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I saw a live demo of this recently and it was very impressive. It is very difficult to search the govt knowledge base because sources are in so many formats, different location, and have different hoops to gain access not to mention code words, acronyms, abbreviations, and the mixing of technical language with contract language. I think it will mostly used as a search tool rather than generating ideas.

I think the worry about GPT-4 making things up is valid. We all know what happened to they lawyer who used GPT. But I think this comes with training. Users need to be trained to use it as tool and to verify the outputs. Now will everyone do this? No. There are lazy and incompetent people in every large organization and the govt is no different.

The concern about a LLM influencing or biasing its output is also a worry. Maybe there isn't a good solution to this one. I would say that having a govt group testing and assessing it would be best however they don't have the expertise form such a group which is the whole reason why they are leaning on companies like MS to guide their AI usage in the first place. I could also argue that this may not matter much anyway since the govt decisions are already heavily influenced by lobbyist and illegal promotion / favoritism of contractors.

I still have a Tandy2000. I learned to code on it as a kid. I still boot it up every now and again to play some King's Quest.

I see other people on here say this but I think it is so important that it can be said again. WRITE, WRITE, WRITE! As you read and learn I think it is so important to write. I suggest a mixture of notes, journal entries, and short essays. The more you do this the more your thoughts will gain clarity and you will see themes emerge from what you are doing.

As far as finding 'what to do with it'. I think that will develop over time as you talk with people about your interests. Share your writings as best as you can and join discussions. See if there are local MeetUp (or something similar) groups on the topics that you find most interesting. If so, join them and go to discussions. Ask if you can give short presentations on topics to the group. If you find a book or essay particularly interesting then send an email to the author.

Another trick that has worked for me; Some famous authors can be sometimes really hard to reach. But look at the work that they cite. Usually you will find some academic paper that they quote or reference. Look up the author / authors of those papers and read about them and contact them directly. Professors LOVE to talk about their work and usually (from my experience) they are happy to talk to people about their research who have read their papers. From those conversations you might find a path to a career or hobby that make you feel fullfilled. Enjoy the journey.

Congrats on the launch!

How do you prevent this from turning into another FB? Is there a difference between using this and using FB where you have all of your posts / activity only viewable with your friends? I guess one obvious difference is FB's advertising and data mining. Are there any features that you absolutely will not add to Circles in the future because they will 'cross the line' into turning Circles into a FB clone?

I really agree with your comments; especially number 1. Often I can't use some black box implementation of an solver (or other algorithm for that matter) without some modifications. Numerical stability is a big one but also just performance. Sometimes the mathematically correct way of doing something is not always the best in practice. Short cuts and approximations can provide huge benefits. It is difficult to make those modifications without understanding the inner workings of the original method.

I had an issue with my pixel and had to send it in. The phone got ran over by a car and was smashed. It could be turned on but I could not do a factory reset. I have financial and other private information on it. So the first thing I did was try to keep it on for days until the battery ran out to see if the hardware encryption would help secure the data. After that I still wasn't sure if the information was secure enough so I took a drill through it to destroy as many of the ICs that I could. My wife then pointed out that maybe this self destruction that I did would violate some terms and void the insurance even though the phone was useless after being run over by the car. So, in the end, I decided to just buy a new phone without doing a trade in or insurance claim. The $500 or so was worth not risking PI.

I was never a big social media person. But back in 2012 I totally went off of social media all together. It happened because I was in grad school and my girlfriend at the time had lots of anxiety issues. Her doctor recommended that she delete her facebook. She was worried about "missing out" on things if she deleted it so her and I decided to delete it together at the same time. 10 years have passed and I still don't have an account and don't miss it at all! The only social media that I have is LinkedIn (and HN) for work purposes but haven't logged into it more than a few times a year.

There are some challenges to not having social media however. It has been integrated into so many other apps and platforms that it is hard to get away from. For example, some of my close friends have a Messenger group chat. Sometimes I have missed out on planning events because of that. Also platforms like Oculus started to require a FB to log in. Online dating was also hard. Dates would ask for my FB or Instagram account and when I told them that I didn't have one they would think I was trying to hide something. I don't want to totally bash social media BUT I really hope that it goes back to what it was originally made for and all of the integrations stop. I don't think this is the trend though...

Good question. Also consider that most of the threats to GPS are ground based jamming. It is fairly easy and cheap to make a jammer out of hobbyist parts and knock out a large area of GPS coverage. However, just because someone jams GPS for an entire city doesn't mean that they are able to jam the LEO satellites flying over that city.

SpaceX will (and does) have good coverage but the accuracy will not be to anywhere what people have come to expect from GPS. At least not without major design changes to focus on this as a product from SpaceX.

Yotta Navigation | Onsite / Remote | Full Stack Developer, Sensor Fusion / ML / Navigation Engineer, UI / UX Engineer, C/C++ Developer, Technical Program Manager | Full-time | Santa Clara, CA | yottanav.com/jobs Yotta Nav. is an exciting small engineering company started in 2008 to create novel navigation hardware and algorithms. We specialize in sensor fusion and machine learning for wearable and handheld navigation devices. We are currently looking to fill two key senior level roles; a full-stack engineer for internal tools and a sensor fusion / machine learning engineer. HOWEVER we are looking for people for all roles listed above. In general, we are looking for some great developers. If you are interested and you don't match any of the listed job postings please feel free to still contact us.

Submit an application at yottanav.com/jobs or email jobs@yottanav.com

I agree. We only do on the order of 20 to 50 a day but only a few times a year. Having something like this would help a lot. Not that it can't be done on a computer but when in a rush and perhaps traveling or in the field having a one-to-many sd card cloner / writer is super helpful. The price isn't that bad considering people pay that much for a new cell phone each year.

Wonder if this will go under Intel Federal since GlobalFoundries is the only US foundry able to do some DoD work.

Sorry, I did not mean to imply that the only value that the creators had was making a nice UI. I truly meant it as a compliment. There is hard work involved in creating a product out of an idea. Seems like this will be a very useful product. Congrats to all of the people who have worked on it.

The idea seems simple enough and the math to do these kinds of predictions is fairly straight forward unless there is some secret sauce under the hood that isn't obvious. I guess the value is slick UI / tool that was created around it.

One question that I do have about these types of tools... how does one evaluate how well it worked? I guess in the end as long as the timeline wasn't too far off then you call it a win.

I think a useful tool for project planning is not necessarily simulating possible time-lines (or a estimated window of time for the project to be completed) however to intelligently identify a set of critical tasks within the list which would have a high probability of totally blowing up your time line their deadlines are missed. In project management / scheduling there are often critical path items listed. However often these critical items are semi-arbitrarily picked by the PM and not backed by and deep insights.

Yotta Navigation | Santa Clara, CA | Full Time | https://www.yottanav.com/jobs

Yotta Navigation is developing wearable activity tracking, GPS-denied navigation, and guidance systems and applications. We design the hardware, firmware, and ML / sensor fusion algorithms to make these systems work. There are a number of jobs listed on our website including: * Front end / UI developers * Sensor-fusion engineers * Software / Firmware / embedded Linux engineers * Mapping / GIS developers

If you don't see an exact match to a job listing but feel like you might be a great addition to our team feel free to contact us at jobs@yottanav.com or message me directly. Must be authorized to work in the US.

Usually Digital Twin = Model = Simulation. Different industries have different words for it. Some call a difference between a Digital Twin / Model and a Simulation where the simulation is the result of some external input being applied to a Digital Twin.

Either way I wouldn't think too much about it. Tech is full of these things. I have been working with AI and neural networks for years before it was called Machine Learning. Now I'm forced to use the term ML to sound relevant even though it is the same thing.

Thanks for the feedback! Seems like you and I both have had a bit of experience being first engineering hires at startups but have had very different experiences when it comes to rolls or a data scientist. I appreciate that.

My view is from a small startup with little to no room for single purpose employees.

When I first started hiring and working with data scientist my view was this: If you can only manipulate data and run it through pipelines to generate models then you can't do enough to be highly valuable. You either need to have a strong enough background in CS to build the pipelines / tools or a strong enough mathematics background to be able to propose cutting edge new ideas. From my experience it is hard to find someone who has one of these skill just from a University "data science" program. At a small company (at least ones that I have worked with) being only proficient in R and basic Python isn't enough. That being said, I have met and handful of Data Scientist who were very smart and self motivated enough to pick up on the lacking skills when given the chance.

My question to HN is this; are there rolls at these larger companies for a Data Scientist who who primarily just crunches data in R and Python without the ability to actually build the pipelines / tools or conduct research?

Thanks for the solid article! Reminds me about some bash writing that I have been avoiding.

I generate invoices using FreshBooks for years. However, I don't use many of the features so I eventually just started to create my own using a word template. Nothing fancy but gets the job done.

Yotta Navigation | Onsite / Remote | Full Stack Developer, Maps / UI SW Engineer | Full-time | Santa Clara, CA | yottanav.com/jobs

Yotta Nav. is an exciting small engineering company started in 2008 to create novel navigation hardware and algorithms. We specialize in sensor fusion and machine learning for wearable and handheld navigation devices. We are currently looking to fill two key senior level roles; a full-stack engineer for internal tools and a software engineer for UI with a focus on integrating maps and mapping features to a UI. Submit an application at yottanav.com/jobs or email jobs@yottanav.com

Yotta Navigation | Onsite / Remote | Full Stack Developer, Sensor Fusion / ML / Navigation Engineer, UI / UX Engineer | Full-time | Santa Clara, CA | yottanav.com/jobs

Yotta Nav. is an exciting small engineering company started in 2008 to create novel navigation hardware and algorithms. We specialize in sensor fusion and machine learning for wearable and handheld navigation devices. We are currently looking to fill two key senior level roles; a full-stack engineer for internal tools and a sensor fusion / machine learning engineer. We are also looking for a UI / UX engineer.

Submit an application at yottanav.com/jobs or email jobs@yottanav.com

I do agree with you on publishing seeds for Monte Carlo simulations however the argument against it is also very strong. Usually when you run a monte carlo simulation you are quoting the results in terms of statistics. I think it would be sufficient to say that you can 'reproduce' the results as long as your statistics (over many simulations with different seeds) is consistent with the published results. If you run a single simulation with are particular seed you should get the same results however this might be cherry picking a particular simulation result. This is good for code testing but probably not for scientific results. I think by running the code with new seeds is a better way to test the science.

This will probably be when I stop using my Oculus. When I first got my Rift I was super excited about the technology and it generally did not disappoint! I have never been much of a gamer but love the idea of VR. I, however, deleted my facebook account back in 2012 when I realized that it did not contribute anything to my life. Over the years I have had to make the decision between not being able to use a product or creating a facebook account just to use them. Most of those products were mobile apps that required facebook logins. I have always chosen to not use the products and will do so again.

Sure, just send me an email.

This is so important! I spend my life writing EKFs for navigation systems however did not have a good linear algebra education. It was a hard struggle! Now, every time I have a new hire or intern, the first thing that I go over is basic linear algebra and rotations including DCM, Euler angles, quaternions, and so on. I also make sure they understand it graphically such as how you can scale and project vectors using a matrix.

Yotta Navigation | Onsite / Remote | Full Stack Developer, Sensor Fusion / ML / Navigation Engineer | Full-time | Santa Clara, CA | yottanav.com/jobs

Yotta Nav. is an exciting small engineering company started in 2008 to create novel navigation hardware and algorithms. We specialize in sensor fusion and machine learning for wearable and handheld navigation devices. We are currently looking to fill two key senior level roles; a full-stack engineer for internal tools and a sensor fusion / machine learning engineer. Submit an application at yottanav.com/jobs or email jobs@yottanav.com

Windows 10 Home: Ignoring all of the typical complaints about windows like bloat wear and Cortana... I would be happy is just basic things worked. For example, I often have to switch between wireless networks for my job and the wifi icon in the bottom tray just randomly disappears about 80% of the time so I have to go through the full settings menu to get to it. Also, searching for applications or documents from the search bar will also search the internet?? I could go on forever.

I have to write a lot of technical reports and I really dislike writing. Writing first thing in the morning is the only way I can be productive with it.

I have basically only ever works at very small startups a research labs. I have toyed with the idea of joining one of the large companies. I have even interviewed and received job offers. In my head the upside would be (maybe) better pay, definitely better benefits, better on the job learning and collaboration (code reviews / mentorship), and most of all lots of new faces! All that being said I have never pulled the trigger on one of these offers. Thanks for sharing about what you have learned!