Viewing profile — ms013

Nobody is forcing people to upgrade - you’re free to stick with an older version of any OS, although possibly at the cost of the OS going out of support from the vendor. Why such a…

Why not just use the wolfram engine for developers? It’s available for the “insanely expensive” cost of $0. (See: https://www.wolfram.com/engine/ )

That’s a relatively recent change. When I first learned MMA around 1995, it was just Mathematica. It was still just Mathematica 10 years later. Then in the last decade they decided…

The NPR planet money podcast also had an interesting episode from 2012 that recently replayed that talked about the origins of the double entry accounting scheme. Pretty interestin…

Ken died like 15+ years ago. Contact John Mellor-Crummey instead: he still does compiler/language work there AFAIK.

Interesting, but I’m not sure why I’d use this over processing/p5.js augmented with a library to provide the fast compute part on an accelerator. I already do this for compute inte…

Yup. I dug deep into the technology recently when I taught a class on the science of sound at a local college. When you look at media not only from the mathematical perspective (Ny…

They owe nothing for anything they legitimately use: that’s the consequence of open source licensing as a developer. If a developer expects a project to get a fair share of revenue…

Not really. With recent articles talking about their push more deeply into health, privacy is a core feature and basis of trust. Very different than the marketing speak we get from…

F# for ecosystem. Most stuff you’d need is available via nuget. Plus, interop with C# is trivial, so all of that ecosystem is there too. Ocaml has opam for package finding, but it’…

F# is extremely similar. To put it in perspective how similar, I just ported a project for work over from F# to ocaml in a few days - mostly adding "in" for let blocks and parenthe…

Ocaml is a bit easier to reason about w.r.t. performance (time/space complexity), and the code is a bit clearer if you're coming in cold after not having seen parts of a codebase f…

I use ocaml daily for work - our core product is written in it. We actively avoid anything that deviates from the base language for reasons of clarity. No camlp4, no lwt, no fancin…

You sound like you’re just not the target audience. That doesn’t make it bad. I personally welcome more specialized news aggregator sites. HN is too diluted and a bit of a fad-foll…

I think I got bit by that last night - working with sound in Mathematica, a simple MIDI tune was playing and then my MBP made a horrendously loud noise. Didn't damage the speakers,…

The Fortran language defines a pretty clean FFI to bind to other languages. It’s not really any harder than binding to C code, which is why it’s called BIND(C) and ISO_C_BINDING. T…

Interesting to see this come up again. Here’s a small model for this system written in Haskell from a few years back: http://syntacticsalt.com/blog/2011-08-27-harmonic-motion.htm..…

Posting on arxiv is useful for making results available early, and to make published work available in some form that isn’t pay walled, but posting on arxiv on its own is not publi…

Nope. Nobody in the review or author role gets paid. And personally, that doesn’t bother me. I put in time to review papers with the understanding that someone else will put in tim…

The problem isn’t technical. The current flaws in the publishing system are not due to lack of indexing, data distribution, provenance, or filtering. And please, please, please, do…

Same for my PhD advisor and current/past students. Unfortunately, this HN post seems to be full of the usual cohort of passionately opinionated HN readers who don’t have a deep und…

Instagram seems to be coming up a lot as a place people are leaving to from facebook. It’s owned by facebook. I wouldn’t say that is eroding facebook’s access to social data as muc…

Yup. A likely result is that if you pick one and spend the time to learn it and use it for a project, there's a non-trivial chance that the choice you make will be join the ever gr…

Reminds me of a project (not in medicine) I had a couple years ago where my group was in the data science role for another group. We helped out with experimental design, data acqui…

Exactly my thoughts. That’s where I landed for my site, and it’s really simple. Edit file, pandoc, scp to server, done.