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jjdredd

Re:Lessons from my PhD on Wednesday December 29, 2021 @05:32PM (#29730958)
Wow, those who could find their own research topic were lucky. I've never seen anyone in my environment get that much freedom. The supervisor sets the problem and the student must solve it.

Edit: I was under the impression that even the postdocs are hired for a specific task.

Re:Lessons from my PhD on Wednesday December 29, 2021 @05:24PM (#29730869)
> full of petty and lame characters, absurd situations and pathetic developments.

Yeh, I wish I could understand this a few years ago. Pursuit of truth is not the primary goal of many tenure profs it seems.

Re:Ask HN: How many hours per day do you work? on Monday December 14, 2020 @02:15PM (#25421848)
Alarm going off 20-40 times a day would stress me out. Also, being aware of the alarm can make one feel tension and they could change the behavior.
I didn't expect to see Artemiev mentioned here. Great soviet composer and his "Meditation" is a very fitting track for the movie. Amazing blend of electronic and eastern traditional music. I didn't watch the whole video, but I don't think he mentioned Jugalbandi. The musician he asked to play for this track used to play mugams according to Eduard's words, perhaps that's why they say it resembles a certain mugam: Bayat Shiraz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrfGR70Y_YY

Edit: The use of this mugam by Artemiev is mentioned in the wikipedia page https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B0%D1%8F%D1%82%D1%8B...

Re:How to become a good theoretical physicist on Friday August 07, 2020 @10:03PM (#24088352)
I think the author is missing a couple of important points:

1) How would one approach this task having a day job?

2) How do you compensate for not having a chance to work in a suitable environment doing good research?

2a)Knowing and understanding everything that has been done in the past doesn't by itself make you a researcher. This (being a scientist) must be taught by actual theoretical physicists. There are many supervisors, but very few that can teach you to do research.

2b) Serious and worthwhile research is seldom done by one person. You need to collaborate or at least communicate with other scientists in the field (and sometimes even out of the field). You have to be in the right environment. Just reading arxiv won't quite cut it.

Re:The Wrongful Death of Toussaint Louverture on Monday June 29, 2020 @01:02PM (#23679430)
Also Santana had a song named after Toussaint but I don't think lyrics are describing anything about the actual person.
Re:Why remote work is hard and how it can be fixed on Thursday May 28, 2020 @04:39PM (#23342252)
I don't work at home all the time, but I've been struggling to find some metric to hold myself accountable for my own quality and intensity of work. Do you mind sharing your experience?
Re:State of Emacs Lisp on Guile on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @12:56PM (#23237129)
Integrating a compiler into a text editor to speed it up is a bit of an overkill imo. What if a lisp source changes and needs to be recompiled? What if several lisp files change? Does it mean that it also needs a sort of a build system? This brings the joke about an "operating system that lacks a decent editor" closer to reality (or reality closer to the joke).
Even 1-2 days of bad sleep (< 6 hrs) would destroy me either now or back when I was 20.
Re:Fortran Standard Library on Thursday May 14, 2020 @03:16PM (#23184064)
That's very cool but it's in no way specific to the FORTRAN language:

https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/documen...

contrary to the earlier comment:

> You can't do this in C/C++

On a side note: having (semi)automatic parallelization with code generation for GPGPU would be very nice.

> There is definitely code reuse, but it's in the form of the scientist collecting snippets of useful algorithm over the years and copy it to the project when they needed.

I think that's just bad programming practices.

Re:Fortran Standard Library on Thursday May 14, 2020 @01:35AM (#23175726)
Heh, I could have made a mistake about the origin of the saying. I haven't read that article.
Re:Fortran Standard Library on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @10:32PM (#23174589)
> The thing is, you can write a perfectly normal fortran code, and instantly gain speedup (CUDA, distributed computing with OpenMP, etc) just by enabling some compiler flags.

I'm not sure I understand you correctly. Can you give examples of such flags?

> Also, vector/matrix operations are first class in fortran and you don't need to rely on 3rd party libs.

It may be useful as long as you're hell-bent on not using libraries (which is somewhat contrary to one of the pro-FORTRAN arguments that FORTRAN has lots of libraries that are tested and ready to use).

This is a weak consolation though, since anything complex enough deals with custom matrix/vector types for sparse matrices or data types used in parallel computations.

Re:Fortran Standard Library on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @10:25PM (#23174544)
Could be, at least C++ has tools to implement better design. I've seen one guy's python code that looks worse than his FORTRAN code. There's a russian saying: "A true FORTRAN programmer can write FORTRAN code in any language".
Re:Fortran Standard Library on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @07:31PM (#23173124)
> Fortran has historically been noticeably faster than even C/C++ for numerical computations

Nowadays: faster - maybe, noticeably - I doubt it.

> supercomputers have better-optimized Fortran compilers than C compilers

I don't know about supercomputer compilers but mainstream compilers usually have the same backend for FORTRAN and C (as well as other implemented languages).

> created a great deal of high-quality legacy Fortran code that nobody feels an urgent need to port into C

Optimized and tested FORTRAN code - maybe, but not high-quality. I've seen some of it, FORTRAN makes it difficult to write readable, maintainable code. For this reason even scientist are rewriting their tools and libraries (that also require good performance) in C++: for example see Pythia, GEANT, cern root.

I was under the impression that physicists had too many ideas and too few chances to test them in experiments.
True. I don't know much about cosmology.
Was QM necessary for invention of bipolar transistors?
Yes, quantum computing is not a problem in modern fundamental physics. Yes, collider construction is not a problem in modern fundamental physics.
SM/beyond SM is the only field in fundamental physics though. Everything else is either a consequence of those models or applied physics.
I wouldn't say that Linux maintenance is completely smooth for me, but if something happens it's usually due to my own poor attention.

OTOH Windows 10 is determined to force its updates on me at the most inconvenient times. Once I left Windows 10 to update over night, to be greeted with grub rescue screen in the morning. Took me most of the next day to fix things.

Linux isn't perfect but at least it doesn't break everything and I'm the one in control of things.

That's the reason I use linux. I need to get work done. I guess I could do it on windows but it's much more convenient on linux to set up a working environment and lots of the tools I use are already there.
Where could I read about advanced assembly optimization techniques like this?
Re:Source code to CS:GO and TF2 leaks on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @06:10PM (#22950749)
They say this leak might enable more malware developed targetting these games.

The code seems to have already been leaked 2 years ago.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599332362?t=03s

> Magnetism is a consequence of relativity and the finite speed of light

That doesn't make any sense.

Differential forms aren't necessary for this though.
Why not SUSY then? Once you understand the formalism you can derive any field theory to your liking.
I don't think you understand the issue here. He's not dodging the question. On the contrary, he's answering on the most fundamental level.
> If you're running a modern Linux desktop you're probably running Wayland

I missed the point when Wayland took over all the major modern distros. Did supersede Xorg now? I've been using X11 forever and never thought of alternatives.

I don't think it's the case. X just works for me. Had to configure it once, after that I experienced no friction using or updating it.
Re:Real Time Person Removal from Complex Video on Tuesday February 18, 2020 @12:44PM (#22358091)
Watched the video. Nice job with following through.

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