hgibbs

6 ms·

1.
by hgibbs 3y ago
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.
2.
by hgibbs 3y ago
Can you give an example? I am unfamiliar (and interested).
3.
by hgibbs 3y ago
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 multiplication terms. Either way, I don't really u
4.
by hgibbs 4y ago
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 months.
5.
by hgibbs 4y ago
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 covid). Norman was the only one with the guts to publicly point
6.
by hgibbs 4y ago
I'd like to plug riptables ( https://github.com/rtosholdings/riptable ), which is (more-or-less) a performance upgrade to pandas.
7.
by hgibbs 4y ago
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 reading.
8.
by hgibbs 5y ago
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 discussion in Volume 3 of TAOCP, but the references within are qu
9.
by hgibbs 5y ago
Why do you say it fits very few uses cases?
10.
by hgibbs 5y ago
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 first time I submitted it, despite it being largely the same
11.
by hgibbs 5y ago
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 increase in case counts it cannot have circulated for long before e
12.
by hgibbs 5y ago
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.
13.
by hgibbs 5y ago
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 can try to minimise the expected number of guesses, and seco
14.
by hgibbs 5y ago
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 differently? I suspect their are elements of both: I believe some
15.
by hgibbs 5y ago
Try lesswrong.com
16.
by hgibbs 5y ago
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 to prove an inequality that seemed straightforward I wou
17.
by hgibbs 5y ago
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 stuff.
18.
by hgibbs 5y ago
Why?
19.
by hgibbs 5y ago
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 sub in terms of human habitats? The other bits seem relatively
20.
by hgibbs 5y ago
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 argue that it will never happen in the broader context of
21.
by hgibbs 5y ago
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 annoyed at how often I was losing - so I went out and bought
22.
by hgibbs 5y ago
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-edge on release have had time to diffuse into scifi culture.
23.
by hgibbs 5y ago
Thank you for all your suggestions and commentary!
24.
by hgibbs 5y ago
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 found it a bit jarring how 'magical' the res
25.
by hgibbs 5y ago
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.
26.
by hgibbs 5y ago
Is what you say less true of traditional exchanges? Maybe it is, but I haven't seen someone crunch the numbers - I'd be happy to read a comparison to that effect.
27.
by hgibbs 5y ago
My question was in relation to the parent comments claim that buying puts can cause unlimited losses - I was pointing out that this was wrong. The original comment seems to be edited now
28.
by hgibbs 5y ago
That's not right either, your downside for selling puts is limited by the strike (worst case is you pay K for a stock worth 0). Short call positions are the ones with unlimited downside (worse case is that you get K but have to cover t
29.
by hgibbs 5y ago
Puts have limited downside?
30.
by hgibbs 5y ago
But how do we get the prices? If I tell you the at-the-money front-month call is $1000 will you tell me the vol is 100pa?

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