Yeah, I usually interpret headlines like that as ultimately stemming from a press release from some lab. It’s a really sad commentary on the state of current journalism.
> or get themselves fired from a real world programming job. Think spaghetti code, lack of testing or continuous integration, non compliance with standards, etc.
Perhaps, but doing all those things would get them fired from the job they are currently in.
I’ve found writing in markdown and converting to other formats to be a very frustrating experience. It only works well for exceptionally simple documents. But as soon as you want something even slightly complicated it falls apart. Side-by-side figures, multi paragraph lists, footnotes, and numbered bibliographies are all trivial in latex and are a huge pain, if not close to impossible with markdown. I’ve wasted huge amounts of time on this.
On the flip, the latex syntax for super simple documents isn’t really onerous (especially if your editor fortifies the different elements).
So I just end up using latex for everything.
The ability to have your simulation code automatically update the data and figures in the manuscript is hugely valuable.
Another neat trick is a latex package called Catchfilebetweentags. This let’s you have a text file with named data fields that you can insert into your document, like when you want to state a parameter that was used in a paragraph. Generating that text file as an artifact of the rest of the data processing means, e.g., that parameters my paper says I used are the ones that I actually used.
I find the modern web insufferable. Personally, I prefer the style of hacker news. It’s a breath of fresh air compared to the rest of the bloated, vapid web. I like that some designer hasn’t gotten ahold of the style sheet and replaced all the content with whitespace.
Agreed. For anything complicated, I’ll always download the pdf. I don’t really find it burdensome pan and zoom a pdf, even on mobile. It seems to work a lot better than publishers attempts at producing web versions of papers, which I find generally useless.
> Data exploration: I find this easier in R. Packages like dplyr help a lot here. Pandas' API is somewhat cumbersome
I can’t claim to have tried everything out there, but so far it’s been my experience that matlab beats the socks off everything else when it comes to data exploration. I’m mostly looking at time series like data (but mostly not statistics). The ability to do things like click on a datapoint and export it and it’s index back to your workspace sound trivial. But in practice it’s a huge convenience and I’ve been unable to find a plotting package for python or Julia etc that can do things like this.
Completely agree. I don’t really understand the motivation for this behavior—surely they are not trying conserve disk space? I’d really like the history to just be like a log file. Even better if I could search within a specified time window.
I’m not really very facile with excel, but one place it’s really handy for me is situations that combine manual data entry with computation.
A super simple example is keeping track of monthly bills when you have flat mates, and need to split them every month. It’s not so critical that I feel the need to version control it etc, but it’s still nice to have a visually inspectable record. Even though I spend most of my days writing code, anything I can dream up that involves python or whatever just seems unnecessarily opaque and baroque. A spreadsheet is ideally suited to the task.
I think that somehow correcting the power imbalance is the key to improving the lives of grad students. In most normal jobs, if your boss is a jerk, you typically have the ability to leave and go somewhere else, and quite possibly end up better compensated as a result. It is exceedingly difficult to switch phd advisors, especially without sustaining a significant setback in your graduate career. I believe this one of the leading factors in exploitive advisor-grad relationships.
Interesting. One of the reasons I switched to mutt (well, neomutt) is that it is faster for me to work with attachements from a cli. This is mostly due to tab completion, which for commonly accessed locations is practically muscle memory. Takes me forever to to click my way there.
I didn’t find the REPL that great, because it takes forever to jit anything. My laptop is not that old and creating an array with 5 elements takes over a second. If I type a syntax error, it takes tens of seconds to produce an error. This yields a very frustrating experience and doesn’t lend itself to an effective prototyping environment. For now at least I’ll be sticking with matlab.
Yes, one may keep that in mind when working something on scratch paper. But when it’s possible for things to be complex, the standard notation is something like A^. In my opinion, it is rather sloppy to write A^T and expect the reader to substitute for the complex case. I can’t remeber where at the moment, but I have definitely seen derivations when the authors explicitly wanted A^T on a complex matrix.
Because the idea that one can separate content from presentation appears as an elegant Platonic ideal to a lot of folks. The trouble seems to be that content and presentation are not actually disjoint sets. And (a perhaps different) set of folks want a slice of the juicy middle.
Honestly, nobody(except the fanbois) cares about the story or Tesla’s original intention. All that matters is what they are actually doing. And what they’re actually doing is skeevy.
If you’re handy python, check out its python api. Another method is to have gnucash store it’s data in a MySQL database, and query that directly. But I agree that having more powerful reporting built would be nice.
The hardware compatibility thing almost bit me. I have an older dell t3600 that a bought a new Radeon 480 GPU for. I only verified that the power supply could handle it and the pci slots were compatible. The card “fit” but I couldn’t put side cover back on, because there is a handle riveted to the inside of the side panel that collided with the card. I ended up having to drill out the rivets and remove the handle.
The first few paragraphs paint a picture of why the author thinks tourism by the massses is a problem. But then proceeds to tell us how when only aristocrats traveled, there was no problem. Not being an aristocrat, the obvious implication is that I ought to leave the traveling to my betters.
Personally, I got about a third of the way through and clicked out because I felt the same disgust as the op. At least to the point in the article I got to, the author didn’t cite any real data, just cherry picked anecdotes to support their pearl clutching. I mean, why are boats with an all you can eat buffet a problem anyway? Right, because the author wants the buffet scarfing philistines to stay in flyover country where they belong.