Hacker News: pkoird

New comment by pkoird in "A sufficiently detailed spec is code"

pkoird — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 05:23:37 +0000

Meh, it's the age old distinction between Formal vs Informal language.

Simply put: Formal language = No ambiguities.

Once you remove all ambiguous information from an informal spec, that, whatever remains, automatically becomes a formal description.

New comment by pkoird in "Two Bits Are Better Than One: making bloom filters 2x more accurate"

pkoird — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 04:14:18 +0000

Clever. My first impression was that surely this saturates the filter too fast as we're setting more bits at once but looks like the maths checks out. It's one of those non-intuitive things that I am glad I learned today.

New comment by pkoird in "Statement by Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands,Norway,Sweden,UK"

pkoird — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 17:02:32 +0000

Potentially because this is about the extra 10% tarrifs?

New comment by pkoird in "CSS sucks because we don't bother learning it (2022)"

pkoird — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 16:24:39 +0000

*Linus

New comment by pkoird in "Ask HN: Is starting a personal blog still worth it in the age of AI?"

pkoird — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:01:57 +0000

AI will scrape your blog and your personal philosophy will eventually become a part of collective Human Intelligence. That's a pretty good reason to blog imo.

New comment by pkoird in "CS234: Reinforcement Learning Winter 2025"

pkoird — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 19:26:47 +0000

Reminds me of something I wrote a year ago https://praveshkoirala.com/2024/11/21/the-democratization-of...

New comment by pkoird in "Project Euler"

pkoird — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 20:50:03 +0000

I remember it vaguely but there used to be a badge awarded for being among the first 100 people to solve the problem. I was obsessed with getting that badge to the point that I spent obscene amount of time solving the-then recently released problem even when the following day was my final exams. I did manage to get that badge though. This was circa 2013. Fun times!

New comment by pkoird in "What is intelligence? (2024)"

pkoird — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 02:56:18 +0000

That would be something that is intelligent to you. I believe the author (or anyone in general) should be focused on mining what intelligence objectively is.

New comment by pkoird in "Introduction to the concept of likelihood and its applications (2018)"

pkoird — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 00:35:31 +0000

Perhaps it was due to English not being my primary language, but it took me an embarrassing amount of time to learn that probability and likelihood are different concepts. Concretely, we talk about probability of observing a data given an underlying assumption (model) is true while we talk about the likelihood of the model being true given we observe some data.

New comment by pkoird in "A built-in 'off switch' to stop persistent pain"

pkoird — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 03:02:38 +0000

If you think about it, this has evolutionary advantages as well. No time to feel pain when your life itself may be in peril due to starvation. Finding food for sustenance easily supercedes recovery.

New comment by pkoird in "How does gradient descent work?"

pkoird — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 16:46:28 +0000

Reminds me of Simulated Annealing. Some randomness have always been part of optimization processes that seek a better equilbrium than local. Genetic Algorithms have mutation, Simulated Annealing has temperature, Gradient Descent similarly has random batches.

New comment by pkoird in "A dumb introduction to z3"

pkoird — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 22:06:03 +0000

Going one abstraction deeper, SAT solvers are black magic.

New comment by pkoird in "A dumb introduction to z3"

pkoird — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 22:04:46 +0000

imo this is the pdf that many people like me used to learn SAT/SMT.

New comment by pkoird in "Quantum Mechanics, Concise Book"

pkoird — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 03:47:09 +0000

Nice effort. As far as textbooks for QM, Electrodynamics, and any sufficiently complex field of study goes, I always feel that these have been written using abstractions that people have developed much later retroactively. I understand the advantages: it makes the entire content concise, structured, and basically straightforward. However, what I crave is a technical book that is based upon the history of the subject. Something that doesn't start immediately with Hilbert spaces but starts off by talking about why Max Plank did what he did, how did Einstein improve upon it, what mistakes were made, what misguided hypothesis were later corrected in what manner, how were different things then unified... you get the point. I think this narrative based approach would motivate me much better than something that's condensed and distilled.

New comment by pkoird in "Spending too much time at airports"

pkoird — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 12:45:58 +0000

I cannot relate to your experience at least in US. I did a lot of flying this summer and have been flying both nationally and internationally over the years but outside the occasional delays due to weather, my experience has been quite pleasant. Even when traveling with luggage, I can generally check them in right outside the airport where I'm dropped off by Uber. Security checks have been straightforward with just the right amount of annoyance in the mix and mobile apps mean that any last minute changes to gates are well communicated in advance. I have found it all really streamlined to be honest.

New comment by pkoird in "Manim: Animation engine for explanatory math videos"

pkoird — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 17:25:45 +0000

Curious to see how it'll combine with a RAG on its documentation.

New comment by pkoird in "Manim: Animation engine for explanatory math videos"

pkoird — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 12:44:07 +0000

I used Manim for one of my class presentations, absolutely a delight to use and as expected many people recognized the style and overall the presentation was well received. Incredibly, I had the opportunity to meet Grant as well a few years back. I told him I have used Manim and he was genuinely excited. Such a cool person with so much contribution to human knowledge and understanding.

New comment by pkoird in "Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC"

pkoird — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 20:45:56 +0000

One of the things I love about my Samsung device is precisely this feature, i.e. DeX

New comment by pkoird in "The natural diamond industry is getting rocked. Thank the lab-grown variety"

pkoird — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 22:00:52 +0000

If the chemical composition is the same, yes.

New comment by pkoird in "Nobody knows how to build with AI yet"

pkoird — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 02:45:57 +0000

Potentially. But also remember what they say about self-driving cars, that it'd make fewer and fewer mistakes than a real driver.