mturmon

8 ms·

61.
by mturmon 1y ago
Very nice summary. I did a similar cross-country trip and 100% endorse many of the conclusions at the end. (The Kansas winds and the hills of the Ozarks (central Missouri) were both surprisingly challenging and demoralizing, even after the
62.
by mturmon 1y ago
Hmm, this take seems too all-or-nothing to me. (I made a similar trip with similar prep - bought the bike a month before going.) The first chunk of the trip is very civilized, and you can use that to build skills before you get out in rural
63.
by mturmon 1y ago
Thank you! I noticed some ** and * in the thing sent to eval(), which (given that the building blocks are small integers) seemed related to prime factorizations. The initial %c is duplicated 21 times (3*7, if I read correctly), and then str
64.
by mturmon 1y ago
> And besides, why argue hypotheticals here ... You are the one who raised the 1940s optical rangefinder question, and now talking about autofocus, which is a totally different problem than dense ranging from optical stereo disparity. If
65.
by mturmon 2y ago
It does not seem like you have much experience with either LiDAR or stereo vision. These systems have well known performance characteristics and advantages. LiDAR has its limitations (in terms of point density and scan rate, and cost), but
66.
by mturmon 2y ago
I see your take, but I disagree. DF is a blog and was conceived that way. HN is a discussion site. The two forms (blogging and internet discussions) are different. They serve different purposes and require different management styles. The d
67.
by mturmon 2y ago
This was an outstanding article and its time on the front page was limited: https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th... You're "just asking questions" and inventing percentages.
68.
by mturmon 2y ago
> ...change in the user base... Agreed. (Change in the user base, or in the sentiments of the user base.) That user base, and its apparent coordination (directed, or emergent), is the main reason I don't engage as much here any more
69.
by mturmon 2y ago
I happen to be reading the book Neurotribes which is a decent (although sometimes pathologizing) treatment of autism, and it retrospectively diagnoses Dirac as on the spectrum. Silberman, the author, does reference and seems to rely heavi
70.
by mturmon 2y ago
This is what made the “ln” argument order click for me as well. Another piece of this parallel is that (with cp and mv) you can omit naming the destination file - you often just name the directory: cp /other/dir/foo.txt .
71.
by mturmon 2y ago
A nearby (excellent) comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43338459 ) gives further context, but: the 6-month revisit period is just an artifact of the Earth-orbit-based sky scanning strategy. In 6 months the satelli
72.
by mturmon 2y ago
Remember, it is passively cooled (a major design plus and, I assume, part of why it was able to achieve the cost it did). So there would be no need for a manned mission. And in fact, at that cost, it wouldn’t make sense anyway.
73.
by mturmon 2y ago
I agree, but: the technique of “singular spectrum analysis” is pretty much PCA applied to a covariance matrix resulting from time-lagging the original time series. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_spectrum_analys
74.
by mturmon 2y ago
Like others nearby, I’d like to see something more specific. I’m willing to believe that in some silos (like relatively high-cadence seismographs) there might be some censoring. For example, it’s believable that siting of permanent stations
75.
by mturmon 2y ago
Peter used to consult/collaborate with my lab. He was a proponent of moving remote sensing computations closer to the sensor ("edge computing" these days). You could definitely make the intellectual case for this approach. In
76.
by mturmon 2y ago
Interesting comment. I do a lot of numerical programming. When developing programs based on optimization, in particular, a similar robustness-to-error property happens. Your implementation can have bugs, but it's generally hill-climbin
77.
by mturmon 2y ago
> Besides being funny ... I enjoyed this part too -- the author (Robert Scherrer) also offers the following link to an even drier paper: https://my.vanderbilt.edu/robertscherrer/miscellaneous/
78.
by mturmon 2y ago
If you want to go looking, grep '[^s]kin$' /usr/share/dict/words turns up a lot. You have to guess at the candidates, like: pipkin -- a little earthenware pot firkin -- a small cask dodkin -- a c
79.
by mturmon 2y ago
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/29103-try-to-be-one-of-thos...
80.
by mturmon 2y ago
I used to work in a field that used \Sigma for covariance matrices, and pervasively needed discrete summations which also use \Sigma (and often with an understood index set, so the \Sigma appears without clarifying adornment). I ended up wr
81.
by mturmon 2y ago
> One of the worst long-term consequences of Nazi rule has been the degree to which pointing out that genes do cause real differences has become taboo I think this hot take should be reconsidered! Surely the above consequence is not anyw
82.
by mturmon 2y ago
Agreed. I do a lot of Monte Carlo simulations of physical systems (radars, scientific models) in which same or close seeds will cause trouble. You do want a deterministic PRNG (for repeatability of the simulation). But if you seed with time
83.
by mturmon 2y ago
While the music played you worked by candlelight Those San Francisco nights You were the best in town Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl You turned it on the world That's when you turned the world arou
84.
by mturmon 2y ago
This pessimism has its place, but in this specific case, it is not accurate. Congress did decide that NEO's are an important problem, and eventually money was appropriated to address it, and a technical solution to the detection proble
85.
by mturmon 2y ago
I get you. The purple circles are not kissing other circles, but the yellow ones -- not sure. In general it seems to have to do with how constrained they are. And there may be differently-arranged also-optimal packings - e.g. for N = 18 the
86.
by mturmon 2y ago
It turns out there are differing interpretations of what to do about the edges. For an "interior" packing (there is a technical word for this that I don't recall rn), following the link by @mbauman below, the n=3 case is: ht
87.
by mturmon 2y ago
Hmm, interesting. Is this still the case if the rejection factor is known explicitly (as it would be here)?
88.
by mturmon 2y ago
The randomly-chosen numbers (with a fixed seed) will not have uniform coverage. They will look very noticeably "clumpy". I get the feeling that OP did not want that. I agree that filtering the Sobol sequence, or other low-discrepa
89.
by mturmon 2y ago
> ...numericists don't like the throwing away bit... Although in 2 dimensions (setting of OP), this isn't that bad (you waste a proportion of (1-pi/4), or 21%, of your samples) -- perhaps 21% might be worth worrying about
90.
by mturmon 2y ago
Not a disagreement with your take, which was helpful to me, but just your parenthetical aside. Homogenous of degree 0, which is key to the conditions of the results in OP, means f(tx) = t^0 f(x) = f(x) [ https://en.wikipedia.org&#

More ›