Portfolio Alternatives

portfolio reviews and mentions

• Common Lisp Resources
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Apr 2022

  Oh I'd love to share it, I just can't. Well I made one that did make its way to Fortran by being independently developed, the Lisp version was in 2011 and the Fortran I think...2017. The brute forcer in AI-Feynman.

  https://github.com/SJ001/AI-Feynman/blob/master/aifeynman/sy...

  I talk about it in my portfolio, it's Guesser 1.0 and Guesser 2.0.

  https://github.com/daniel-cussen/portfolio/blob/master/portf...

• “A Pleasure to Burn”: We Are Closer to Bradbury’s Dystopia Than Orwell or Huxley
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Feb 2022

  I actually got a great insight into marketing from Fahrenheit 451.

  So what you should know is I spent a long time dedicated to creating algorithms, and in doing so created enough different material to make a portfolio: https://github.com/daniel-cussen/portfolio/blob/master/portf...

  And I got that idea from Bradbury, at one point--in my recollection of the book, I can't find the part I'm looking for--what I remember is the antagonist (Captain Beatty) saying there's ten million soldiers, but reporting it as one million is more impressive, so that's what's claimed. But a million was the magic number of the twentieth century. Now it's a billion.

  So in my portfolio I describe an algorithm that beats the state of the art by a factor of a billion. It's a rough way of communicating it, it's not actually a fixed factor except in specific situations. And really it was about 1.07 billion. So, that's pure marketing--it's the truth, it will be faster by that much--but there's a reason it was about a billion and not more. I could have kept improving it, but it would have been counterproductive to its real purpose, which was talking about it to people and getting exposure as an algorithm writer. For those purposes, a factor of a trillion would have been much less impressive. I'd have to explain what a trillion is, it's such a big number you can't write it down because it's got twelve zeroes behind it, which confuses people. And it leads people to believe it wasn't a meaningful achievement, like I optimized something that didn't really matter.

  So there you go, even dystopian novels can have good ideas.