atrettel

24 ms·

241.
by atrettel 4y ago
This idea is sometimes called the McNamara fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
242.
by atrettel 4y ago
I think your perspective underestimates the political or nationalistic aspects of naming things. Take the "Mach number" as an example. It is named after Ernst Mach by aerodynamics expert Jakob Ackeret, but it was Christian Doppl
243.
by atrettel 4y ago
I would not give up hope in science. In the short term, fraud is a problem, but science is a process and in the long term it will (eventually) self-correct, though the time scales for that process may be quite long indeed. To that end, doe
244.
by atrettel 4y ago
I wouldn't say that people are stupid. Many people just desperately need a car. I wish it were not the case, but at least in the United States, most people need to buy a car or else they cannot go to work, get groceries, etc. Indeed
245.
by atrettel 4y ago
My take is that statements like "there are no jobs available" and "employers cannot find enough workers" can be both true at the same time. My best guess right now is that employers want to hire a lot of low-skill worke
246.
by atrettel 5y ago
> Speaking of dead fields... I know many postdocs who come from physics into ML because many areas of theoretical physics just don't seem to be going anywhere anymore. Not a good sign! I do not necessarily agree with the notion that
247.
by atrettel 5y ago
I agree that different departments can vary wildly within a school, and I would go even further to say that different research groups can vary wildly too even within a department. Office culture and politics can be multi-layered and differ
248.
by atrettel 5y ago
As far as I can tell, this paper has nothing to do the generalized solution to the Navier-Stokes equations. It deals with flows near surfaces (boundary layers) and not flows in general. After skimming the paper I could only find one menti
249.
by atrettel 5y ago
Yes, this is something that I wish more employers recognized. Applying to jobs can be quite time-consuming, especially once you start to get multiple interview requests. That said, some applications are also time-consuming and can take ho
250.
by atrettel 5y ago
Reading this, I am reminded of a quote by Edsger W. Dijkstra from 1975 [1]: > In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's
251.
by atrettel 5y ago
Some hiring freezes have actually continued even to today. I applied to one postdoctoral fellowship in the Bay Area in March 2020, and the organization still sends me a monthly update that they have suspended all hiring due to the pandemic
252.
by atrettel 5y ago
Yes, these were the original hard copies. I was only talking about dissertations filed at the school I went to, so I fortunately did not have to go anywhere. I just had to put in the request and wait a day or two for them to arrive at the
253.
by atrettel 5y ago
Well, I do not think I have ever read a dissertation from cover to cover that I checked out from the library, but I did read several substantial sections of quite a few when I was in graduate school. These ones were older and not yet digit
254.
by atrettel 5y ago
I believe I've answered your questions in two of my previous posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28112208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28112358 To sum up, the authors did not just use m
255.
by atrettel 5y ago
It's a fair question. They were foreigners submitting to an American journal, so there is always the possibility for some sort of cultural misunderstanding in addition to any language difficulties. Nonetheless, the journal's sub
256.
by atrettel 5y ago
As I have said in another comment, the authors did not just copy my short definition but my entire paragraph-length explanation of the concept. I might have let the short definition slide but an entire paragraph is just inexcusable. I agre
257.
by atrettel 5y ago
No, I did not suggest the definition and explanation as content for them to use. I was trying to explain a concept that they discussed incorrectly multiple times in the paper. It is an advanced concept that might not even appear in gradua
258.
by atrettel 5y ago
That is a good question that I do not have a good answer for, unfortunately. The review process for this journal is supposed to be blind, so crediting me would only reveal me as a reviewer. An anonymous acknowledgment is better than nothi
259.
by atrettel 5y ago
I have encountered something similar to this for a submission that I reviewed for a scientific journal. I will not list any names or give much detail past those generalities, but I pointed out that the authors were misusing a particular te
260.
by atrettel 5y ago
Thank you for giving an employer's perspective here. I can see how finding qualified applicants can be difficult, and I hope you find qualified people for your other open positions. Nonetheless, I think the hiring process you describ
261.
by atrettel 5y ago
I'm a mechanical engineer and I believe I can answer your first question. My take is that many engineering employers value the ability of entry-level employees to learn new things rather than what they know (their expertise). They wa
262.
by atrettel 5y ago
I have seen it argued that heavily-curved suburban streets are safer because drivers have to slow down to see around the bends, etc. Highly-curved suburban streets also tend to avoid 4-way intersections and prefer T intersections. In theo
263.
by atrettel 5y ago
If you like this article, I suggest checking out the book it is based on: Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design edited by Michael Idov. The book is rather small and consists of just pictures of products or designs along with a few p
264.
by atrettel 6y ago
Yes, you are correct. Weather forecasting is much more accurate (at least in the short term) than economic forecasting. My point wasn't about comparing the accuracy of the predictions between meteorology and economics, though. It wa
265.
by atrettel 6y ago
Economics can attract people making wild claims because it is difficult to truly prove or disprove some claims in the subject. Still, there is good science done in economics, though conducting science is more difficult in fields like econo
266.
by atrettel 6y ago
I have experience with modern Fortran. The features that make Fortran relevant today are the array operations, simpler memory management than C/C++ (the allocate statement), and the ability to change floating point and integer precisi
267.
by atrettel 6y ago
If you are fine with the command line, then nothing beats some combination of Ghostscript, ImageMagick, and PDFtk. OCR is much more complicated but I have used Tesseract when OCR was needed. The results were mixed at best, sometimes being
268.
by atrettel 6y ago
I have often found eponyms confusing and I try to avoid them when a good alternative exists. Take "Gibbs free energy" as an example. I had trouble remembering what it is compared to "Helmholtz free energy", but then I
269.
by atrettel 6y ago
Your argument raises a lot of good points. I actually agree that binary does lose all of the metadata and documentation that goes with it. That is a big problem. That is why I think it is also important to include some sort of documentat
270.
by atrettel 6y ago
> Whats been really awesome about that has been the fact that I've written some binary data files on big endian machines in the early 90s, and re-read them on the laptop (little endian) adding a single compiler switch. I want to sec

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