jofer

69 ms·

631.
by jofer 13y ago
> The answer-er was myself. I didn't even remember writing the particular answer, but there it was, and past me literally (re)explained to future me.. That exact same thing happened to me recently. I'm glad I'm not the only one! It's
632.
by jofer 13y ago
Good point. However, alumni donations are often strongly correlated to the performance of the sports teams (at universities with traditions of popular sports teams, anyway). Donations are a non-trivial part of a university's income stream.
633.
by jofer 13y ago
Eh, I can see it for undergraduate admissions, etc. I'm very skeptical as well. However, I know some very smart people who did actually choose their undergraduate program based partly on the football team.
634.
by jofer 13y ago
Typically, it's only into the athletic department, though. At least at the big state schools I've been at, money from athletics/merchandizing/etc goes to athletics and only athletics. Beyond paying for athlete's education, etc, the money
635.
by jofer 14y ago
I'm in the energy industry, rather than in software directly. (I'm a geophysist, rather than in CS.) I'm at one of the majors, but it's probably best if I don't say which one. There are certainly "academically inclined" groups where I work.
636.
by jofer 14y ago
As someone who relatively recently decided to go into industry instead of academia after finishing my PhD, my reasoning was almost identical. Industry seems like a better chance to work on interesting problems and have a bigger impact. How
637.
by jofer 14y ago
Or, if you really like acronyms: SSCCE http://sscce.org/ Short, Self Contained, Correct (Compilable), Example This applies to answers on SO/lists/forums/etc, as well as questions. Everyone benefits from clear communication and examples.
638.
by jofer 14y ago
I'm be surprised if there was that large of a speedup going from a well-written numpy implementation to C/C++ (assuming a non-parallel implementation in both)... In my experience, it's usually more like 2x-5x for a straight translation of t
639.
by jofer 14y ago
I believe he was referring to the "put my brain in G" comment. It's all about recognizing when to build tension and when to resolve tension. Yes, the roles that the notes play is defined by the key, but if you don't mentally make the switch
640.
by jofer 14y ago
If you have lots of pdf's on your hard drive that you want to automatically extract metadata from (or organize), it's quite nice. It's easy to go from nested folders of pdf's --> Mendeley --> bibtex file, with a reasonably minimal
641.
by jofer 14y ago
While Mendeley certainly has me hooked on their desktop client, I'm not sure I've ever understood their social aspects... I'm very, very, very skeptical, but this could wind up being a good thing. Elsevier can't entirely make it a "walled
642.
by jofer 14y ago
Radio. Voyager is nuclear powered (Thought not in the sense you're probably thinking. It's a nuclear source and a thermoelectric cell.), and many (most?) of the instruments are still functioning and sending signals back. It really is quite
643.
by jofer 14y ago
The normal convention is to avoid using pylab, and instead use matplotlib directly. Pylab is handy if you're just transitioning from Matlab, but otherwise, there's no reason to use it. It's a gigantic namespace, and all but a couple of fun
644.
by jofer 14y ago
Good point. I was thinking of lacking functions within scripts, which is quite annoying for small projects, but not a major problem for larger things.
645.
by jofer 14y ago
Beyond that, pandas (Wes McKinney's library that the book partly focuses on) is really, really fantastic. It has rapidly become a central part of the scientific python ecosystem.
646.
by jofer 14y ago
Don't forget maintainability. Anything moderately complex in matlab quickly becomes a maintainability nightmare, in my experience. Matlab discourages modularity (functions have to be either one line or in a separate file), and writing test
647.
by jofer 14y ago
At the moment, scipy-lectures is probably the best comprehensive introduction to the scientific python ecosystem. If you're looking for a more detailed overview of just numpy, the original numpy book ( http://www.tramy.us/numpybook.pdf ) i
648.
by jofer 14y ago
If you're looking for more of a narrative, "Thin Ice" by Mark Bowen is an excellent read. While it's not comprehensive, it does a good job of laying out the science. It's a third biography, a third climbing novel, and a third popular scienc
649.
by jofer 14y ago
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that pip didn't handle multiple versions (though my comment certainly reads that way). I intended that to be a comparison of "full-blown" package managers with conda. (As were the user-home-directory and cross-
650.
by jofer 14y ago
Actually, this particular one does a lot that pip doesn't do... It manages dependencies that aren't python packages. Furthermore, it allows multiple, side-by-side installations of said dependencies in a user's home directory. And it's cros
651.
by jofer 14y ago
Good point. I'm probably being overly paranoid. Just avoiding an obviously "Real Name" tag is probably more than enough. Thanks, at any rate!
652.
Ask HN: Company IP agreements and unrelated FOSS projects
2 points by jofer 14y ago|2 comments
653.
by jofer 14y ago
Isn't googling while camping cheating? :) While you're at it, look up the Chikyu. It's a very neat ship! (and some of the translations on the JAMSTEC website for the Chikyu are amusing: e.g. "Science the Earth") That aside, they're very goo
654.
by jofer 14y ago
We already know how to drill them. It's how to keep producing heat out of them that's the problem. You need to circulate fluid _through_ a large volume of the rock, not just down the borehole. That means you need to create permeability (i.
655.
by jofer 14y ago
The Chikyu is a (very large) riser drilling ship, not a robot. Other than that, dead on. The Chikyu was more or less built to drill the "mohole", and the Japenese government has been fairly set on it. However, it would almost definitely be
656.
by jofer 14y ago
And to put it in even more prespective, we're just talking about drilling through the equivalent of the skin of an apple.
657.
by jofer 14y ago
To be fair, they (the oil industry) already developed pretty much _all_ of the technology in question. Scientific drilling just applies the oil industry's methods to academic projects. (There are a few exceptions, particularly with regard
658.
by jofer 14y ago
Just for the sake of explanation, here are some of the reasons (I'm a geophysist, currently working in the oil industry, but my dissertation work relied heavily on the Chikyu (the ship in question)): 1: The ocean is the only place where it'
659.
by jofer 14y ago
Hereby coined "James's Law" "Given a large enough crowd, someone is bound to know what in the hell they're talking about."
660.
by jofer 14y ago
You put it quite eloquently: >"...The answers I invested hours in remain relatively untouched; but the main value for me comes from learning by answering questions..." More than anything else, that's what keeps me coming back to stackov

More ›