Recent content on Lucas Pauker
We love to optimize Technical people love to optimize every little thing. For example, I am always thinking about how to use my time, money, and knowledge in the most effective way to the point of getting upset when I do things suboptimally. However, everyone optimizes for different things. When I had my first software engineering job, I was learning to use vim and I downloaded a bunch of…
Debugging prod after shipping on Friday Your job as a software engineer Every line of production code is a bet on speed, safety, and correctness. When you ship software, you are balancing: Getting it done fast -> shipping faster means the feature appears earlier for customers and ultimately the business makes more money Not introducing bugs -> bugs can cause outages or other errors that lead to…
How to learn I did competitive gymnastics growing up, and the training was chaos…in a good way. You had to be comfortable flying through the air, twisting, flipping, and hanging upside down. Even one skill, like a giant (spinning in full circles around the bar), had a hundred little steps. You first learn it with your hands strapped to the bar, feeling the motion through your body. Then a…
He had chased the city for most of his life. It began with a rumor, tucked in the margins of an old book: a golden city, untouched by time, hidden beyond the last bend of the river. He was young then, and the idea took hold like a fever. Over the years, he followed maps that led nowhere, voices that faded into trees, and trails that vanished in the rain. But still, he pressed on, certain that one…
I have recently seen a lot of rhetoric about this study that shows that developers take longer to code with AI compared to without AI. However, speed isn’t the whole story. The real benefit is that AI finishes your thoughts. You start writing or coding and it carries the thread to completion. That means less mental juggling, less half-baked ideas, less cognitive strain. AI is not just an…
Recently, when I was at the airport looking to get a ride share back home I checked the price of both Uber and Lyft. I noticed that an Uber was 25$ and a Lyft was 39$…that is a price difference of 14$, or more than half the price of the Uber! The Lyft ride was 56% more expensive… How can two multibillion publicly traded companies have such different pricing? Both companies have entire teams…
I remember watching a video a while ago where a pro card counter answers questions about gambling. In one of his answers, he said that what makes someone a true gambler is that the joy of winning a bet is more than the sadness from losing a bet. This has stuck with me since I watched the video over a year ago. Since then, I sometimes think about why people gamble and what makes some people more…
With holiday season in full swing, people may be more enticed to give to charity. However, there is a question of how to optimize your charitable donations. Specifically, I would like to optimize charitable donations for maximum impact. It seems to me that there are two parts to this equation:
This is a story about me. I wanted to know why we are here and how I should live my life since these questions have been bothering me lately. First, I went to a church. The priest told me that I needed to accept Jesus as the lord and savior. “But I’ve never even met Jesus, so how can he be my lord?” I thought. So I left the church and went to a synagogue where they told me about…
Why home runs? Some of the best moments in baseball games are home runs. Something about hitting the ball out of the park is satisfying. Since baseball season just started, I wanted to model a part of the game. I decided to model home runs since they are pretty rare events but should still be able to be accurately predicted. When I say accurately predicted, I mean that we can accurately predict…
Introduction The goal of this article is to explore the latency of different OpenAI models. When using AI models in production, latency is an important factor to consider. Comparing Model Architectures First, I test the latency for different OpenAI models. I test the following models: gpt-4 , gpt-4-0613 , gpt-3.5-turbo , gpt-3.5-turbo-0613 , gpt-3.5-turbo-16k , gpt-3.5-turbo-16k-0613 ,…
Disclaimer: This article mentions https://terra-cotta.ai/ , an LLM experimentation platform I am building Introduction ChatGPT, Bard, and other large language models (LLMs) are very useful for a wide variety of tasks from writing code to answering complex questions to aiding with education. However, these models are ultimately limited by the data that they are trained on. Also, these models are…
Advancements in artificial intelligence and language models have made significant impacts in various fields from healthcare to finance to entertainment. Here are 50 practical applications of AI that are currently in use or have the potential to be implemented in various industries. Let me know if any of these ideas inspire you or if you build any of them! Text Analysis Automatically generate…
Below are reflections of our startup journey participating in the Floodgate Reactor Program. We have strong opinions, loosely held and while these opinions reflect our current state of mind and understanding of the world might change as we continue our entrepreneurial journeys. Introduction H-2A is a US government program that allows farmers to bring foreign seasonal agricultural labor to the US.…
At the beginning of 2022, we began the Floodgate Reactor program with the hopes of finding a successful startup idea and learning how to build a successful company. We started the program with an idea in cybersecurity related to vulnerability patch management. By the end of the summer, we were working on an idea that focused on solving farmer labor shortages and building a global talent…
Introduction Everyone has a framework, a basis by which they make decisions and navigate the uncertainty of the world. Frameworks are developed over time through knowledge and experience. Learning is a process in which we can incorporate new knowledge and experience into our existing framework. Working on a startup opened the floodgates to new knowledge and experience rushing into our frameworks…
In this blog post, we will explain why H-2A is a crucial program that supports the livelihood of countless farmers and workers. H-2A is a US government program that allows farmers to bring foreign seasonal agricultural labor to the US. In 2021, over 300,000 workers came to the US under this program and over 16,000 farms across the country used the program. The H-2A visa lets workers stay in the US…
Introduction I recently decided to restore an old Peugeot bike. I wanted to have a nice fixed gear bike to ride and learn more about how bikes work. The bike before restoration. In this blog post, I’ll talk about the process for disassembling the bike, repainting the frame, and assembling it again. I’ll also talk about some mistakes I made and lessons I learned that could be useful for…
Introduction I recently read Ed Thorpe’s Beat the Dealer , a book about how Thorpe, a mathematician, found a way to gain an edge in blackjack. In the book, Thorpe uses computer simulations to calculate the best blackjack strategy as well as card-counting strategies. Since I took a reinforcement learning class last quarter, I wanted to apply one of the most common algorithms, Q-learning, to…
Faster than a Supercomputer? In the 1980s, American physicist Richard Feynman proposed the idea of quantum computers to model complex quantum systems. In October 2019, around 40 years later, Google AI and NASA scientists unveiled a quantum computer which ran an experiment in a few minutes that would take the fastest supercomputer 10,000 years. The quantum computer sped up the computation by a…
Introduction In this blog post, I will implement a few simple time series models of a stock price over time. I will also see how they do if we trade using them. We will look at moving averages (MA) and exponential moving averages (EMA). Data First, we need to download the price data. For this article, we will use SPY historical open price data. We can download this from Yahoo Finance . Now,…
Introduction This blog post will discuss the delivery options for someone who is short US Treasury (UST) futures contracts. During the last month of trading, the short “delivers” the USTs specified in the futures contract to the long. The short has various options when they make delivery of the treasuries. Understanding these options is interesting and important for anyone who trades…
Why Exchange Clocks Matter In high frequency trading (HFT), time is literally money. An edge of a few microseconds could translate to millions in profits. The most popular markets for cash products (equity, bonds, etc.) are in New York (NYSE, Nasdaq), while the most popular futures and options market is in Chicago (CME). Since cash and futures influence each other, getting data between New York…
The Question I, like many others, started learning to play piano when I was around 8 years old. I took lessons, learned songs, and gained an appreciation for the instrument. I have been playing (with some breaks) until today. Although I have been playing for a while, it wasn’t until taking my first music theory class in college that I started thinking deeply about why music is constructed in the…
Introduction I spent the summer of 2019 as a physics research intern at the Stanford University Solar Lab . I was very fortunate to have a wonderful advisor and had a great summer overall. I created machine learning models to characterize time series data for solar flare prediction. In this article, I will first provide some physics background about solar flares, then dive into my research. For a…
Recently, I wondered if I could create a random number generator using the digits of pi. Disclaimer: this article’s purpose is not to create a computationally efficient random number generator; it is just a fun proof of concept. In order to create a random number generator with pi, we must first verify that the digits of pi are randomly distributed. This can be accomplished in a few lines of…
Introduction This project done for my CS221 class aims to classify classical music by musical era (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern) with composers as a proxy. Using audio processing techniques, such as Short-time Fourier Transform, we extracted features such as the spectrogram and chromagram of the audio data from two datasets, Free Music Archive and MAESTRO . We used two ensemble…
Introduction I recently became interested in neural networks and sought interesting applications of what they could do. Neural networks are based on how the human brain works; the networks are made up of many nodes that take inputs and predict outputs. Over time, with more data, the networks improve by correcting for error, known as backpropagation. Neural networks become especially useful when…
This project done for my CS106X class mixes two given mp3 files together and has a visualization to go with it. Introduction I have always been awestruck by DJing and have had little idea of how it is done. I set out to create a python script to mix songs to understand the process a bit better. I first found that DJs use many effects in their mixes. These effects include changing tempo of songs,…
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