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michaeld123

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Show HN: Antimatter – Match the opposites (Mahjong solitaire mechanic)

linguabase.org
12 points·by michaeld123·قبل 4 أشهر·5 comments

The New York Times hated crossword puzzles before it embraced them

bigthink.com
4 points·by michaeld123·قبل 4 أشهر·1 comments

Words with Spaces

linguabase.org
4 points·by michaeld123·قبل 6 أشهر·2 comments

The Small World of English

inotherwords.app
157 points·by michaeld123·السنة الماضية·70 comments

Show HN: Semantic Games – Word games based on meaning instead of spelling

inotherwords.app
4 points·by michaeld123·السنة الماضية·4 comments

comments

michaeld123
·قبل شهرين·discuss


  Location: Takoma Park, MD, USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: All LLMs, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Swift 
  Portfolio: https://www.michaeldouma.com
  Email: [email protected]
I help make performant systems easy to use, both the first time and the 1000th. Last year I built Linguabase, a semantic graph of 400K terms and 63M relationships from 130M LLM inferences. I work across the stack, from systems architecture to highly usable design, and I've led cross-functional teams of 9 to 40. Currently an AI Engineer at the U.S. Treasury. Previously ran a word-game studio funded by a $295K NSF SBIR. Earlier work includes SpicyNodes (40M users), ProstateCalculator (neural-net health AI, 1.5M patients), and time.gov. I judge games for IGF, MAGFest, CODiE, and GEE.

I'm good at communicating clearly: my interactive article on multi-word expressions in English trended on Hacker News in February.

Looking for an applied AI role at a smaller company where I can help you strategize, build, and deploy. I'd shine on developer tools, learning platforms, knowledge products, creative AI, thinky games, or anything that needs to be more accessible to users.

  Latest: https://www.linguabase.org, https://www.inotherwords.app
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldouma/
michaeld123
·قبل 3 أشهر·discuss


  Location: Takoma Park, MD, USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, LLM pipeline orchestration (130M+ API calls across Claude/GPT/Grok), JavaScript
  Portfolio: https://www.michaeldouma.com
  Email: [email protected]
My interactive article on multi-word expressions in English trended #1 on Hacker News in March. I help make systems easy to use, both the first time and the 1000th.

Currently at the U.S. Treasury as an AI specialist, but I want to get back to a smaller team. I've led cross-functional teams of 9 to 40. Last year, I launched Linguabase, a semantic graph of 400K terms and 63M relationships from 130M LLM inferences. Before that, I ran a word-game studio funded by a $295K NSF SBIR. Past work includes SpicyNodes (40M users), ProstateCalculator (neural-net health AI, 1.5M patients), and time.gov. I judge games for IGF, MAGFest, CODiE, and GEE.

Looking for an applied AI role at a smaller company where I can build. Developer tools, learning platforms, knowledge products, creative AI, brain health. Anywhere the core problem is some version of 'this is powerful but nobody can figure it out.'

  Latest: https://www.inotherwords.app
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldouma/
michaeld123
·قبل 4 أشهر·discuss
Both your points are solid. I think I'm pretty liberal about opposites, I can see opposites to major political and cultural figures too. You are right that the mahjong presentation loses rigor if there's not enough downside from choosing the wrong sequence. The mobile mahjong games often have a small fill-tray so the player needs to really focus on the sequence.
michaeld123
·قبل 4 أشهر·discuss
the older generation of vectors, like word2vec, compress to one sense of a word, but even if we ignore polysemy, opposites have a lot in common. So for any antonym pair, they would not be minus-1, they would be actually pretty close.

The big challenge is when we go beyond antonyms with clear scales like heat, speed, size. To me "as of now" is recent, and therefore opposite to "old". I would like a word other than "opposite" or "antonym" or "contrast" that captures a wider range.
michaeld123
·قبل 4 أشهر·discuss
Historical look back at old articles on this popular word game. February 15, 2022 - bigthink.com Long before the Wordle mania, there was the crossword puzzle craze. And newspapers around the world condemned them as an “invasive weed” that caused mental illnesses and even murder.
michaeld123
·قبل 4 أشهر·discuss


  Location: Takoma Park, MD, USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, Swift, JavaScript, semantic systems, LLM orchestration
  Portfolio: https://www.michaeldouma.com
  Email: [email protected]
I had an article trending on HN last week about "words with spaces" in English. I can help you make your complicated system be more usable for your consumers.

I have a track record that spans from govt services (I created time.gov in 1999), visualizations (SpicyNodes, 40M users), AI-based health info before AI was a thing (ProstateCalculator, 1.5M patients), and association-based word games (two games, plus a game-centric game studio, NSF funded w/ $295K SBIR). I also judge games for several awards (IGF, MagFest, CODiE, GEE, Serious Games).

How can I help you? Maybe your project needs an overall product vision, or incremental improvements that help first-time and long-time users know and (enjoy!) using your product.

I would love to work with your team in a product/design leadership role, at a smallish-company. I can work with developer tools, learning platforms, knowledge products, brain health, creative AI.

  Latest: https://www.inotherwords.app
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldouma/
michaeld123
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.
michaeld123
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
And I attempted to add your 'svart hull' note.
michaeld123
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
I just adapted your comments into the paragraph starting with "German". Hopefully accurately.
michaeld123
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
My bad. there's a little sidebar about it, but I put it lower after the chart because there wasn't room. You might still not find my logic on the 15% satisfying, but it's there.
michaeld123
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
It's not so much the prompt, as the volume. This overall project has involved >100M LLM inferences, spread across 1.9M headwords. the building block is "what words or short terms are related to X?", but scaled out. Plus a lot of filtering. So it's mostly a reflection of English, and also a reflection of what ChatGPT and Claude report back as a significant collocation.
michaeld123
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
Ha — you're probably right that it would have been less controversial. But I kept it precisely because it's arguable. Added a parenthetical acknowledging the HN debate and framing it as on-the-fence by design
michaeld123
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
Added a note: "'I love you' isn't opaque, but it's tight enough to put on a tile." The familiar end of the spectrum picks up collocations that are transparent but loaded — I'm not claiming they're words in the traditional sense, but they're useful vocabulary for word games, which is where I'm coming from.
michaeld123
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
You were right — it is now. Thanks
michaeld123
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
Yeah — added a note below the slider that the obscure end is noise (LLM artifacts, jargon fragments, Wiktionary debris) and that where to draw the line is up to the reader. It was always intended to show the full gradient including where it breaks down, but that wasn't stated
michaeld123
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
Added Japanese nettō alongside the Slavic examples. Thanks for the specifics
michaeld123
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
This was a great detail — added Russian kipyatok and Polish wrzątok to the article as evidence that "boiling water" carries enough conceptual weight that other languages crystallized it into a single word
michaeld123
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
Added Dutch "creditcard" as another example. Thanks
michaeld123
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
Added a German/Norwegian section — but vidarh corrected me below: German doesn't 'remove the space,' the compound never had one. Adding a space changes the meaning or breaks the grammar. The article now reflects that.
michaeld123
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
Great example — I added svart hull to the article as an illustration of a language that writes it as two words but still puts it in the dictionary because the meaning isn't obvious from the parts. That's exactly the instinct English lacks.