Hacker News: spot5010

New comment by spot5010 in "Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card"

spot5010 — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 17:28:13 +0000

+1 you can walk through the subway turnstile and not slow down.

New comment by spot5010 in "Incentives are for losers"

spot5010 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:41:28 +0000

In a conversation about careers, a friend of mine casually dropped a simple approach to life that has helped me a lot: you can’t have everything all the time, so make the best of what you got. Some years you will have health and knowledge but be poor, others years you will build wealth but may not be able to uphold your moral values, etc.

I may not have the luxury to ignore bad incentives right now, but I try to make lemonade from the lemons life throws at me so that one day I can.

New comment by spot5010 in "Software for One"

spot5010 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:09:13 +0000

Wow okay I need to try this out.

New comment by spot5010 in "Software for One"

spot5010 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:08:24 +0000

Nothing against what you are doing. That’s awesome and exactly the kind of thing I would nerd out about. I was just commenting on my current state of not having the mental bandwidth to do these things.

New comment by spot5010 in "Software for One"

spot5010 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 12:27:17 +0000

As a new father, just using so many apps sounds exhausting, let alone building and maintaining them. I would have been very excited about these maybe 10-15 years ago. Now I just want the ability to do things with my phone when my hands are tied up holding the baby.

New comment by spot5010 in "The Economic Benefit of Refactoring"

spot5010 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:29:41 +0000

The website is martinfowler.com, but the article seems to be written by Giles Edwards-Alexander.

New comment by spot5010 in "Show HN: Open-source engine running Gemma 4 26B in 2 GB RAM on any M-series Mac"

spot5010 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:04:08 +0000

The human analogy would be that I don’t remember everything in the books I have read, but I do recall reading a particular book and can always look it up.

So, is there a way to train a neural network and then tune it forget a lot of the facts that can be easily retrieved, but keep the intelligence.

New comment by spot5010 in "How an oil refinery works"

spot5010 — Fri, 01 May 2026 03:05:56 +0000

My father worked in the HPCL refinery in Chembur. I got to go visit on Republic day when I was a kid, but they stopped doing visits. He worked in the distillation tower at first, but then moved into diesel desulphurization. I wish it wasn't but its a dangerous job, and he narrowly escaped several accidents, including a horrible naphta fire that took many lives.

New comment by spot5010 in "2025 Turing award given for quantum information science"

spot5010 — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 19:20:03 +0000

As a young grad student, I remember going to a talk by Bennett where he explained how a Quantum Computer allows manipulation in a 2^N dimensional hilbert space, while the outputs measurements give you only N bits of information. The trick is to somehow encode the result in the final N bits.

I felt this was a much better layman explanation of what a quantum computer does than simply saying a quantum computer runs all possible paths in parallel.

New comment by spot5010 in "MoD sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security"

spot5010 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:57:26 +0000

I feel like there’s a lesson to be learnt by reading Lord of the Rings and seeing what happens to Saruman and Denethor.

New comment by spot5010 in "A CPU that runs entirely on GPU"

spot5010 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:01:02 +0000

I don't think we get rid of the CPU. But the relationship will be inverted. Instead of the CPU calling the GPU, it might be that the GPU becomes the central controller and builds programs and calls the CPU to execute tasks.

New comment by spot5010 in "Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?"

spot5010 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 01:14:48 +0000

What if we create a situation in a lab that can be labelled as a collapse of the wave function by interaction with a macroscopic object. Except the macroscopic object is under our control and we can reverse the collapse.

A quantum computer is such a macroscopic state.

New comment by spot5010 in "Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?"

spot5010 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:50:28 +0000

There’s papers that “derive” Born’s rule from the many worlds interpretations, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.7907

I don’t claim to understand them though. I have tried.

New comment by spot5010 in "Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?"

spot5010 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:42:53 +0000

What you said here makes sense. Forgive me, but I have trouble even articulating what it is that I don’t understand correctly.

Maybe what I meant was this: if I perform a quantum experiment where the spin measurement of an electron could be spin up or spin down, the future me would end up in one of two branches: I measure spin up, or I measure spin down. There wouldn’t be any possible world where I measure a superposition of spin up and spin down, because such a a state is going to decohere rapidly. This makes sense. What I’m unable to grasp is that even though the wave function of the universe contains both branches, “I” somehow experience only one of the two branches.

The answer to that I guess if that the two branches are nearly orthogonal they will merrily evolve independent of each other. But somehow “I” only experience only one of them.

Sorry for the rambling. I’m not able to articulate what I don’t understand.

New comment by spot5010 in "Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?"

spot5010 — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 23:12:39 +0000

The part that I have trouble wrapping around with many worlds interpretation is how I as an observer end up in one of the many bifurcations. Any links you can share that will help me with understanding that is welcome!

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/) goes into this in some depth, and it seems like the right way to think about it is say that "I" in one branch is a different entity than the "I" in a different branch. I have somehow not been able to grok it yet.

And I agree about the naming. I really dislike the name "many worlds interpretation", which seems to imply that we have to postulate the existence of these additional worlds, whereas in fact they are branches of the wavefunction exactly predicted by standard quantum mechanics.

New comment by spot5010 in "Show HN: Badge that shows how well your codebase fits in an LLM's context window"

spot5010 — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:23:02 +0000

I agree. My suspicion is that token efficiency is what will drive more efficient tool calls, and tool building. And we want that. Agents should rely less on raw intelligence (ability to hold everyting in context), and more on building tools to get the job done.

New comment by spot5010 in "The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)"

spot5010 — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:13:56 +0000

These seem ideal for robotics applications, where there is a low-latency narrow use case path that these chips can serve, maybe locally.

New comment by spot5010 in "AI is a horse (2024)"

spot5010 — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 15:04:27 +0000

I had the same question.

Maybe the train is software that's built by SWEs (w/ or w/o AI help). Specifically built for going from A to B very fast. But not flexible, and takes a lot of effort to build and maintain.

New comment by spot5010 in "C++ std::move doesn't move anything: A deep dive into Value Categories"

spot5010 — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 15:42:15 +0000

I didn’t think of that, but you are right. At some point I thought I understood templates r-value references work but now I’ve forgotten.

New comment by spot5010 in "C++ std::move doesn't move anything: A deep dive into Value Categories"

spot5010 — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 13:28:07 +0000

Maybe a std::take to pair with it?