Hacker News: mbbbackus

New comment by mbbbackus in "Everyone is capable of, and can benefit from, mathematical thinking"

mbbbackus — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 15:21:17 +0000

I've been reading the author's book, Mathematica, and it's awesome. The title of this post doesn't do it justice.

He shows that math skill is almost more like a sports talent than it is knowledge talent. He claims this based on the way people have to learn how to manipulate different math objects in their heads, whether treating them as rotated shapes, slot machines, or origami. It's like an imagination sport.

Also, he inspired me to relearn a lot of fundamental math on MathAcademy.com which has been super fun and stressful. I feel like I have the tetris effect but with polynomials now.

New comment by mbbbackus in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2024)"

mbbbackus — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 15:46:58 +0000

Location: Washington D.C.

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Typescript, React, Node, Django, SQL

Resume: https://benback.us/static/media/Backus_Resume.de670ddec52d5d...

Email: mbbbackus@gmail.com

Portfolio: benback.us

I'm a fullstack web developer from Stanford who's looking to work at a fast growing company, preferably in AI but any company with interesting problems to solve will excite me.

New comment by mbbbackus in "No one buys books"

mbbbackus — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 21:56:17 +0000

Currently in the same boat! When you say beta readers, do you mean other friends/writers or like people on twitter

ChatGPT has been down for an hour

mbbbackus — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:56:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/the-ship-burns-without-its-captain-as-chatgpt-without-sam-altman-has-been-experiencing-a-near-total-service-outage-for-nearly-an-hour

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38373092

Points: 4

# Comments: 3

New comment by mbbbackus in "Washington, DC, avoided the worst price rises that have plagued American cities"

mbbbackus — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 18:38:00 +0000

I live in the part of Arlington that this article talks about the most and it's so fascinating to learn about the history of how the area got developed. It really does feel like the county has nailed the the development of Ballston and Clarendon. The only thing I'd complain about is parking. Street parking has costed me over a thousand dollars lol (my car got shot by a bb gun and insurance didn't pay so that's mostly why, but otherwise it feels super safe here)

New comment by mbbbackus in "Improving mathematical reasoning with process supervision"

mbbbackus — Wed, 31 May 2023 20:03:28 +0000

Good point. You can create a formal definition of hallucinations in formal language, like math and logic, but probably not for natural language. There are bound to be edge cases where natural language defies the rules of formal logic without being incoherent. But, while you might not be able to have a simple formal definition, maybe you could create a model that's trained to recognize these edge cases, and the model would be a sort of approximation of a formal definition.

New comment by mbbbackus in "Improving mathematical reasoning with process supervision"

mbbbackus — Wed, 31 May 2023 18:15:54 +0000

Really excited to see if this approach can help reduce hallucinations overall. Process supervision combined with the browsing models could drastically improve how logically sound anything that's generated is. Creating consistently valid logic is the harder part so this is awesome.

New comment by mbbbackus in "Good conversations have lots of doorknobs"

mbbbackus — Tue, 09 May 2023 17:12:30 +0000

Best article I've read on here in a while. From now on, whenever there's dead air in a conversation, I'm just gonna drop "I get weirded out when couples treat their dogs like babies."

Also, this is great for relationship advice too. Personally, I always struggle with asking too many yes/no or how many questions rather than asking why/how questions. Givers vs Takers aside, if I had to guess, I'd say that "doorknobs" can be created by saying or asking something the gets you to explore each others' opinions and experiences.

I also thought the part about how sharing boring mutual memories is more fun than exciting individual memories is interesting, but maybe not a hard rule to follow. I've been more interested in scuba diving recently because of some of the awesome stories my friends have told me.

New comment by mbbbackus in "Analog"

mbbbackus — Sat, 24 Dec 2022 14:50:01 +0000

In my experience, the commitment to read every day is more important than how much. If I’m in a spacey mood, I can still power through a page in a meaningful way. Plus, sometimes I’ll get momentum from that and then the next few pages will pull me in.