quantum information science"

lkm0 — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 21:46:03 +0000

If you enjoy reading about undervalued scientists, check out the life of Ernst Stückelberg, who missed out on 4 to 5 Nobel prizes because he mostly published in unknown journals. https://blogg.perostborn.com/2023/03/22/hes-not-so-easily-st...

New comment by lkm0 in "Why I may ‘hire’ AI instead of a graduate student"

lkm0 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:35:52 +0000

This sounds misguided. In the little experience I had, I've seen that models get basic knowledge so absolutely wrong that giving them any sort of independence will not result in publications that positively impact a professor's reputation, or contribute to science. Or at least the reviews and papers I read that had AI content did not give me the impression that we should have more of this. And they require much more supervision, with the added issue that they cannot learn in the long term through your interactions, and without the enjoyment of teaching something to someone. They're really good at finding papers though. Perhaps because navigating search engines has become a pain. Perhaps this will be the case in the future, but saying you're tempted right now is like saying you're being tempted to replace your HPC with quantum computers. It's a bit early.

New comment by lkm0 in "Library of Short Stories"

lkm0 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 11:18:12 +0000

I was surprised not to see Forster's stories as they are marvelous and public domain. People often cite the machine stops, but I recommend reading them all. The point of it and co-ordination are two favorites

New comment by lkm0 in "Willingness to look stupid"

lkm0 — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:47:59 +0000

It is sort of funny to think of Nobel prize level work in relation to blogposting. A couple of examples that don't conform: Marie Curie won another prize. Josephson in general (check him out). Feynman did greatly contribute to other fields after his prize. You can find as many counterexamples as examples if you dig a bit. I've witnessed a few times that looking like an idiot is the least of their concern.

New comment by lkm0 in "Billion-Parameter Theories"

lkm0 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:50:35 +0000

It's an optimistic point of view. Still, when people use large neural nets to model physics, they also have a lot of parameters but they replicate very simple laws. So there's something deeper about this. Something like a simulation of theory.

New comment by lkm0 in "Addicted to Claude Code–Help"

lkm0 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 07:54:41 +0000

Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I definitely want to try a more complex setup when I have more time on my hands

New comment by lkm0 in "Addicted to Claude Code–Help"

lkm0 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:35:23 +0000

I'm seeing the limits when Claude makes some statements that are extremely wrong but incredibly hard to spot unless you're in the field, recently telling me that "some people say" that rydberg atoms and neutral atoms are different enough to be in different quantum computing categories (they're the same). The stakes are lowering somehow, because I know I can't trust it for anything but fun side-projects. For serious research it's still me and reading papers.