<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>semi-extrinsic</author><text>I disagree. Through Scott Aaronson&amp;#x27;s writings, I gather we still don&amp;#x27;t have conclusive evidence [1] that anyone&amp;#x27;s built an actual quantum computer capable of more sophisticated computations than a human 10-year-old can do with pen and paper, and furthermore that it&amp;#x27;s not clear we&amp;#x27;ll be able to build such a machine in our lifetimes. I&amp;#x27;m not saying it&amp;#x27;s impossible, but we know it&amp;#x27;s going to be really hard.&lt;p&gt;What you&amp;#x27;re ignoring with your exponential growth argument is that it is &lt;i&gt;also&lt;/i&gt; exponentially harder to add one qubit while maintaining usefulness (i.e. long decoherence times).&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d say, anyone who doesn&amp;#x27;t want to work either in academia or on &amp;quot;vanity projects&amp;quot; like D-Wave&amp;#x27;s much-hyped collabs with Lockheed, Google etc. should wait half a decade and see.&lt;p&gt;[1] Arguably the D-Wave machines are faster than a human, but we don&amp;#x27;t have evidence (yet) that it&amp;#x27;s not just a fancy annealing ASIC.</text><parent_chain><item><author>reikonomusha</author><text>Now. &amp;quot;Exponential&amp;quot; is faster than most people, including myself, can believe. When one unit of resource doubles your computational capacity, it doesn&amp;#x27;t take many units.&lt;p&gt;I like to use the analogy. Adding 1 GB of RAM these days isn&amp;#x27;t that big of a deal. You can maybe open two more tabs in Chrome. :) Adding 1 giga-qubit to your computer would make it 4.6 x 10^301029995 times better. That&amp;#x27;s unimaginably more powerful than anything any human can think of.&lt;p&gt;We don&amp;#x27;t have quantum software engineering figured out. And it&amp;#x27;s not going to be figured out by a few academics, although they may lay some good foundations. It&amp;#x27;s going to be figured out by the same folks who figured out traditional computing: people who try stuff, break stuff, and experiment.</text></item><item><author>pieteradejong</author><text>As a software engineer looking for a highly marketable and differentiated skill set, given your projections for quantum computing roadmap, when should I start exploring this area? (or: when should I start writing code and doing side projects)</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Rigetti Forest 1.0 – programming environment for quantum/classical computing</title><url>https://medium.com/rigetti/introducing-forest-f2c806537c6d</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>algorias</author><text>&amp;gt; Now. &amp;quot;Exponential&amp;quot; is faster than most people, including myself, can believe. When one unit of resource doubles your computational capacity, it doesn&amp;#x27;t take many units.&lt;p&gt;Please don&amp;#x27;t make bullshit claims about exponential speedups. I don&amp;#x27;t know exactly what technology you are claiming to have, but statements like this cause me to believe less in your technology, not more.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve been through the cycle of unfounded hype many times (with D-WAVE and others). Scott Aaronson has an entire category on his blog filled with depressingly many posts debunking the same bullshit over and over [0].&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.scottaaronson.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;?cat=17&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.scottaaronson.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;?cat=17&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain><item><author>reikonomusha</author><text>Now. &amp;quot;Exponential&amp;quot; is faster than most people, including myself, can believe. When one unit of resource doubles your computational capacity, it doesn&amp;#x27;t take many units.&lt;p&gt;I like to use the analogy. Adding 1 GB of RAM these days isn&amp;#x27;t that big of a deal. You can maybe open two more tabs in Chrome. :) Adding 1 giga-qubit to your computer would make it 4.6 x 10^301029995 times better. That&amp;#x27;s unimaginably more powerful than anything any human can think of.&lt;p&gt;We don&amp;#x27;t have quantum software engineering figured out. And it&amp;#x27;s not going to be figured out by a few academics, although they may lay some good foundations. It&amp;#x27;s going to be figured out by the same folks who figured out traditional computing: people who try stuff, break stuff, and experiment.</text></item><item><author>pieteradejong</author><text>As a software engineer looking for a highly marketable and differentiated skill set, given your projections for quantum computing roadmap, when should I start exploring this area? (or: when should I start writing code and doing side projects)</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Rigetti Forest 1.0 – programming environment for quantum/classical computing</title><url>https://medium.com/rigetti/introducing-forest-f2c806537c6d</url></story>