Hacker News: skzv

New comment by skzv in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

skzv — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 19:25:47 +0000

https://blog.skz.dev

New comment by skzv in "Bluetooth Channel Sounding: The Next Leap in Bluetooth Innovation"

skzv — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 17:12:05 +0000

Cool, I worked on indoor localization, particularly with RTT, at Google for many years :)

3D Reconstruction from Public Photos with Machine Learning

skzv — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 02:54:48 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.skz.dev/3d-reconstruction-from-public-photos

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44980579

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by skzv in "Darwin's children drew all over the “On the Origin of Species” manuscript (2014)"

skzv — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 17:55:57 +0000

From the wiki article:

> Scholars believe that the Novgorod Republic had an unusually high level of literacy for the time, with literacy apparently widespread throughout different classes and among both sexes.

Predicting How the Market Will Open Tomorrow

skzv — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 04:52:54 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.skz.dev/predicting-how-the-market-will-open-tomorrow

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43457851

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by skzv in "The Ribbon Microphone"

skzv — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 19:59:08 +0000

I bought my father a RM-BIV3 ribbon microphone [0] to record violin. It's a beautiful piece.

[0] https://micpedia.com/microphone/bashaudio-rm-biv3/

New comment by skzv in "Maximum likelihood estimation and loss functions"

skzv — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 23:28:01 +0000

Yes, you are totally correct, but I believe this term is omitted from the cross-entropy loss function that is used in machine learning? Because it is a constant which does not contribute to the optimization.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

New comment by skzv in "Maximum likelihood estimation and loss functions"

skzv — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 21:32:38 +0000

To bring things full circle: the cross-entropy loss is the KL divergence. So intuitively, when you're minimizing cross-entropy loss, you're trying to minimize the "divergence" between the true distribution and your model distribution.

This intuition really helped me understand CE loss.

New comment by skzv in "Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals"

skzv — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 06:28:13 +0000

Increasing efficiency often causes an increase in consumption, not less [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

New comment by skzv in "The brain summons deep sleep for healing from life-threatening injury"

skzv — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 00:42:05 +0000

I was concussed and suffered from persistent headaches for 2 years.

It was really tough. I was suicidal. My only reprieve from pain was falling asleep.

I saw a neurologist and he told me that two most important things for your brain are:

- consistent sleep schedule

- regular exercise

Once I got those two under control, the headaches finally went away.

New comment by skzv in "Russian family lived alone in the Siberian wilderness for 40 years (2013)"

skzv — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 20:46:46 +0000

The Vice documentary mentioned in the article is really great [0].

Best of luck to Agafia.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt2AYafET68

New comment by skzv in "Personal Names Around the World (2011)"

skzv — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 05:38:38 +0000

I exploited one of these regional naming conventions so that I only have a first name on Facebook.

New comment by skzv in "Google won't be mandating a strict return-to-office plan"

skzv — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 20:30:11 +0000

I go to the office almost everyday by choice. Free food, snacks, and coffee, gym, and medical clinics on campus. And it's just nice to get dressed and leave the house.

But it's really nice to have the flexibility to WFH when I need to, especially just mornings to skip traffic.

New comment by skzv in "What Is a Particle? (2020)"

skzv — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 20:10:41 +0000

Aren't you describing quantum field theory (QFT)?

Anyway, what exactly is a field besides a mathematical object? What is it made of?

New comment by skzv in "macOS Sequoia is available today"

skzv — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 20:23:42 +0000

Sorry, it's actually 49". It's the Samsung Odyssey G9. I love it.

New comment by skzv in "macOS Sequoia is available today"

skzv — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 20:03:40 +0000

I've been happily using Magnet for a long time for this purpose. Good window tiling is critical when working on a 57" monitor...

New comment by skzv in "The Jackpot Generation"

skzv — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 18:44:27 +0000

I grew up in Canada, but my family and I are first generation immigrants from Ukraine. The privilege of my peers left a huge, almost traumatizing, impression on me. My parents were constantly working overtime at their minimum wage jobs at a plastics plant to support us, while my brother and I were raised by my grandmother. Most of my peers had wealthy parents and it was hard to relate. The silver lining is that it really motivated me to work hard and escape that. I live in California now and make many times more than my parents ever made in their lives. My mom still works as a janitor for minimum wage.

Most people I know back in Canada get lots of support from their parents. Everyone I know who bought real estate had huge help from their parents. Canada is just too expensive otherwise and local jobs don't support the cost of living. It definitely feels unfair to those that don't have wealthy parents. They fall behind, and as housing prices rise, it becomes harder to catch up. Those definitely won demographic lottery, and I don't think many of them understand how lucky they are.

All that being said, given a global perspective, I am very lucky, too.

New comment by skzv in "Do Animals Know That They Will Die?"

skzv — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 18:22:11 +0000

I slaughtered about 40 chickens once. I was probably around 19 at the time. My ex-girlfriend's dad just told me to get in the truck, asked his kids to stay at home, and took me to a chicken coop where him and his friend were raising chickens. I took them out of the coop, a few at a time, hung them upside down, and then killed them with a knife. After the first few, the rest in the coop began panicking even though they couldn't see what was going on. That really stood out to me. I'm sure they could hear or smell death. They knew what was coming.

New comment by skzv in "LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live with This"

skzv — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 18:14:42 +0000

Yes, but it also makes a huge difference whether we are asking the model to interpolate or extrapolate.

Generally speaking, models perform much better on the former task, and have big problems with the latter.

New comment by skzv in "We're in the brute force phase of AI – once it ends, demand for GPUs will too"

skzv — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 17:49:28 +0000

One of my favourite economic paradoxes. It changes the way you think about efficiency and consumption.

My colleague introduced me to this idea. He had been studying ways to increase computing efficiency out of concern for the environment. Making programs more efficient would reduce energy consumption, right?

His advisor introduced him to Jevons paradox and he realized such efforts could have the exact opposite effect. So he dropped that research entirely. If you're worried about energy consumption, you need to make energy production more green, not machines more efficient.

Making data centers more efficient will probably cause us to build more data centers and use more power overall, not less.