Viewing profile — atrettel

I agree that visualization does not need to be perfect. One issue is that "correct visual output" depends on your expertise level. A visualization that is good to teach undergrads …

I get what you are saying, but my issue is not that it runs a script. My issue is that curl piped into a shell does not verify that the download is from the original source before …

You raise a good point. This is why people sign the checksums. The signature confirms that authenticity of the checksums. That somewhat moves the goalpost, though, since it then de…

Curl does verify certificates [1]. That does confirm that your connection is to the right server, but it does not confirm that the files were unmodified. SSL/TLS/HTTPS is more abou…

The issue does not have to do with whether the download is a binary or source code. It has to deal with verifying the integrity of the download before installation. Curl piped into…

I still have no comprehension of how curl piped into a shell command has become the default installation method for many projects (looking at you, Rust...). It breaks my brain as t…

Von Braun was not "just lucky" to get captured by the US. He and his immediate staff took active steps to get captured by the Americans [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernh…

I imagine that it could be usage, but it also could be fewer people caring to report issues on the weekends too for that matter.

The issue, in my experience, is that there is a lot of productive work that does not look productive at first glance. Long term work may not look productive for years until it sudd…

I've often described this as a bias towards easily taught ("teachable") material over more realistic but difficult to teach material. Sometimes teachers teach certain subjects beca…

Even if this line is true, and I am not saying that it is, running and other cardiovascular activities lower your resting heart rate [1]. So even if you believe that you only have …

I completely agree. The issue is that some misconceptions just never go away. People were talking about how bad lines of code is as a metric in the 1980s [1]. Its persistence as a …

https://www.andrewtrettel.com/

I spent around 170 hours on this so far, with only 60% of that being coding. The rest was mostly research or writing.

Before I started the project, I was already vaguely familiar with the notion of an inverted index [1]. That small bit of knowledge meant that I knew where to start looking for more…

I recently wrote a command-line full-text search engine [1]. I needed to implement an inverted index. I choose what seems like the "dumb" solution at first glance: a trie (prefix t…

Location: Maryland, United States Remote: Open to remote, hybrid, and in person Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: C, C++, Fortran, Java, Message Passing Interface (MPI), OpenM…

Reading that particular section made me think of the tree swing cartoon [1]. I agree that the best engineers have likely been on the ground making concrete changes at some point, w…

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I am not your lawyer. This is not legal advice. In the United States, the only patentable subject matter is processes, machines, manufactures, or com…

The language enforced difference is that only functions can return a value, but other than that, they are quite similar and just called "procedures" generally. In my experience, Fo…

They are pretty similar, but they are definitely used differently. For one, you have to "call" a subroutine in one statement, but you can use multiple functions on the same stateme…

Yes, sorry for the confusion. To be clear, the quote is directly about spaces not being significant in the source code in general, but I was commenting more about how this mindset …

The article did not discuss this, but to me, one of the bigger differences between Fortran and more modern languages is the difference between functions and subroutines. Yes, they …

There is actually a lot of debate as to whether scientific discovery is driven by "heroes and geniuses" (as you argue) or by multiple people simultaneously and independently coming…

It's not just for universities and for CFD. Slurm is the primary job scheduler at Los Alamos National Lab. I know other federal labs that use it too. It is just really popular in g…