Viewing profile — nthompson

Automatic differentiation only works on functions which are locally complex analytic. It fails on things that fall outside that model, but are still differentiable. Daubechies wave…

> When I took a tour of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility a few years ago, Buddy Bland, who is Project Director, told me he could tell when he comes to the Lab in the mor…

They do not have their own power station. They have the Bull Run coal plant and hydro plants in the area. They do coordinate with TVA before a run.

Pulsed femtosecond lasers have repeat rates in the megahertz. The total energy is very high. When I took laser physics in grad school, they were able to drop a razor blade through …

The product lineup is solid; even if they go bankrupt, the debt owners will simply wipe out the shareholders, prune away the less profitable parts of the business, and scale back t…

Yeah, but medical bill collections has way less weight on your credit than (say) a car bill past due. They send so many people to collections that even creditors don't care about i…

Do you work in medical billing? My experience is just the opposite, they try to extract marginal costs from those people.

Buddy of mine breaks his collarbone, gets some pins put in. They drop him a bill for $25k. He says "I'll give you $1500 now, or you can send me to collections." They took it; now I…

He's making a joke that the arbitrage could generate infinite amounts of money by generating clean power with coal power.

haha they ought to try that.

The Idaho legislature is totally dominated by farmers (I mean this literally: The Idaho congressmen are primarily farmers.). These farmers are allowed way better deals on hooking u…

Location: Knoxville, Tennessee Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: C++/HPC/Python/JS/Numerical Analysis/Signal Processing Email: nathompson7@protonmail.com I have wri…

Can you selectively grow semiconducting tubes, or metallic tubes, or do you only get a mixture of semiconducting and metallic?

That sounds tough. You also have a code size/speed trade off that must be managed. Where did yours land?

Awesome list of questions, btw.

The question about Gracie jiu-jitsu is not so interesting anymore: In the early 90’s, there were simply very talented jiu jitsu practitioners who were close to the UFC. Now we’ve w…

Very cool analysis. I would add: A lot of regex work is still being done out of boost.regex; maybe people still haven't done the switch for most projects? For example, I think boos…

Are you sure it was three miles? Serious wildfires make your eyes burn 50 miles away.

I imagine both steeper and flatter. The flatter curve seems to be easier to handle within my naive mental model of how utilities work.

Isn't this problem caused by fix axis solar? If all solar panels were on trackers, wouldn't the curve change form and partially mitigate the problem?

I should've clarified: I meant portability of code so that is can be compiled by multiple compilers, VS, clang, gcc. The feature set for C++ is so vast that it's almost certain tha…

At APS March Meeting in LA, there were groups fabricating Josephson junctions. They appeared to be succeeding at ~15mK and individual logic gates, not ICs. I got the impression tha…

I learned x86 floating point assembly from Ray Seyfarth's book: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Bit-Assembly-Programming... I figured out how to write some basic stuff, then I …