Hacker News: rpmuller

New comment by rpmuller in "Culture eats policy"

rpmuller — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 21:03:21 +0000

Also check out the interview Ezra Klein did with Jennifer Pahlki on his podcast [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...

New comment by rpmuller in "Seven sins of numerical linear algebra"

rpmuller — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 17:16:25 +0000

Love the post. I'll take this opportunity to link to a favorite classic linear algebra paper in a similar vein: "Nineteen Dubious Ways to Compute the Exponential of a Matrix" [1]

[1]: https://www.math.purdue.edu/~yipn/543/matrixExp19-I.pdf

New comment by rpmuller in "Good Coffee Is Now Bad"

rpmuller — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 14:27:45 +0000

Thanks for the link to that essay. I feel changed after reading it.

New comment by rpmuller in "Good Coffee Is Now Bad"

rpmuller — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 14:20:50 +0000

It’s even stranger than the author makes out. When I got into coffee in the 80’s, being a coffee snob meant buying beans, grinding them in a $30 Braun chopper, and brewing them in a $50 Braun automatic drip machine. The beans were often from the grocery store, and normally roasted very dark. When a Peet’s opened in the town where I went to grad school, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

A Blue Bottle coffee opened up in that same town, and I had a cup last time I visited. It was almost unrecognizable as coffee. Light roasted, fruity, what is now called “specialty coffee”. I got that cup pour over, but coffee is very often made today on expensive espresso machines. I have a $500 machine. I have friends with $1000 machines and $600 burr grinders. People debate the merits of flat vs conical burrs in machines.

I was still buying dark roasted coffee, now from a coffee roaster subscription, but it hasn’t been tasting as good to me. I miss the taste of the dark roasted drip coffee I made in the 80’s, and I don’t seem to be able to recreate it with my manual burr grinder or my v60 pour over set. I think my taste as probably changed. I changed my coffee subscription to explore some of the lighter “specialty” roasts. Still doesn’t taste like coffee to me, but I’m starting to appreciate it more. There’s no Peet’s in my current state, and I find Starbuck’s drip coffee so strong as to be hard to appreciate.

Around 10 years ago I was in a diner and had a fantastic cup of coffee. It was full bodied and nearly perfect. I asked what kind of coffee it was and they said Maxwell House. I haven’t started buying Maxwell House (yet), but it made me realize how much of current coffee culture is fetishism around our addiction, and how little is about the ultimate taste.

A good cup of drip coffee can be amazing. I haven’t had one in a while, but am trying to find the beans and the grind that will bring me back to the excitement I had about coffee in the 80’s.

New comment by rpmuller in "From Common Lisp to Julia"

rpmuller — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 15:25:32 +0000

I had been intrigued by Lisp for years, but it was Julia's roots in Lisp that finally got me to explore the Lisp languages. I actually haven't used LispSyntax.jl, but it's close to what I'd like to have in a language.

New comment by rpmuller in "Monte Carlo Geometry Processing"

rpmuller — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 15:14:03 +0000

Wow, you're correct, he uses ACM TOG for the paper. As a scientist, I mostly just use the REVTeX packages or tufts-latex. Evidently there's a brave new world of other templates out there that I need to learn about. Thanks.

New comment by rpmuller in "Monte Carlo Geometry Processing"

rpmuller — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 13:42:07 +0000

Does anyone know how he writes his papers? His illustrations will forever be beyond my skills, but I’d like to up my paper mojo. Since his references are in bibtex, I assume he’s using some flavor of TeX, but this looks more sophisticated than LaTeX. In particular, he has small sub-illustrations next to his section headings that are really hard to get right using LaTeX. Is he using ConTeXt? Which fonts does he use? The ligatures are really nice, also hard to do using standard LaTeX available fonts.

New comment by rpmuller in "Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?"

rpmuller — Sat, 10 Sep 2022 19:21:58 +0000

It was Peter Atkins’ lectures in Quantum Mechanics that made me decide to go into Quantum Chemistry, so the book always brings back fond memories.

For Chemistry I’d also list Pauling’s Nature of the Chemical Bond. And maybe Szabo and Ostlund’s Modern Quantum Chemistry.

New comment by rpmuller in "From Common Lisp to Julia"

rpmuller — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 11:48:07 +0000

You mean like https://github.com/swadey/LispSyntax.jl ?

New comment by rpmuller in "Tools for Better Thinking"

rpmuller — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 14:28:29 +0000

Does anyone know of programming tools for better thinking? I used to be a very good programmer, and now I run a large research organization. One would think that there would be ample opportunity to use my programming skills to better manage the organization, but there's little more than exploring business data using Excel. The closest I've come is the Thinking in Systems stuff that Donella Meadows and her colleagues have done.

Are there other Thinking Tools for programmers who want an edge in managing large groups?

New comment by rpmuller in "Build your own FPGA (2012)"

rpmuller — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 17:04:23 +0000

Course-Grained Reconfigurable Architecture [1], like an FPGA but with more robust logic units. Something I'd like to learn more about.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04509

New comment by rpmuller in "Build your own FPGA (2012)"

rpmuller — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 14:31:33 +0000

Anyone know of anything similar for CGRAs?

New comment by rpmuller in "Enzyme Electric Fields"

rpmuller — Wed, 18 May 2022 11:43:33 +0000

I no longer work in the field, but I've always been incredibly impressed by the innovative methods that Steven Boxer uses in enzyme spectroscopy.

New comment by rpmuller in "Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem"

rpmuller — Mon, 16 May 2022 14:45:05 +0000

I've been a part of many language communities, and that the Julia team is the very best in terms of the professionalism of the language and the key modules.

Maybe the best response to this is to view it as a call to action for us Julia fanboys/girls to stop cheering and fix some bugs ;-).

New comment by rpmuller in "Converting Integers to Floats Using Hyperfocus"

rpmuller — Wed, 11 May 2022 16:58:50 +0000

In addition to being interesting to techies, this is a really well-written article, e.g.

> Everyone was slightly disgusted and slightly impressed.

Went back and reread the whole article to find more gems like that one.

New comment by rpmuller in "How did the Enigma Machine work? (2021) [video]"

rpmuller — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 15:58:21 +0000

The National Cryptologic Museum is well worth visiting for the Enigma Machines alone. It's free to get in, right next to NSA headquarters, but you don't need a visitors pass or to go through a guard station. When I was there they had ~4 Enigma Machines available to look at.

New comment by rpmuller in "VRML"

rpmuller — Sat, 16 Apr 2022 21:33:55 +0000

I was so excited about VRML in 1996. I thought it was going to take over the world of molecular graphics -- all we would have to do is write molecule-to-VRML translators, rather than writing free-standing OpenGL applications. It's taken a surprisingly long time to get to the point I thought we would be 25 years ago. Three.js turns out to be what everyone was looking for back then.

New comment by rpmuller in "Lambda Calculus in 400 Bytes"

rpmuller — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 13:55:09 +0000

Slow down! I’m still catching up to sectorlisp!

New comment by rpmuller in "Hello Many Worlds in Seven Quantum Languages (2021)"

rpmuller — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 19:08:36 +0000

The "Mike and Ike" book is the standard introduction to the field: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Computation_and_Quantu...

New comment by rpmuller in "Hello Many Worlds in Seven Quantum Languages (2021)"

rpmuller — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 19:06:33 +0000

What? No Jaqal? https://www.sandia.gov/quantum/Projects/QSCOUT_Jaqal.html