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proginthebox

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Selecting an approachable problem is also a skill that more experienced people have and often the younger people don't. Some problems are just not ready to be tackled because the field hasn't developed for it yet. It is a risk factor between choosing your own problem and floundering through the quagmire or getting help in choosing a problem you have confidence in solving in some years.

While I appreciate your brother's personal choice, to each their own after all. There is quite a lot of merit in your PhD advisor helping you in choosing a problem. That being said, good advisors provide students with an array of good problems out of which the student can choose one they are the most passionate about. This is what happened with me, I was provided with around 7 different choices to make. In the end, I chose 2 of them even though I wanted to chose 3 more but couldn't because of lack of time.

I see. Well, you have a point, but the OP did specifically ask for a plan like that Susan Fowler's blog post. And I am an applied mathematician working mostly on computational physics and I can attest to the requirements I mentioned.

But your advice has a point, just going through books mindlessly is not motivation enough/ can lead to wandering. And it is always good to have specific tasks at hand. Like, solving a particular ordinary differential equations numerically.

This is terrible advice. Apart from the last sentence. A better advice would be to specify which subject to learn.

For example, (since I don't really have much time)

1. Topology (book by Munkres)

2. Real Analysis and Measure Theory (book series by Stein Shakarchi)

3. Algebra (book by Aluffi)

4. Linear Algebra (book by Friedberg Insel)

5. Measure Theoretic Probability (book by Cinlar)

6. Differential Geometry (book Smooth Manifolds by Lee)

7. Numerical Analysis (book by Quarteroni)

8. Set Theory and Propositional Logic (books by Goldrei)

This is what one will mainly learn in a strong undergrad/grad math program. Once this is done, then there are different tracks to follow.

Is C++ fast? 8 years ago

With proper use of constexpr, templates and types, you can make C++ at least as fast as C code without giving up on readability.

In short, the two fields just look similar, but are actually extremely different fields.

Physical simulations need to preserve entropy, maximum principle, energy conservation and other kinds of conservation, preservation of consistent states, convergence in case of finer mesh.

There are multiple equations which model different forms of fluid: 1. Incompressible Euler (For liquid) 2. Compressible Euler (For non-viscous gases) 3. Navier Stokes Equations (For viscous liquids)

There are multiple solver methods: 1. Finite Difference 2. Finite Element 3. Discontiguous Galerkin Finite Element 4. Finite Volume Method

There are multiple equation methods: 1. equation splitting is just one of the many methods possible.

Just because the equation is unique does not mean that the solution is unique. Single equation provably have multiple and even infinite solution for the same initial condition. Computer graphics fluid simulation does not care (with a good reason) about this and hence, often their simulations even though they look kind of nice, are often incorrect since they do not demonstrate various physical characteristics that must be preserved.

In contrast, the qualitative/quantitative constraint in physical simulations are very strict. You need to know a lot of theoretical math to even understand if you are even computing the correct solution.

Just because someone can use a software does not mean they can/will pay for it. In other words, you'll can only earn money if your customers are rich.

What I've observed in Europe is that there are huge amount of small companies instead of one big one. While big and powerful companies might be important on global scale. I suspect that on a more local scale, it is the large number of small companies which are more beneficial.

I think you have already done a huge amount in the course. You should keep your mind open to the possibility that the students just found the topic of database to be dry inspite of your presentation. It is quite possible that those people would have really hated the subject if the presentation was not as good as it looks.

Point. Somehow, I have seen quotes from HP which were always much cheaper. May be it is because my employer had some sort of deal? Also, proliant servers were somehow cheaper than towers. Again I am not sure how, but yes, point taken.

If you buy a workstation from HP/Supermicro, then you get something much more powerful for the same price. So, to say, they are very close is not very correct. The problem here is that the assembled PC is a customer PC assembled for workstation performance. Even then, they were not trying very hard.

Yes, hence my question. I have tried to setup a HTTPS service and it seems incredibly complicated if you have your own domain name. Even with lets encrypt, if you are using github pages for hosting but your own custom domain, you are out of luck. The point is not that he is not serious about security, point is, it is too hard to get normal security correct. And I am not talking about "cryptography is hard". I am talking about tools which should be easy and standardized. Those are hard.

It's not about that guy's blog. This causes desensitization to non-HTTPS traffic and when people then actually visit non-HTTPS malicious blog, they get infected. If all "trusted" websites were HTTPS, then whenever there was untrusted access, people will notice it and raise alarm.

It's ridiculously easy to apply a method which is not applicable if you are not at least a little aware of the theory behind it. You will get wrong results and you will never know why. The wrong results might never be found out because the impact is so complicated that you cannot even point out the source. I have sadly seen this happen too often in various places. But because our other systems are robust enough, this issue (even though it affects things) is not really heeded to until something really catastrophic happens (like 2008 crash).

Its a subscription magazine. So, Patreon will be useful for people who do not really want to read the magazine but donate the money anyway. Not sure how that would work.

I agree with almost all the points apart from transparency. Transparency is not customization. Transparency is basically like, you search something google returns something, and then there is a link which tells you why google returned what it did. This is the transparency which is currently being pursued by the EU. That algorithm providers should be able to explain the results of their algorithm.

It does not have a "documentation" link. It does not even say "man pages" anywhere on the page. ALso, the man pages go to something called "openssl", and when I click on the link, there is no "libressl" on the resulting page. Am I still on the libreSSL site? Is the libreSSL API exactly same as OpenSSL API? I have no clue. If it is, it does not say so, if it is not, it does not say so. What a mess.