boothby

24 ms·

391.
by boothby 6y ago
Counterexample here, I started working with William Stein in 2006, contributing to Sage Math. As a math student, I actually learned these skills (including source control, unit testing, peer review, etc in addition to high-performance algo
392.
by boothby 6y ago
> Also, I guess this is beside the point, but surely almost all of the DP structure can be reused if you're repeatedly removing seams... It's not besides the point at all. If you can reduce this linear-time algorithm to, say,
393.
by boothby 6y ago
Personally, I'm most interested in some rather esoteric applications: in a very real sense, our QPU can be thought of as "programmable matter". Specifically, it can be used to simulate various crystalline lattices [1, 2, 3].
394.
by boothby 6y ago
I address the first part of your question in another comment on this post [1] (disclaimer, I'm a D-Wave employee and only talk about our offerings). As for what types of problems: D-Wave's quantum computers (and adiabatic quantum
395.
by boothby 6y ago
I'm a D-Wave employee, and our cloud service [1] is mature and available* today. You can sign up to get a free minute of QPU time (which turns out to be quite a lot; sampling a problem generally takes milliseconds of QPU time). Addit
396.
by boothby 6y ago
A plug for an old-is-new-again feature I hacked together in an evening... https://github.com/boothby/dissert I like assertions. They're a really good alternative to unit tests because they can be used in a real e
397.
by boothby 6y ago
It's not just you, but personally, I've never been interested in getting rich. For me, HN is a replacement for slashdot, after every second comment there was racial slur copypasta. I'm here for the technical articles and wa
398.
Making music in excel(kottke.org)
2 points by boothby 6y ago|0 comments
399.
Apparent utility of thermal fluctuations in quantum annealing(physicsworld.com)
3 points by boothby 6y ago|0 comments
400.
by boothby 6y ago
This isn't an "incredible thing" but it's a fun project I accomplished this week: single-file python package that lets you disable assertions in files or modules. https://github.com/boothby/dissert
401.
Show HN: Disable Python assertions per file/module(github.com)
3 points by boothby 6y ago|0 comments
402.
by boothby 6y ago
Plotting is a killer feature of Sage, IMO. It's a wrapper over matplotlib, and eliminates reams of boilerplate. In my experience, it's not just easier to use, but also easier to navigate the Sage docs than figure out the right
403.
by boothby 6y ago
> An employer with math researchers isn't going blink at the $2k for a perpetual license, so anyone doing the work regularly gets Matlab who wants it. Not all employers can splash for matlab. You might be right about a simple licen
404.
by boothby 6y ago
You've caught me there. I'm having trouble even locating a source for why it's even called the Conway knot! The wolfram page has a few references of about the right age, but I don't have access to them, sadly. It bein
405.
by boothby 6y ago
I'm not sure about the severity of its impact, but I toyed with the problem when I was learning knot theory. It's a spot where probably hundreds of mathematicians have tried to itch. Advances have been made in attempts to solve
406.
by boothby 6y ago
Well, shit... I've been a lil frustrated by a lack of a clear resource and consequentially haven't gotten far on a couple half-hearted attempts to learn it. I can just make it up myself? A little late in the weekend for a new pr
407.
by boothby 6y ago
Shortest paths is definitely a big timesink... I'll definitely give that a shot. Thanks for the link :) As for what I'm doing, I work at D-Wave and a lot of my work is on what can be thought of as "compilers" for our qu
408.
by boothby 6y ago
Time to hit the books, I guess. Thanks!
409.
by boothby 6y ago
I'm a graph theorist, and I spend a lot of time on various optimization problems (matchings, packings, coverings, Steiner trees, etc) doing VLSI. AFAICT, it seems like GraphBLAS is geared for information processing about data stored in
410.
by boothby 6y ago
Another one I had some fun with: write a FRACTRAN->brainfuck compiler! https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/5210/convert-fr... My solution was nowhere near competitive but I sure had fun with it.
411.
by boothby 7y ago
Okay okay, I take issue with the last sentence of that (specifically the word "marginal"). The aim of Cython is to provide a smooth slope from "quickly writing comprehensible programs in Python" to "belaboring bits
412.
by boothby 7y ago
> When was the last time anyone saw a maintainer thank someone for creating a fork? It's probably happened. The closest I've seen was when Cython was forked from Pyrex* because Sage developers had needs that the Pyrex author
413.
Designing metamaterials with quantum annealing and factorization machines(journals.aps.org)
3 points by boothby 7y ago|0 comments
414.
by boothby 7y ago
Well yes, the example uses a C backend and everything. repiet wc.png -o wc.c --backend c --codel_size 10 -O 2 gcc wc.c -o wc -O3 I hacked it together in response to a "brainfuck is faster than C" HN post and stale jokes d
415.
by boothby 7y ago
Cool, I haven't seen your interpreter! I'll have to give it a read through. npiet is good, and I use its examples for testing, but FYI it diverges from the spec in how it handles whitespace. According to DMM, if the cursor enter
416.
by boothby 7y ago
Bears mentioning that Piet is "faster than C" if you use the right compiler. https://github.com/boothby/repiet/blob/master/README.md#but-... Among the esoteric languages I've learned, Piet
417.
by boothby 7y ago
What a great list! Adding some suggestions... some I've done, others are goals (especially APL and Prolog) 1. Design a new programming language. Prove it Turing complete (or go back to the design phase). Maybe do a compiler for it. 2
418.
by boothby 7y ago
> There’s just got to be a way, there’s no way we can just give up. By no means do I intend to discourage progress! I wouldn't do the work that I do if it wasn't so difficult. I did hedge, a bit: "may never," "
419.
by boothby 7y ago
One of the questions folks tend to ask me is some form of, "when can I expect my cellphone to contain a quantum co-processor?" That gives me an excellent opportunity to tell them everything that I know about cryogenic refrigerato
420.
by boothby 7y ago
Disclosure, I'm a D-Wave employee; we're one of the hardware vendors. Here's a handful of resources: an introduction to our software stack [1], the SDK [2], a repository of demos [3]; a webinar [4]; and if you're willin

More ›