4 ms·
Back when I worked at Twitter, celebs used to show up randomly at the HQ at lunchtime. I was just your average Indian immigrant data scientist, not clued into
by dxbydt 9y ago
Back when I worked at Twitter, celebs used to show up randomly at the HQ at lunchtime. I was just your average Indian immigrant data scientist, not clued into American culture.
The team I was on was trying to hire a lady for a front end eng role. I didn’t know what the lady’s name was, but I was told she was a very promising candidate, and we were all looking forward to the day when she joined because we had a ton of frontend work.
Ok, so at lunch, my colleague said out aloud - Hey Katy Perry is in the lunchroom!
Everyone got excited. So I said, Oh is that the new front end engineer ?
The whole room exploded in laughter. I thought I must have made a big social gaffe. My mind quickly raced...,oh maybe she must be a celebrity of some kind. Perry Perry...which Perry do I know...So previous night I was watching some show on TBS and suddenly a Perry name flashed into my brain, so I instantly said - Oh she must be the daughter of Tyler Perry!
The room just doubled up in laughter. Finally I did a wiki lookup and found out who she was. But for days, people would look at me, laugh and say he’s the Katy Perry Tyler Perry guy ha ha ha.
Finally I was so embarrassed and pissed off I asked them - Do you know the difference between between Jacobian and a Hessian ? Nobody knew. Well, I said triumphantly, I might not know your katy perry from tyler perry, but atleast I know what I need to know to fo my work.
So yeah, some of us do know that a Gaussian is its own Fourier transform, derivative of an exponential is the exponential itself, etc.
- jordigh 9y agoYou were one of that day's lucky 10,000: https://www.xkcd.com/1053/ https://www.xkcd.com/1053/
- BoiledCabbage 9y agoActually, you were one of today's lucky 10,000 - and I won't make fun of you for it.
- whatshisface 9y agoYou've given a good example of what well-known really means: "well-known among the expected audience." Aside, I honestly wonder if I would be able to recognize Katy Perry in person...
- watersb 9y agoFWIW in college when I would visit family during holidays, I was often confused by cultural references; someone would slip in a catch-phrase and everyone in the room would laugh. I was too busy to watch TV in those days, and it was like being from another culture. After college, I had fallen out of the habit of watching TV, and for decades I thought my culture of tech journals and overwork was superior to their sitcoms and crime dramas. I can still find merit in my choices, but of course that is missing the point. I was wrong. However frivolous the _structure_ of TV entertainment, the _function_ of shared experience reinforced in-group bonds within my family. I feel like a Martian for having to explain this to myself. So I thank you, dxbydt, for sharing your story. :-)
- gisely 9y agoI love this story! Both mathematics and pop-culture have an abundance of names and terminology that can make their discussion very foreign to people who haven't encountered the lingo. I've been thinking about this as a way to understand why many people hate math. I think a lot of people tend to miss that learn math is a lot like learning any other lingo. They assume somehow when they don't understand something it's due to their lack of intelligence rather than simple unfamiliarity with the terms being used. "It is well known that..." gets interpreted as "Even a moron would understand that..." rather than "It is a key piece of cultural knowledge of this domain that...". Now no one would ever make a statement like "It is well known that Katy Perry is a celebrity" as part of discussing American pop-culture. They'd just laugh at you instead for not knowing who she is. Not sure which way is better.
- pierrebai 9y agoSo, how does twitter uses Jacobian?
- jordigh 9y agoA Jacobian is often used in optimisation. In machine learning, optimisation is often relabelled "learning", because they're finding the minimum of a cost function, also sometimes called an error function. You may have heard of backpropagation. Backprop is merely a convenient way to compute the Jacobian of a feed-forward neural network. The Jacobian computed by backprop is then used to pick a line search direction to minimise the network's error. Put it another way, a Jacobian is kind of a multidimensional gradient. It tells you in which multidimensions a function is changing the most rapidly.
- dnautics 9y agoyeah but is most of twitter really using that?
- dxbydt 9y agono, but most of twitter isn't using knowledge of katy perry's whereabouts either. Storing garbage info like katy perry kim kardashian etc. in your brain, in my humble opinion, is a tax on your cognition - one pays that tax by being ignorant of elementary methods like fourier transform or multivariable calculus or eigenvalues or trig integrals or T distribution or you get the idea...
- dnautics 9y agoI'm quite good at math and found your anecdote funny (yes, I know what a jacobian and a hessian are, and give have lectures on using the fourier transform to professional scientists), but honestly most people, including coders, don't need that, and their lives are not bettered by knowing these things. It is a lot bit pretentious, and not humble at all, to judge people for keeping 'garbage' information.
- jgord 9y agoread Anathem, if you haven't already.
- twic 9y agoI don't know about the Jacobian and Hessian or Katy Perry, in both cases because i'm only interested in derivative-free methods!