Viewing profile — hgibbs

If you want to work in a Hilbert space (i.e. have angles) then you are stuck with the euclidean metric up to scaling of the axes.

Can you give an example? I am unfamiliar (and interested).

The term "matrix derivative" is a bit loaded - you can either mean the derivative of functions with matrix arguments, or functions with vector arguments that have some matrix multi…

Yes UNSW maths. Maybe everybody else had it figured out, but certainly Norman was the first to publicly acknowledge that all the learning would have to be online within a few month…

I made a public bet with Norman in early 2020 (late Feb) about whether the university we were at would hold classes until the end of the term (he believed they would not due to cov…

I'd like to plug riptables ( https://github.com/rtosholdings/riptable ), which is (more-or-less) a performance upgrade to pandas.

Earthsea is great. Ursula also wrote a lot of amazing science fiction: left hand of darkness, the dispossessed, the lathe of heaven, the word for world is forest etc. All are worth…

I would appreciate references on the time complexity of merging sorted lists (if I am not worried about space complexity at all), for arbitrary n and m. There is an excellent discu…

Why do you say it fits very few uses cases?

Having a paper published can take a very very long time, a year is quite short and 6 months is basically the minimum wait. My last paper has taken 2 years to be accepted from the f…

But the symptoms of covid are very similar to e.g. the flu, and this would make you and your partner some of the first people on Europe to have had covid (given exponential increas…

My point is exactly that though - the choice of cost function is subjective. There is no best cost function, just a mapping from costs functions to optimal strategies.

As a point of curiosity, what do you mean by optimal? To me, I can see at least two (potentially different) cost functions that a Wordle strategy can aim to minimise. Firstly, you …

Very roughly I think you are saying that it is unclear whether rationalists are thinking differently, or whether the think in the same fashion and just think that they think differ…

Try lesswrong.com

One problem solving approach which I adopted around the time that I was very frequently reading Terry's blog was to personify the problem as a combatant. For example, when trying t…

I honestly can't think of a use case for excel that pandas doesn't handle better. The 1 million row limit is crazy limiting, it's just nicer to not have to worry about that kind of…

Why?

Why is it ludicrous - do you have a specific issue that you object too? How is living on Mars very different from e.g. the international space station or conditions in a nuclear su…

Why won't we go to Mars (ever)? You may be sceptical of it happening in the next 100 years but very confident in it happening in the next 500 years, it is a very strong claim to ar…

At the beginning of the most recent lockdown in my city I had been introduced by a friend to magic (specifically commander), and I had played enough with him to have started to be …

I thought a lot of the ideas in snowcrash were very interesting - particularly when you consider that the book was published in 1992 and so a lot of the elements that were cutting-…

Thank you for all your suggestions and commentary!

Thank you for your suggestions! I have read some of N.K Jemisin and enjoyed what I read, the others I have not heard of except for Liu Cixin. I've read the three-body problem but I…

Can anybody recommend authors like Stephenson? He is my favourite author by far and it's going to be a sad day when I exhaust his works.