Hiring is hard: why good applicants without connections can get overlooked.

Knowing people is a great way to get hired. Nepotism is one obvious explanation (aka people hire you because they like you, or to gain favors from people who like you). I (along with most other people) think that nepotism is bad: it's unfair, and gives jobs to people who are probably not that good at them. However, it is a mistake to think that nepotism is the only reason why people who are known get hired, and that this practice is always bad. Some better reasons are:

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Double checking that Gauche's fingerprint kernels are positive definite.

GAUCHE is a library for Gaussian processes in chemistry. I contributed a small amount to GAUCHE several years ago but am not an active developer. I recently learned that some new fingerprint kernels were added. In this post I examine whether these kernels are positive definite (PD), and if there are any restrictions attached.

Using a small set of lemmas (of which two were new to me), I am convinced that all but two of the kernels are PD, without being restricted to binary vectors. The remaining 2 I am unsure of, but don't claim that they are not PD.

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Review of NeurIPS 2024 and predictions for ML in 2025

I was fortunate to attend NeurIPS 2024, arguably the largest and most influential machine learning conference in the world (thanks Valence for sponsoring my trip 🙏). In this post I will try to summarize what I learned at NeurIPS, and cautiously make some predictions for the year ahead.

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