sfpotter

6 ms·

1.
by sfpotter 14d ago
*moves back to NYC*
2.
by sfpotter 2mo ago
The determinant of a polynomial mapping is a polynomial, which is the subject of the conjecture. To get the Jacobian determinant, all you need to do is compute partial derivatives of polynomials, and add, subtract, and multiply them togethe
3.
by sfpotter 2mo ago
No. This is about polynomials. The assumption that the Jacobian is nowhere zero is what is doing so much of the work. This means the Jacobian must in fact be constant. But obviously there are many mappings whose Jacobians are not constant
4.
by sfpotter 2mo ago
"At present, no language can rival, let alone surpass, Fortran when it comes to implementing long-lived, large-scale, massively-parallel scientific and engineering applications; not even C and C++." Huh??? A tremendous amount of s
5.
by sfpotter 4mo ago
So far as we know, consciousness only takes place in biological organism. A computer isn't a biological organism, therefore the burden of proof for claiming that an LLM is extraordinarily high. To me, this makes it reasonable to dism
6.
by sfpotter 4mo ago
There's a reason so many cab companies have fleets of Priuses.
7.
by sfpotter 5mo ago
"Serious delirium!"
8.
by sfpotter 5mo ago
He didn't pooh-pooh anyone's careers.
9.
by sfpotter 5mo ago
"Legibility" here just means something that is visibly important/useful/scrutable/not a waste of time to (i.e. "is legible to") a manager.
10.
by sfpotter 6mo ago
This is what the field of numerical analysis exists for. These details definitely have been treated, but this was done mainly early in the field's history; for example, by people like Wilkinson and Kahan...
11.
by sfpotter 6mo ago
This is just subdivision of Bernstein polynomials. The unifying way of looking at this is via the blossom of the Bezier curve (Bernstein polynomial). You can derive all manner of shifts, change of basis transformations, and so on using the
12.
by sfpotter 6mo ago
It could easily be both.
13.
by sfpotter 6mo ago
The truck would come by once a week to pick up all of our dirty diapers and drop off a new set of clean diapers. The service provided a bucket with a cloth bag inside of it that had enough capacity for one kid for a week. Packaging up = clo
14.
by sfpotter 6mo ago
With the service we used, they picked up and dropped off diapers once per week using a big truck. They also drove around to do the same for many other people at the same time. You can't call this diaper delivery "constant". A
15.
by sfpotter 6mo ago
What do you find confusing about the idea of a diaper service? It seems too unsanitary for you? The idea that it might cost slightly more than disposable diapers is intolerable to you? Do you have any reason to believe washing diapers actua
16.
by sfpotter 6mo ago
The energy saving is clear and gets better year after year as the grid continues to green. You can also line dry cloth diapers which saves a lot of energy. I never had any trouble with cloth diapers. You can always have a blow out with any
17.
by sfpotter 6mo ago
They really do! Anyone who's thinking that a set of cloth diapers begins and ends with a single family has really got a pretty limited imagination.
18.
by sfpotter 6mo ago
Cloth shopping bags are a really bad comparison here. Some things working in favor of cloth diapers here are general greening of the grid, mitigating issues with electricity consumption. Beyond that, line drying diapers works very well an
19.
by sfpotter 6mo ago
This study has issues. Take a closer look at it. See my other comment on here responding to someone else who linked to it.
20.
by sfpotter 6mo ago
This study has serious methodological issues. I would encourage you to carefully peruse it yourself before citing. This is far from the only issue, but the fact that someone who works at Procter and Gamble is on the study's advisory bo
21.
by sfpotter 6mo ago
Oops, talked to my wife and realized I got a detail wrong: we did not keep the diapers from the service, we gave them back. And the diapers we got from the service were almost surely used by plenty of other people before. Someone else on
22.
by sfpotter 6mo ago
We kept the diapers from our diaper service and the covers. The washing machines used by the service are much beefier and can handle these kind of loads easily, and will generally be more water efficient. We also got a good number of used d
23.
by sfpotter 6mo ago
Cloth diapers are good. We used them for our last kid with a diaper service and are going to do it again washing them ourselves with our next who is due at the end of the month. Regular diapers are useful to have either way. But cloth diape
24.
by sfpotter 6mo ago
He sees through his beer purchases but he doesn't see through his seeing through them.
25.
by sfpotter 7mo ago
What? Arbitrary precision arithmetic implemented in a compiled language will be faster than the alternative. This is no great mystery. The same is true of essentially all low-level symbolic or numerical math algorithms. You need to get to a
26.
by sfpotter 7mo ago
The reason it's preferred to use "=" instead of "\in" is because the way that Landau notation is generally used in practice is as a kind of ellipsis or placeholder. For example, the Taylor expansion e^x = 1 + x + O(
27.
by sfpotter 8mo ago
Why are you asking HN? Do you have anyone you know in your personal life you can talk to? Family or friends? Hopefully someone you know well can give you some honest feedback and help you figure out what would be a better fit for you. I don
28.
by sfpotter 9mo ago
You're in luck! As of a year ago, I work at McNeel on the math team on Rhino's in-house CAD kernel. Luckily, we own the entirety of the kernel, so we are free to improve it. I've been in the field of numerical methods for mos
29.
by sfpotter 9mo ago
Why would you say Rhino 3D "isn't CAD"?
30.
by sfpotter 9mo ago
I made a conscious choice to work at a small company rather than a large company because of this. The politics are smaller, but that doesn't mean the stakes are.

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