Viewing profile — nwhitehead

(Spouse's story) Today I used Claude to diagnose a blocking bug in a Steam game I really wanted to play. It took it 18 mins, but it unpacked the Godot package, figured out the bug,…

This is fun, I'm curious to try it. An alternative that I experimented with and found to be very usable is one solar panel, a small camping battery ("portable power station"), and …

You would think so... I asked this question in a college-level class with clickers. For the initial question I told them, "This is a trick question, your first answer might not be …

One idea is to put more pressure on writers of letters of recommendation. There is obviously already some rather weak "reputational incentive" to not give letters of recommendation…

I like how you can handle lots of languages in a very systematic way, that is cool. One thing I like about pyodide is that it supports lots of packages like numpy. How would you su…

I'm using the new generation of small models to do semantic search for music lyrics. The first step is giving the model the text and asking, "What is this text about?" Without fine…

This is a good one. It is all too easy to spend years casually "interested" in a topic without developing a true foundation of the important ideas in the field. In my case I spent …

This is awesome! This reminds me of MinBLEP audio synthesis of discontinuous functions ( https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/papers/icmc01-hardsync.pdf ). Instead of doing things at high s…

Agree, automated testing is good as far as it goes but really shouldn't be the whole story with grading. Another fun tool is CrowdGrader ( https://www.crowdgrader.org/ ). It's a ni…

My favorite is Welford's Algorithm [1] which lets you compute mean and standard deviation in one pass. Every programmer should be aware of it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al…

OLGA was full of transcribed songs, great for learning guitar. Now it's gone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-line_Guitar_Archive

I would recommend all the works by Robert Nozick, listed at #14 on the list for "Anarchy, State and Utopia". While that might be his most influential book, I found his other books …

Steps to publishing your research: -Do a literature survey and read LOTS of papers. If you are not coming from the standard academic route you are probably vastly underestimating h…

> If you’re relying on c99 complex or std::complex and fast complex operations, and you don’t have -fcx-limited-range or -ffast-math turned on, you should probably consider this a …

This is fun to read, I'm always amazed as the disconnect between public presentations and the engineering reality of what's really going on. For me, "Larrabee" died during it's fir…

What's wrong with sequence A096774 (numbers with 9*10^n+7 prime)? Why is sequence A000027 (numbers starting at 1 increasing by 1 each time) better? Because it comes earlier in the …

I'm solving "2^... = 256" and it gives NaN. It works when the right hand side is smaller than 200 but fails when the right side is larger than 242.

This example makes it really clear what's going on. Could someone translate it to do reverse automatic differentiation? That's the one I never quite understand.

This might be true on really weird platforms, but with IEEE-754 floating point this isn't true. Integers within a big range are exactly representable without any rounding error. Do…

Yes, I'm working on a good way to do this, this is high priority.

Yes, there is a way to install more packages. Inside the notebook you can do "import pineapple", then "%require NAME" which is just like doing "pip install NAME". There is also a p…

That is a great idea. I'm also thinking about ways to get multiple "pages" inside of one notebook file, let me know if you have good ideas for that.

If you grab the latest code in master from https://github.com/numpy/numpy you'll get support for @ in numpy. It's great!