Viewing profile — robotelvis

The goal is that this tutorial shouldn't require much math knowledge. If there is anything in there that is too hard to understand then let me know. My 11 year old son seemed to ge…

I've created an interactive tutorial that teaches how AI models work. I set myself the goal of making it approachable enough that my 11 year old son Isaac can fully understand it. …

Hi HN, I'm Rob. I built Broomy because I got frustrated with the one-thing-at-a-time workflow of existing coding tools. When I work with AI coding agents, I typically have 5-10 tas…

I built a fun little history visualization called Histomap Reborn, inspired by John Sparks’ 1931 Histomap. It shows the relative power of civilizations over time, plus layers for t…

I also looked at getting a flip phone but decided it wasn't really viable. Realistically you need to have an iOS or Android phone, because even if you don't need it /most/ of the t…

I played with disabling Safari but it's hard to sustain that because you'll often find yourself needing to open a random QR code to do something. But I have buried it on the third …

Cool that you were able to do that. There are definitely lots of things you need a smartphone for today, but fortunately few enough that it's practical to not have a smartphone wit…

New Public ( https://newpublic.org ) | Senior+ Software Engineer | REMOTE (US, Canada) | Full-time | 160-175k We are working with a consortium of public broadcasters around the wor…

I was asked to give a talk on how to make the most out of OpenAI's new Codex coding agent, and it turned into a blog post. Codex works best when you have a really clean code base, …

Best to apply to the jobs you think are interesting using the form. If we think you could be a good match, then we'll reach out to you.

New Public ( https://newpublic.org ) | Open Source Developer | REMOTE | Full time $140-$160k We are working with a consortium of public broadcasters around the world to create a pu…

If your advisor is one of the stars of their field, then probably more than one of their grad students will be professors. If not, then probably none of them will. Otherwise this p…

In my experience the best approach is to first try to solve the problem without having read the prior work, then read the prior work, then improve your approach based on the prior …

I think part of the issue is that the people who want simple non-SUVs are the people who mostly buy used cars. The majority of people buy their cars used, but the car makers make t…

Demis was a legend at Cambridge. I was in CS a few years below him. He would have had very strong recommendations from professors.

The flip side is that if punishments are eye watering harsh then people will be even less willing to inflict them. Bear in mind also that the vast majority of academic fraud isn’t …

Calling out bad work is career suicide. You are defecting on your tribe. That’s half of the problem.

Another reason for doing this is that if the people doing replication also do original research then calling out someone’s work as bad incentivizes them to sabotage your work when …

The tricky thing with randomizing is that science gets very specialized, both with equipment required and knowledge. So there may only be a handful of people whose work you can com…

Well you aren’t going to get tenure unless you distort your results and it’s hard to change established habits. That, and you select for the kind of people who are willing to fake …