Hacker News: mvh

New comment by mvh in "Launch HN: Vela (YC W26) – AI for complex scheduling"

mvh — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 18:28:42 +0000

Hey! Fellow YCer (S24) here. Super cool idea. Depending on how b2c you want to be, one area to maybe consider would be surgeries. Scheduling rooms for surgeries is quite challenging, and has a cost component associated with it which makes the problem even harder. Especially since, as you can imagine, it's not at all obvious how long a procedure will necessarily take, and other procedures may need to start at a certain time.

New comment by mvh in "Launch HN: Hypercubic (YC F25) – AI for COBOL and Mainframes"

mvh — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 22:00:14 +0000

Sort of related to what bloop is trying to do too right?

New comment by mvh in "Launch HN: Maitai (YC S24) – Self-Optimizing LLM Platform"

mvh — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 16:31:19 +0000

We're using Maitai's structured output in prod (Benchify, YC S24) and it's awesome. OpenAI interface for all the models. Super consistent. And they've fixed bugs around escaping characters that OpenAI didn't fix yet.

New comment by mvh in "Detexify: LaTeX Handwriting Symbol Recognition"

mvh — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 01:26:10 +0000

I use this every week and have been using it for years. Huge fan.

New comment by mvh in "Grad students at Northeastern pushed back against invasive digital surveillance"

mvh — Sat, 08 Oct 2022 16:06:35 +0000

Thank you! Keep in mind this was a joint effort by many, many students. I just happened to tweet about it first.

New comment by mvh in "Grad students at Northeastern pushed back against invasive digital surveillance"

mvh — Sat, 08 Oct 2022 16:06:12 +0000

Thank you! Our faculty allies were very helpful as well, although in a more private way.

New comment by mvh in "Grad students at Northeastern pushed back against invasive digital surveillance"

mvh — Sat, 08 Oct 2022 16:05:54 +0000

Thanks!

New comment by mvh in "Grad students at Northeastern pushed back against invasive digital surveillance"

mvh — Sat, 08 Oct 2022 16:05:43 +0000

We have some excellent faculty allies. The admin is interested in doing the same thing to faculty (making them share space) and so faculty is 100% on our side. Hence we had a public letter with 250+ signatures including many faculty.

I agree they likely over-accepted and spent money poorly but I can't say for certain, as I'm not in admin and thus not privy to these details.

New comment by mvh in "Grad students at Northeastern pushed back against invasive digital surveillance"

mvh — Sat, 08 Oct 2022 14:12:59 +0000

I’m the student who wrote the twitter thread. Let me know if you have any questions!

New comment by mvh in ".gov/anime"

mvh — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 20:37:52 +0000

I want to know about .mil/anime

New comment by mvh in "As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia"

mvh — Wed, 15 Jun 2022 16:51:25 +0000

I'm a PhD student in CS in the USA. At my school in Boston, we are paid a ~40K USD/yr stipend. My friends in industry make a _minimum_ of 120k/yr, and some make considerably more than that (think 200k+), in junior / "entry-level" positions.

When I complete the PhD, if I go to industry in the USA, my income will probably be similar to that of my friends who will have been in industry the entire time (and gotten steady wage increases throughout).

It's important to note also cost of living. 40k/yr might sound like a lot, but in Boston, rent is >1k/month even with roommates, we don't have dental care, our health insurance is imperfect, groceries are expensive, etc. etc. Meanwhile in Tucson Arizona or Bloomington Indiana the stipend is something like 22-28K/yr, as cost of living is lower.

Generally speaking it's reasonable to say that completing a PhD in computer science is not a financial investment, but rather, something I am doing because I want to do it. I am very unlikely to literally "profit" (compared to, if I had gone straight to industry instead).

I hope this information is useful/interesting!

New comment by mvh in "Holbert: An Interactive Theorem Prover"

mvh — Thu, 26 May 2022 16:32:22 +0000

Why would you even consider using an unsound logic?

I’m a 3rd year PhD student in formal verification and for the life of me I can’t imagine why anyone would choose to use an unsound logic. I must be missing something very obvious. Is it, IDK, “sound as long as you don’t reason about some very specific kind of formula which can be easily avoided”, or something like that?

New comment by mvh in "Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use?"

mvh — Sat, 25 Dec 2021 18:03:22 +0000

I use program synthesis - cutting edge technology from, I think, the 70s?

New comment by mvh in "Prettymaps: Small Python library to draw customized maps from OpenStreetMap data"

mvh — Fri, 27 Aug 2021 00:03:11 +0000

I recently made a map (using Generic Mapping Tools) of one of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, for one of my dad’s grad students to use in a paper. That would constitute a good example of where you couldn’t just tell my # of built structures (since at certain zoom levels, there are none!)

New comment by mvh in "Renaissance Science: the base ten number system"

mvh — Tue, 18 May 2021 15:37:29 +0000

You’re right. There are two types of 0: the internal syntax denoting digit shift, like in 507, and the number representing nothing, as in 0. So in our number system, o isn’t just syntax, it’s also a number.

New comment by mvh in "Feds say man broke into public water system and shut down safety processes"

mvh — Fri, 02 Apr 2021 21:17:00 +0000

Isn’t this a copycat crime of the similar incident in Florida roughly a month ago?

New comment by mvh in "The Mathematical Pranksters Behind Nicolas Bourbaki"

mvh — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 08:37:46 +0000

This nonsense sounds a lot like programming in Coq.

New comment by mvh in "Why do interviewers ask linked list questions?"

mvh — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 20:51:44 +0000

Wild speculation: because Noetherian induction is kind of tricky? And linked lists are a way to sort of allude to that trick ones without calling it out by name?

New comment by mvh in "Annie of Annie's Mac and Cheese"

mvh — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 20:18:09 +0000

I went on Semester at Sea with her - when I was only 3! My dad was a professor on the ship. Apparently she was super nice, although, I don’t remember, since I was 3.

New comment by mvh in "Chomsky – The Machine, the Ghost and the Limits of Understanding (2012) [video]"

mvh — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 04:30:51 +0000

PSA: Chomsky answers emails.