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Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

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Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

#111

Post by Retric »

fabiomaia wrote: post #95
superhuzza wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very, very hesitant to to this. First of all, you definitely don't want any chance of incorrect recognition of handwriting coming from a nuclear weapons plant . Secondly, who knows what policies he might violate by using some unauthorized, untested software (whether OP is the author or not) with potentially sensitive information.

He can use it such that the model's predictions are still manually verified by him before actually submitting them or whatever. Seems pretty harmless to me.

Manual verification is likely just as tedious as doing it by hand in the first place.

Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

#112

Post by debatem1 »

ratsimihah wrote: post #107
superhuzza wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very, very hesitant to to this. First of all, you definitely don't want any chance of incorrect recognition of handwriting coming from a nuclear weapons plant . Secondly, who knows what policies he might violate by using some unauthorized, untested software (whether OP is the author or not) with potentially sensitive information.

First of all, you definitely don't want any chance of incorrect recognition of handwriting coming from a nuclear weapons plant. Loving this, this sounds like the plot of a bad sci-fi movie.

It reminds me of the start of "Brazil", bugs and all.

Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

#113

Post by jtms »

musgravepeter wrote: post #12

(PhD, 1996 in general relativity) Embedded graphics drivers for real-time systems. I keep the physics part of my brain alive by developing physics based Unity assets (nbodyphysics.com) and supporting a package for GR on github (grtensor). I still buy WAY too many physics books. Current aspiration is to work through "Modern Classical Physics" Thorne/Blandford.

I’d imagine there could be some really interestingly massive simulation possibilities integrating nbody with unity’s new ECS system

Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

#114

Post by probwalk »

B.S in physics, total spent 5 years in biology (first MS then Ph.D program) as I felt like there are lots of areas to be explored / studied there. I later switched to statistics (and got a PhD in statistics) as the future of senior lab-mate did not look bright to me (many years in Ph.D or post-doc stage, work is more or less driven by publication pressure instead of science curiosity). Choose statistics as I got good background in math thanks to the education in physics.

Now my job title is "data scientist".

Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

#115

Post by hpcjoe »

ddavis wrote: post #24

(5th year PhD student) Working on my thesis analysis (collider based HEP), squeezing in time for OSS development and prepping for a jump to software dev. I love physics, but academia is in a rough place right now. Almost everyone I know pursuing the academic career path has nightmare stories.

[ghost of tenure track searches past]

The physics job market has been, and will remain in a "rough place". As with all things, it is who you know.

If you want to stay in the field, network like mad. Get people to know your name. Make sure you have work known to them. Get a great Postdoc with someone who will make calls for you when you are done with your project, to help your search.

Otherwise, computing is nice :D

Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

#118

Post by dhimes »

Ph.D. in Condensed Matter (surface) physics 1992, the "era of the 40 year old post-docs." I had a talent for teaching, so rather than pursue the endless post-doc trajectory I followed my talent and taught.

Now I work on educational software trying to extend my reach.

Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

#119

Post by sergiosgc »

superhuzza wrote: post #75
kriro wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""try to read bad handwriting from records from nuclear weapons plants. It's a dull job a monkey could do but it pays the bills.""" + """For years I worked as a computer guy for an academic department and that was fun and I'm trying to get back into it""" Sounds like you could enjoy automating your work. Learn a bit of Python and some Machine Learning/Deep Learning and digitize the handwriting and build a little pro…

I would be very, very hesitant to to this. First of all, you definitely don't want any chance of incorrect recognition of handwriting coming from a nuclear weapons plant . Secondly, who knows what policies he might violate by using some unauthorized, untested software (whether OP is the author or not) with potentially sensitive information.

I'd first go for a pareto approach. There's probably some easy automation that can aid the manual work, which is easy to implement and provides visible performance gains. Stuff like pre selecting interesting image parts (aim for high false positive rates and zero false negatives) or even just an interface for speeding up dull manual work like pulling documents from the repository, associating relevant documents and presenting them in a fast acting UI.

Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

#120

Post by gjmulhol »

Building physics and chemistry domain specific machine learning systems at Citrine Informatics. It's the best of both the physical science world and the data science world, has really hard problems, works with big companies and has big contracts, and is a team where more than half the people have technical graduate degrees.
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