havercosine

8 ms·

31.
by havercosine 3y ago
The most badass story related to 'using basic tools and a steady hand in a pinch' is Buzz Aldrin pulling out a sextant and sliderule to do some calculations in Gemini XII. The description in the article reads "Aldrin pulled o
32.
by havercosine 3y ago
This is a great post. Another aha! moment I had in understanding Kalman Filter came from a short note by John D. Cook (link: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/applied-kalman-filtering/ ) . A traditional calculus/
33.
by havercosine 3y ago
I agree with the observation (most people do not contribute to libraries), but I think the arrow of causality is little different. Python is used as a glue code in scientific computing on top of libraries written in C/C++. The developm
34.
by havercosine 3y ago
This is spot on. I love Julia, whatever little I have dabbled into it. History of deep learning would have been slightly different if Julia had taken off as the implementation language. Might have encouraged more hackability and understanda
35.
by havercosine 3y ago
This is a super impressive achievement. - What would you say is your biggest learning from this experiment? - What were the Aha! moments you experienced while learning like this? For example, something you vaguely understood before but is n
36.
by havercosine 3y ago
I don't mind bit of skepticism. But let's see: Comma is actually used by people in their cars to achieve some degree of self driving. He actually shipped something that works! The idea is ambitious as well as commercially interest
37.
by havercosine 3y ago
This is a good intuition. At times it reminds me of old school hand rolled feature engineering used in time series modelling: assuming that the signal is made up of a stationary component and a sine wave. Though haven't managed to math
38.
by havercosine 3y ago
Wholeheartedly agree. I'm a self taught programmer who programs to get things done rather than just doing programming for fun (I started in ML/data science field). That way, my code often resembles the caricature of these hacky co
39.
by havercosine 3y ago
Has anyone actually tried to talk with Anthropic team for obtaining commercial usage permissions? I'm slightly vary of anything that says "talk to our sales team and explore partnerships" to be a time waste. But happy to chan
40.
by havercosine 3y ago
Personal experience: was using LangChain and its output parsers for getting structured data. It was having a very high error rates (probably prompt was becoming too long and confusing). But it is a just prompt + some parsing logic. Replaced
41.
by havercosine 4y ago
Hello :) . Pleasantly surprised and happy to see folks who know about Engelmann and DISTAR here. Random tidbit: I too quit software work to launch experiment in ed-tech two years back. Randomly stumbled on Englemann through a rabbit hole. I
42.
by havercosine 4y ago
I hear your sentiment. As a backend / ML guy who tried to ship projects as a solo dev: I do understand JS/HTML. I understand the programming model of web and still build things the conventional way: templating on server which retu
43.
by havercosine 4y ago
I second this. Given your background (lisper) maybe do the Little Learner book once it is out + Karpathy's video series. Follow it up by building a slightly complicated application in your favourite domain (text, images, videos, time s
44.
by havercosine 4y ago
Well, hard to say if it is a better resource. But it will appeal to those who are in a hurry (and yes, it is okay to be in a hurry). For example, fast.ai first chapter will have you build a dogs vs cats classifier. But how do they build it?
45.
by havercosine 4y ago
Hard agree on the interview focus. I think Google's interview culture has optimized heavily for missing forest for the trees, where the person will be extremely good at solving hard but well defined problems. But general customer empat
46.
by havercosine 4y ago
'Little..' series books are famous for their pedagogical style: small bit of concepts, presented as a dialogue, making you think at each step, in a well thought out order. It will appeal to anyone who wants to build it out themsel
47.
by havercosine 4y ago
The blur is addictive because it feeds a feedback loop: rather than tiring out your brain on understanding one thing in detail, you can watch two summaries and have a vague sense of understanding. It allows to jump to next novelty, always f
48.
by havercosine 4y ago
Gustavo has created superb courses around Maths and Physics of game development. I did 2 of his courses and RoI in terms of learning is huge. The crucial point is: he starts with an empty file and codes up the stuff with you at an understan
49.
by havercosine 4y ago
The fear is a lot deeper than quality of chat GPT's results for now. Google is afraid that ads driven business models might get dislodged for "give me a service and I will pay you money for that" model. That will be a nail in
50.
by havercosine 4y ago
I so so much agree. Just applying the D (differential operator) twice reveals what are we doing much more than the conventional d2y/dx2 notation. By and large mathematics education has missed the point of invention of computers. It is
51.
by havercosine 4y ago
My cultural reading of this notation problem is this: mathematical notation was formalised when scientists were writing papers and letters to each scientists in the era of scarce paper and no internet. So focus was on succinctness at the ex
52.
by havercosine 4y ago
Ignoring all the flak Stephen Wolfram gets, this is something that Wolfram Alpha does much better. Asking `escape velocity on Enceladus` to ChatGPT, it gave correct formula and still wrong result. All the hard-work of generating computable
53.
by havercosine 4y ago
This book coming out is an amazing news. The HTMX website already does a fine job of explaining the philosophy behind hypermedia applications. But taking a 101/102 application like contacts app and building it with hypermedia is enligh
54.
by havercosine 4y ago
I agree that most of the routine software work feels like, umm, filling forms? The way I've made peace with it is to accept that the work that pays the bills is going to be boring. After considering ourselves to be special as software
55.
by havercosine 4y ago
I was doing this experiment few years back with `emacs -nw`, tons of other packages in Emacs and custom elisp code. Used `ein` in emacs instead of Jupyter notebooks, browsed web in text browser etc. But as I grew older I realised I need to
56.
by havercosine 4y ago
I think this is a spot on assessment. Google has always been a 'nerds trying to build a cool technology' company. Yes, one of it is search which is infinitely useful for users. But other than that, they have been in their shells n
57.
by havercosine 4y ago
Shameless plug. I'm building this, a fun but curricular platform for games focused on mathematics grades 8 onwards. Please check https://pledu.co/trigo-shooter (no login needed). The game levels are designed to gradual
58.
by havercosine 4y ago
'Tried to it right notwithstanding what masses think' and commercial success are not exclusive. Two examples. Clojure's maintainers very carefully vet what goes into the core language. It has been a source of frustration for
59.
by havercosine 4y ago
Thanks for writing about that experience, makes sense. My first to forays in the language ended the same way. I tried to do mainstream programming stuff in it but realised I wasn't making much progress in first few days and eventually
60.
by havercosine 4y ago
With Haskell, one always finds articles explaining how great it is, how its features (pure functionality) lend to correct code. But, articles explaining the core use cases and how only this language enabled solving it are rare. I'd lov

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