HN user

metaobject

555 karma

Working as a software engineer using C, C++, Python, Scheme on simulation and optimization tools and applications in the meterology/satellite data processing/atmospheric sciences domain. I'm fond of the Lisp family of languages, and am currently working on Scheme-bindings for our modeling, simulation, and analysis tools.

Posts3
Comments314
View on HN

Sometimes I lay in bed at night thinking about the deficiency I haven't had time to address or that isn't a current priority, or the obscure bug I found a while ago that is laying in wait ... then I end up taking a melatonin capsule because my brain won't stop trying to plan/reorganize my next few tasks to squeeze in enough time to solve these issues.

I'm going to guess and say he was just borrowing a current, in-the-news hashtag and applying it to this situation. In other words, he was just joking around.

For me, it's when I open my .emacs file and start working on my personal TODO items. The last time I ended up writing some elisp functions to make adding code comments/documentation easier and to auto-generate project layouts and source code skeleton files.

Regarding the "smearing" concept, how does that square with the formation of neutron stars and white dwarfs? Those objects are incredibly dense because they're composed mostly (?) of nuceei or neutrons, respectively.

Why would previous versions of Python3 (e.g., 3.5, 3.6) not perform as well as 2.7? What about Python3 makes it slower? Is it a language design issue?

We’re in the process of migrating several keras/TensorFlow-based projects to 3.6, and I’m struggling to get my emacs environment setup to handle Python 2 and 3 code simultaneously.

I really don't understand the hate for Musk. Shit, a lot of these projects are really experiments that he's funding. They're really cool experiments, at that, and experiments aren't supposed to be successful all the time, anyway.

It's like the people who bash NASA for having failures. This has never been done before!

Besides being much newer (and lighter components are now available), the electronics for a Free Space Optical system are much lighter than the electronics for an RF system.

The concept 'Size, Weight, and Power' (SWaP) is commonly used when comparing FSO vs. RF systems. Incidentally, FSO systems have lower SWaP than RF systems. They're smaller and lighter payloads, and the system requires less poweR.

I wouldn't call myself proficient in Java, but I understand the basics. I'm a C and C++ programmer at heart, so the few times that I had to write new Java code back in the day I always would prefer snake_case class names and snake_case variable names. Although I'm sure it irked the Java guy we had working for us, at least it was very easy to determine who wrote a particular block of code.

A Virtual Machine 8 years ago

Very clear presentation. Helpful diagrams. Clean code. This has a very “Linkers and Loaders” (John Levine) feel to it. Very well done.

Similarly, a few years ago I swas developing a path-finding algorithm for time-varying 3D vector fields and I found myself knee-deep in various research papers. Some were better than others, and I did find a few web/blog resources helpful, but it was mainly research papers.

Semi relevant note: When I followed the link PG has on his website for 'Hackers and Painters', Amazon reminded me that I ordered that book in 2005.

I worked full time as a software engineer before I finished my CS degree, but I wasn't really happy with my situation and wanted to do something else. As I was interviewing with companies through the my university's Career Services department, I recall being complimented by several interviewers on how specific I was regarding my goals and desired position. I wanted to work on a specific OS/platform with specific languages.

I guess I was lucky because I'd already had relevant experience, so I knew exactly what I did and did not want to do. Luckily, the offer I went with was up-front and I ended up doing exactly what I wanted to do.

Playing devils advocate, could it be a lack of experience that is the issue with new hires?