alt Hacker NewsThis article does two things which make it unhelpful for me:
1. It uses math notation. This is a software development site, wouldn't this be much more clear to this audience written as psuedo code instead of a complex series of greek and latin letters?
2. It doesn't step through a concrete example. What is hollow R raised to the (M * d_v) ? Is it a number, a set, a list, a matrix?
To use an example I understand: RAG used to seem complicated to me when only math people were talking about it in math words. For example, let's take a line from wikipedia on embeddings:
> the representation is a real-valued vector that encodes the meaning of the word in such a way that the words that are closer in the vector space are expected to be similar in meaning
What made it clear was learning that generating an embedding is just a function(string) -> list[float], and RAG is just taking a list[float] for your prompt and finding other list[float] that are close to it in your dataset.
So what would make this article more clear, is step through a simplified example of putting a value into a memory store and querying that memory store, showing the actual data structures.
Replies
Upvoting you for this is quite fair. Mathematicians do seem to suffer from the Feldspar Problem:
>It's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the formulas for Olivine and one or two Feldspars
That being said the llm is indeed the universal translator — the babelfish supreme — and is excellent at translating whatever you want into pseudocode in your language of choice.
Send the link to Claude or your favorite alternative, and cut-and-paste your comment into the box, and you'll get exactly what you want.
> This is a software development site, wouldn't this be much more clear to this audience written as psuedo code instead of a complex series of greek and latin letters
At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a forum where people can post arbitrary links to other sites, some of which might have audiences that might not be "the exact set of people who read Hacker News". I'm not sure you'd be able to make a compelling argument that alexwang.ai is aimed at software developers and no one else.