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Re:The Illustrated Guide to a PhD on Sunday January 12, 2025 @09:43AM (#42673869)
Thank you, Matt! Loved your guide when I started my own PhD in ye olden days, and I've shown it to a lot of people since then.
Re:The Illustrated Guide to a PhD on Sunday January 12, 2025 @08:39AM (#42673445)
Matt has also written a great follow-up, "How to get tenure", see https://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/

Highly relevant for the aspiring researcher, and it describes really well the nonlinearities of (academic) life.

Re:The Illustrated Guide to a PhD on Sunday January 12, 2025 @08:35AM (#42673427)
Please consider that not everyone has the luxury of having (had) a PhD advisor who really cares. There's a wide spectrum, ranging from micromanagers, to people you see once during your PhD, to advisors that are genuinely great (intellectually and as a person) and caring.

I wish you the best of luck for your PhD, a caring and supportive advisor, and great results!

Re:The Illustrated Guide to a PhD on Sunday January 12, 2025 @08:32AM (#42673409)
I can only second this after having advised a few students from bachelor to PhD level. The ones who do well are (usually) the ones who are genuinely excited. Not only about the thing they're doing, but in general. It really helps getting over the lows.

Furthermore, do not underestimate the importance of sheer luck. Exaggerating a bit, deep learning was just another subfield of ML, until GPU-powered DL really took off and made the researches behind the most fundamental ideas superstars. This is not a given, and it might take years or decades until it's really clear whether you're making an impact or not.

I wish you the best of luck, InkCanon, and stay excited!

Re:Building Bauble on Saturday January 11, 2025 @11:46AM (#42667030)
Congrats, Ian, on the amazing side project and the thorough and thoroughly enjoyable writeup.

You really got me with the tests for the original Bauble, I had a good laugh after that paragraph!

I’m now also somewhat inclined to have a deeper look into Janet, it looks both useful and interesting.

Re:Sub-Pixel Distance Transform on Friday December 27, 2024 @06:20AM (#42521389)
Steven's articles are always a joy. I love that he often delves into details others miss or leave out on purpose. For SDF fonts in particular, most articles skip the fact that in Valve's paper, very high-res per-glyph textures are used to produce SDFs of satisfying quality, making realtime generation rather difficult. Steven explains very nicely how to circumvent that, while still being fast and accurate (enough).
Re:Show HN: Svader – Create GPU-rendered Svelte components on Saturday December 14, 2024 @09:05AM (#42417215)
Chrome on iOS also uses WebKit as backend, as iOS restrictions don’t allow other engines. Same goes for Firefox, Brave, etc…

Edit: Actually not fully true anymore, as of iOS 17.4, you _could_ bring your own engine (https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...) - with restrictions, of course.

Re:Three shell scripts to improve your writing on Saturday December 14, 2024 @04:58AM (#42415912)
This is a great summary how to use regexps, complete with some very nice examples. Thank you!
Re:A Washing Machine for Human Beings, from 1970 on Thursday November 28, 2024 @02:19AM (#42263218)
Came here with the idea of this being about how someone made terrible pre-1970 washing machine UX into something much better. Can’t say I’m disappointed though! I’m wondering if cleaning-intensity ultrasound could cause issues for humans?