Hacker News: micheles

New comment by micheles in "Physicist Astrid Eichhorn is a leader in the field of asymptotic safety"

micheles — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 09:07:13 +0000

The article is badly written. This has nothing to do with fractals, they are talking about the assumption that there is an UV fixed point for all physical laws, which can even be true and personally like. It means there are no ultraviolet divergences and that at some point quantum field theory becomes finite. Over a certain large mass scale (which still can be much smaller than the Plank scale) all the coupling constants freeze, there are no radiative corrections and all is simple and well behaved. The problem is, you need some extra fields to do that, with some symmetry cancelling the divergences over the mass scale (it does not have to be supersymmetry) and we lack a theory for that. Moreover, the low energy physics will be nearly independent from the high energy modifications, so the predictive power is low. Yes, they predicted the Higgs mass, but it could very well be a coincidence. If they could predict something really new, though, then it would become quite interesting.

New comment by micheles in "Extending single-minus amplitudes to gravitons"

micheles — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 04:01:17 +0000

As a former Theoretical Physicist, this result is remarkable. I myself I tried to use AI for calculations in Perturbative Quantum Field Theory and I was impressed. I agree with the authors: it looks like the future of Theoretical Physics would be more in verification and consistency checking of AI-assisted results rather than in manual calculations.

New comment by micheles in "Italy's longest-serving barista reflects on six decades behind the counter"

micheles — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:48:55 +0000

My barber is 75+ and he says that he has no intention of ever retiring, until he is forced to by health reasons.

New comment by micheles in "Think Weirder: The Year's Best SciFi Ideas"

micheles — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 18:04:22 +0000

I like far-future concept-driven science fiction, is there something for me too?

New comment by micheles in "Tell me about your favorite tree (a slow-web proposal)"

micheles — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 18:55:48 +0000

I am old. The time of the old Internet corresponds to my Ph.D. years, so I was very much an adult. I still miss it ;-)

New comment by micheles in "AI killed the tech interview. Now what?"

micheles — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 08:44:31 +0000

Nowadays I am on the other part of the fence, I am the interviewer. We are not a FAANG, so we just use a SANE interview process. Single interview, we ask the candidate about his CV and what his expectations are, what are his competences and we ask him to show us some code he has written. That's all. The process is fast and extremely effective. You can discriminate week candidates in minutes.

New comment by micheles in "More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals"

micheles — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 03:05:29 +0000

Finally somebody making sense in this thread!

New comment by micheles in "Everything you need to know about Python 3.13 – JIT and GIL went up the hill"

micheles — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 16:07:28 +0000

I am scientific Python programmer. 99% to 100% of my programs require parallelism, but it is ALWAYS embarrassingly trivial parallelism, nothing is ever mutated and I never need locks. Right now I am forced to use multiprocessing to get the performance, with all problems of multiprocessing, the major one being that I need to use more memory. For me using multithreading could mean the difference between running out of memory and not running out memory. The GIL removal matters for people like me, the proponents of the GIL removal comes from the scientific community.

New comment by micheles in "Confessions of a Theoretical Physicist"

micheles — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 03:30:53 +0000

I remember when I took my course of "Theoretical Physics" (so called, it was an Introduction to Quantum Field Theory in actuality) and I realized that particles do not exist. It was quite an enlightenment. Particles are a convenient description of Quantum Fields in the perturbative regime, but what Quantum Fields are is not known, not even at the mathematical level. When you live at frontier of knowledge, as a Theoretical Physicists, reality becomes fuzzy. But that's life.

New comment by micheles in "Ask HN: For advice: I'm a mathematician looking for a plan B outside of academia"

micheles — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:56:29 +0000

I was in your situation 20 years ago, as a postdoc in Theoretical Physics. My advice is to contribute to some known Open Source project, so that you have some provable programming skills when entering the job market. In my case I contributed to Python, not by coding, but by writing various articles on advanced features of the language and an essay on the Method Resolution Order that at the time was new and undocumented. Guido van Rossum in person put that essay on the official Python site. Having something like that in your CV helps when looking for an IT job. Nowadays I would probably contribute to Julia, you need something that shows promises but it is not mainstream yet to make a good impression.

New comment by micheles in "Everything that uses configuration files should report where they're located"

micheles — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 09:39:35 +0000

This is good advice and my own software is following it:

$ oq info cfg

Looking at the following paths (the last wins)

/opt/openquake/oq-engine/openquake/engine/openquake.cfg

/opt/openquake/venv/openquake.cfg

However, I do not think there is any standard API to follow, I used "info cfg" but many alternatives were possible. So sysadmins have to explore to find out which is the introspection command to give. Not ideal, but I don't think there is a solution.

New comment by micheles in "Story: Redis and its creator antirez"

micheles — Thu, 11 May 2023 07:50:46 +0000

Pity that I never met antirez in all this time. I first heard of him from David Welton who was a coworker of mine in 2004, well before the existence of Redis. But hope is not lost. For the moment, I think I will buy his book ;-)

New comment by micheles in "Programming isn’t coding (2020)"

micheles — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 03:13:13 +0000

>In my experience teaching programming, we spend very little time helping students actually write code. >Instead, the mentors mainly deal with problems of tooling – “it says ‘EADDRINUSE’ and crashes”; “git is giving an error”; “npm just says segmentation fault”.

He is doing things wrong. If he wants the students to use modern tools he first need to give a course on the tools and later another one on programming.

Otherwise he must not use modern tools (no git, no react) and use some simplified teaching environment (not ideal, but at least he will not be distracted by the tooling issues).

In my experience (I have to work a lot with Ph.D. students in science with very little IT expertise) the tools are always the issue, while the algorithmic thinking is rarely a problem, so probably a course on the tools is more useful than one on programming.

He must focus on tools that are not the fashion of the moment, so the terminal is okay, git is okay, React is not okay.

New comment by micheles in "Numba: A High Performance Python Compiler"

micheles — Tue, 27 Dec 2022 17:01:48 +0000

I use numba a lot nowadays. Works perfectly well on all platforms (linux, windows, mac, even the M1) and gives speedups as expected (few percent for already well vectorized numpy code, and extra-large speedups for loopy code). I strongly recommend it for the performance critical part of your code. Many things are not supported yet, so it has to be used with care. I remember I needed a missing scipy special function and I the end I implemented it myself by vectorizing math.erf: it was surprisingly easy to do and a big success in terms of performance.

New comment by micheles in "Is Peer Review a Good Idea? (2020)"

micheles — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 13:48:36 +0000

Having been on both sides of the peer review process in my field (Theoretical Physics), I say we should completely abolish it. Just publish the papers on the preprint archives. Some will be bad, some will be good, and you will know the impact of a paper after 10 years, nothing different from how it is now. Currently the very big majority of the effort in the reviews (on both sides of the process) is wasted time.

New comment by micheles in "How the Physics of Nothing Underlies Everything"

micheles — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 14:32:21 +0000

Speaking as a physicist, I have always hated this nomenclature. There is no vacuum at all. The universe is filled with quantum fields, they are the source of the Casimir effect. Terms as "vacuum energy" are simply a bad naming, the energy comes from the quantum field, which is a very physical object even if not intuitive, as anything quantum.

New comment by micheles in "Science needs more research software engineers"

micheles — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 15:02:50 +0000

I work as a research engineer in Italy. My path was academia (Physics)->industry (Finance)->mix. The "mix" where I am now is a strange case: it is located inside an university, nearly everybody has a PhD and we also have PhD students, but we are not academia, it is a private no profit company doing applied research. I am getting the same money I was getting in the industry but also 7+ weeks of vacation per year, more autonomy and less stress. Plus, I am not working to make rich people richer.

Most of my job is about optimizing numeric code, lots of numpy, pandas, numba but also thinking of new algorithms. I get respect and they put my name in the research papers they publish, even if I did not write a word in the paper and have no knowledge at all of the underlying science ;-) Such companies are rare but they do exist. Much better than academia because there is no bureaucracy. I got in because of a friend of a friend...

New comment by micheles in "Squeezing Down the Theory Space for Cosmic Inflation"

micheles — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 07:29:51 +0000

This is quite interesting. As a theorist, I have 100% confidence in inflation. The problem of inflation is that there are too many variations on the idea, if we can begin to throw away at least some classes of models it is a big progress. But probably we will start seeing lots and lots of new models producing small r ratios ;-)

New comment by micheles in "University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty"

micheles — Sat, 30 Jan 2021 17:56:37 +0000

It is more or less the same in Italy and in most European countries, it is not only Germany.

New comment by micheles in "Modified Gravity Theory Passes a Critical Test"

micheles — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 03:56:43 +0000

Actually this is classical general relativity, the math is not particularly advanced. When I was doing Theoretical Physics I would have considered this paper "easy", at least relative to most papers on hep-th.I never believed in MOND and even this paper is not convincing, since the lagrangian is built ad-hoc rather than derived from a clean principle.