Hacker News: krull10

New comment by krull10 in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened"

krull10 — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 16:08:24 +0000

Their review of MacOS 26 is 79 pages when downloaded as a pdf, so they still sometimes have in depth articles. But I agree that that level of detail isn’t as common as in the past.

New comment by krull10 in "Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem (2022)"

krull10 — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 18:15:09 +0000

I've nearly exclusively used Julia since 2017. I don't think this is a perverse use of such functions -- long ago I naturally guessed I could use `cumsum!` on the same input and output and it would correctly overwrite the values (which now gives a similar warning in the documentation). However, when I first used it that way I tested if it did what I expected to verify my assumption.

It is good the documentation is now explicit that the behavior is not guaranteed in this case, but even better would be if aliasing were detected and handled (at least for base Julia arrays, so that the warning would only be needed for non-base types).

Still, the lesson is that when using generic functions one should look at what they expect of their input, and if this isn't documented one should at least test what they are giving thoroughly and not assume it just works. I've always worked this way, and never run into surprises like the types of issues reported in the blog post.

Currently there is no documentation on what properties an input to `sum!` must support in the doc string, so one needs to test its correctness when using it outside of base Julia data types (I haven't checked the broader docs for an interface specification, but if there is one it really should be linked in the docstring).

New comment by krull10 in "Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem (2022)"

krull10 — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 18:09:26 +0000

The simplest approach is to always read the interface of packages one wants to use, and if one isn't provided look at the code / open an issue to interact with the developers about their input assumptions. One should also make tests to ensure the interface behaves in the expected manner when working with your code.

Using this approach since 2017 I've never really encountered the types of issues mentioned in Yuri's blog post. The biggest issue I've had is if some user-package makes a change that is effectively breaking but they don't flag it the associated release as breaking. But this isn't really a Julia issue so much as a user-space issue, and can happen in any language when relying on others' libraries.

New comment by krull10 in "Implicit ODE solvers are not universally more robust than explicit ODE solvers"

krull10 — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 23:54:24 +0000

Use spectral methods? But you’d presumably also have to use higher precision number types if you want that many digits.

New comment by krull10 in "Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now' [video]"

krull10 — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 16:42:34 +0000

I’m all for keeping user freedom to install whatever they want, and wish it was easy to do so on my iPhone. I will point out though that if you pay for YouTube premium it has now incorporated the ability to skip in-video sponsored ads. I use this all the time now on my Apple TV via the YouTube app.

It is actually pretty hypocritical they’re adding such tech to their apps while fighting so hard against people that want to block the ads they serve…

New comment by krull10 in "How University Students Use Claude"

krull10 — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 23:55:01 +0000

Yeah, and forget about giving skeleton code to students they should fill in; using an AI can quite frequently completely ace a typical undergraduate level assignment. I actually feel bad for people teaching programming courses, as the only real assessment one can now do is in-class testing without computers, but that is a strange way to test students’ ability to write and develop code to solve certain classes of problems…

New comment by krull10 in "Among top researchers 10% publish at unrealistic levels, analysis finds"

krull10 — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 03:05:38 +0000

I’ve had that happen in notes from an editor telling me that in addition to addressing reviewer comments I should cite a whole bunch of their completely unrelated articles when submitting a revision.

But I have also been a reviewer in a situation where a supposed broad review article for a preeminent journal completely ignores citing a massive amount of relevant prior work (except, conveniently, the authors’ own work, which in many cases was cited over more relevant and important earlier work), including a large number of my own articles.

New comment by krull10 in "Julia 1.11 Highlights"

krull10 — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 11:25:02 +0000

General scientific computing is pretty good across the Julia ecosystem, from optimization, to ODE and now PDE solver libraries, to various statistics and inference packages, etc. It lacks the deep NN tooling or breadth of ML libraries of Python, and nothing matches R for breadth of stats libraries, but for most other scientific computing it is really great at this point.

New comment by krull10 in "Julia 1.10"

krull10 — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 21:20:05 +0000

You can always (slightly) reduce the DiffEq dependencies by adding OrdinaryDiffEq.jl instead of the meta DifferentialEquations.jl package. But lots of those dependencies arise from supporting modular functionality (changing BLAS, linear solvers, Jacobian calculation methods, in vs. out of place workflows, etc.). That said, the newer extension functionality may let more and more of the dependencies get factored out into optional extensions as time goes on.

New comment by krull10 in "It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals"

krull10 — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 13:10:22 +0000

I think it remains to be seen how/if its reputation changes given their new approach. It will take a number of years before its impact can really be assessed.

New comment by krull10 in "It’s time to allow researchers to submit manuscripts to multiple journals"

krull10 — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 13:07:20 +0000

Right, and that is why the same government bodies need to cap the amount that can be paid towards open access fees or page charges via a grant. If grants only provided $200 per publication that would end the ridiculous open access fees / APCs that currently get charged. There is no reason it should cost thousands of dollars to publish an article given the limited proofing most journals now do, the ability to easily submit works in a template provided by a journal, and that peer-review is uncompensated.

New comment by krull10 in "Julia and Mojo Mandelbrot Benchmark"

krull10 — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 12:27:33 +0000

Someone feeling the need to bash other languages is universal. For example, every Julia post here has people bashing it, in a way that is often tangential to the topic of the post. I'm actually surprised this thread doesn't have someone complaining about 1-based indexing in Julia.

New comment by krull10 in "FAA issues ground stop for all DC-area airports due to equipment fire"

krull10 — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 02:33:44 +0000

Why drive to NYC? If one is in DC you can just take the train, especially if then shifting to a train from NYC to Montréal…

New comment by krull10 in "FAA issues ground stop for all DC-area airports due to equipment fire"

krull10 — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 02:31:57 +0000

As others mentioned, if you are in DC it is easy to take a train to Philly or NY and you can then catch a flight from one of the airports in those areas.

New comment by krull10 in "Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print"

krull10 — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 18:21:25 +0000

Well played

New comment by krull10 in "Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay"

krull10 — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 19:40:40 +0000

I don’t think the promotion and prestige incentives can be fixed easily by academics. Their promotion, earnings, ability to change universities, and recognition depend on publishing in the most prestigious journals they can.

In contrast, the government could easily fix this by simply not providing the money currently required by such journals, which would force them to come up with models that can work with lower fees.

I hope you are right though!

New comment by krull10 in "Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay"

krull10 — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 19:33:11 +0000

Grants are only in the millions in certain fields. But more than that, $10K per paper, budgeted for 2-3 papers a year in a 3-5 year grant across all the NIH grants, is a lot of taxpayer money that could be better spent funding students, postdocs, and researchers.

New comment by krull10 in "Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay"

krull10 — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 19:26:33 +0000

It is not just a barrier for researchers without lots of grant funding, but also diverts public funds from funding more research and research personnel to paying significant publication fees. This really needed a complementary cap on what would be allowed in paying such fees via grants to bring the costs down.

New comment by krull10 in "Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay"

krull10 — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 19:18:07 +0000

This is a good thing overall, but it only half addresses the issue. Now journal fees to authors will simply go up to cover the difference, making it harder for researchers without lots of grant funding to publish (journals can now be over $6000 per article), and even more tax payer dollars will be going towards paying these fees for those researchers funded by gov grants (money that could be better spent funding students, postdocs and researchers). This really needed to be coupled with a requirement to cap per article charges for grant-funded work, which would have benefited all researchers.

New comment by krull10 in "Julia 1.8"

krull10 — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 12:31:17 +0000

It is useful in determining which packages are dominating a given package’s load times, allowing for a better understanding of where to invest effort to reduce runtimes. This has already helped in directing efforts towards a number of common dependencies that increase load times…