Viewing profile — dbfclark

I think your per-axis std normalization is likely doing a big pile of the work —- it’s fairly well-known that “wrong” PCA, setting sigma=Id or just taking a square root, gives bett…

I did a goodly chunk of vibe coding over the summer and I found that the best language for me was Rust implementations with Python bindings for interface. A few reasons: - Everythi…

Another completely viable solution (other than adding extra starch) I’ve found is to sprinkle a bit of sodium citrate (the sodium salt of citric acid, a common food additive and ch…

A good way to understand why cosine similarity is so common in NLP is to think in terms of a keyword search. A bag-of-words vector represents a document as a sparse vector of its w…

Convergent sequences are always Cauchy; for metric spaces, compactness and sequential compactness are the same.

The key question here isn’t so much whether GPT-4 beats the actual human decks as much as what it had to fabricate to do so. The humans are probably constrained by things like “rea…

Very let down by the title -- why no ancient Roman abstract algebra?

Not my company, but Zocdoc has the best values I’ve ever seen exactly because they all have anti-values: Patients First Important, not Immediate Learners before Masters Together, n…

Tossing this one into the ether in case it works: I'm Wes Clark's grandson (see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11183970 if you're not sure who he is). It's now a year since …

Sure. Moonshine I know a lot about, relative to physics at least. Given that I now work somewhere that specializes in term embeddings, it kind of feels like I've spent half my life…

Hey, I'm a mathematician, not a physicist. We tend only to get as far as "oh yeah, here's all this pretty math we care about. I hear it has some applications to physics..."

Presumably the extra credit is that the binary Golay code is closely related to the Leech Lattice, and thus to the entire moonshine situation, which gets you to string theory. See:…

Very company dependent. At Luminoso ( http://luminoso.com ), we live in Python, with varying doses of Javascript for frontend, very little R (but some of us know it), Java and C++ …

Indeed -- it's struck me recently how Wes was probably among the first (if not necessarily number one, if only because of ill-definedness) people to make computers smaller. Looking…

Quite. Minsky was actually advisor to my company, which is based in part on his notion of common sense computing. There is much to mourn recently.

He'd talk about computers for fun, at least. But try to convince him that the internet actually worked and you'd have a whole evening's conversation on your hands...

It's a reference to a story about Ramanujan, who once (remarkably) told G. H. Hardy that 1729 wasn't a boring number because it was the smallest number that could be expressed as t…

Everyone has stories, most better than me. I find my most vivid memory of experiencing him as an adult was that every time you spoke with him he'd have had some completely flabberg…

I'm his grandson, not his colleague, so far be it from me to say he was a great man, but he was a great grandfather and an inspiration. He taught me an enormous amount, from logic …

I couldn't possibly agree more in general, though of course I'd quibble with many of the specifics... As to stodginess, I'd say there's a big difference between personal/small comm…

This is an impact of the default Unicode normalization, which is set to NFKC. This normalization is lossy for things like the ordinal indicator and trademark symbol; if you'd like …

Luminoso cofounder here (we make ftfy, among other things). Our use case is fairly specific: a customer uploads text documents, often as a spreadsheet originally exported from some…