Indeed, there is the unfortunate fact that directly pointing out that a particular person has not read the paper is against HN's rules. Let us not violate the Prime Directive further.
If I understand the origin of this paper correctly, it is mainly the idea and work of an undergraduate student. From this perspective, several problems become more understandable. The limited computation done in support of the paper may have been done by a setup as meager as a lone student's laptop. The naïve view of machine learning as a field could be explained by undergraduate eagerness; indeed, perhaps they did "recently [find] out about least squares".
I agree with your thoughts on SGD. The authors did do PCA for some of their tests, but this entire setup should be buildable in a more efficient and incremental way.
I think, however, that the reason that this paper got the other three co-authors on it, despite its controversial nature, is that the core of the original idea is interesting and has yielded related fruit like UMAP [0] in the past. We should be more comfortable exploring it.
I like your book reference. It's informative and direct, without mumbo-jumbo. To accelerate the lookup for the next follower, start at p279.
If I understand the origin of this paper correctly, it is mainly the idea and work of an undergraduate student. From this perspective, several problems become more understandable. The limited computation done in support of the paper may have been done by a setup as meager as a lone student's laptop. The naïve view of machine learning as a field could be explained by undergraduate eagerness; indeed, perhaps they did "recently [find] out about least squares".
I agree with your thoughts on SGD. The authors did do PCA for some of their tests, but this entire setup should be buildable in a more efficient and incremental way.
I think, however, that the reason that this paper got the other three co-authors on it, despite its controversial nature, is that the core of the original idea is interesting and has yielded related fruit like UMAP [0] in the past. We should be more comfortable exploring it.
I like your book reference. It's informative and direct, without mumbo-jumbo. To accelerate the lookup for the next follower, start at p279.
[0] https://github.com/lmcinnes/umap