BrandonS113

6 ms·

1.
by BrandonS113 5mo ago
I really wanted to like Typst. No more latex would be fantastic. Decided to use it for a project, and had to give up and return to latex, just too many corner cases. Both things its missing from latex, and lack of Pandoc convertibility. Rea
2.
by BrandonS113 3y ago
I have European debit cards. They get rejected in many Albert Heijn when Dutch cards (debit and credit) are taken. Jumbo takes foreign cards. Jumbo gets my (and a lot of my colleagues who pass though) business, AH not. Many restaurants take
3.
by BrandonS113 3y ago
I agree. But plenty of Dutch vendor only accept Dutch mastercards and not foreign. The fee s the same. WHY? And foreigners can't get IDEAL or Dutch mastercards. I have gotten used to carry a lot of cash when there. Fortunately, Holland
4.
by BrandonS113 3y ago
One reason to like the visa mastercard duopoly. They work everywhere. I go to the Netherlands a lot for work, and it is a real pain as they have their own payment system, IDEAL, one needs to live there, that is closed to foreigners. Many ve
5.
by BrandonS113 3y ago
AMEX unusable in Europe? Hardly. I payed for my dentist Friday with it, both supermarket and lunch today, and all Amazon, etc. Some vendors dont take it, but in my European country most places
6.
by BrandonS113 3y ago
I much prefer parallel in R with mclapply() to the Julia implementation of parallel. One of the few areas where I prefer R to julia (other being R data.tables to julia dataframes)
7.
by BrandonS113 3y ago
I think that is exactly what is happening. Most of my code is much much faster in Julia, and the code is nicer. But R has its moments. Which is good since this particular app has 3K lines, and I do not want to port it to Julia. And data.tab
8.
by BrandonS113 3y ago
Great idea, I do lurk there, just might do that next time I look at the code. My hunch is that simd is the low hanging fruit julia brings. But, and I am not an expert, both might end up doing BLAS anyways, which is why they are so similar.
9.
by BrandonS113 3y ago
No, its 4 lines of code. I just benchmarked for myself. All it is for 2 vectors x and y of average length 50, and 5 parameters, with exponential, addition, and multiplication, and ultimately sum to return to the optimizer. I was also surpri
10.
by BrandonS113 3y ago
no, the function it calls is pure R and that is where the the code spends all its time.
11.
by BrandonS113 3y ago
I used to think so, but I have a function that gets called about a billion times each and every day as new data comes in, and and takes about 0.01 seconds to evaluate (optimizaiton with nlopt). I tried to code it in c (30% speed improvement
12.
by BrandonS113 3y ago
Well I exported to ps this morning, since I used the pstricks package in latex. It is the best way I have seen to make diagrams with code, which can be very convenient. so python takes instrument data and writes latex with pstricks, then to
13.
by BrandonS113 3y ago
I disagree, there are at least 2 reasons why eps can be better. a) you can exactly match the fonts in an eps figure to a latex file, which will look much better. b) you can use \psfrag to change text to get proper mathematics in figures, li
14.
by BrandonS113 3y ago
yes, the book Ultra-Processed People https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/07/books/review/ultra-proces... does that quite well.
15.
by BrandonS113 3y ago
Can believe that, but there is more to such additives than cancer. The book Ultra-Processed People https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/07/books/review/ultra-proces... makes clear the danger from such ch
16.
by BrandonS113 3y ago
The demographic most likely to fall for scams is the 20 year old. So. no.
17.
by BrandonS113 3y ago
Its doomed to failure. Latex is horrible but makes beautiful documents and the relevant world either uses latex or Mircosoft Office. Why use anything else? Latex lives by the community of people who use latex for their work and to collabora
18.
by BrandonS113 3y ago
I have to disagree to "arguably not a very good fit, such as for presentation slides." I have to make regular work presentations with a lot of math. There are two choices: Powerpoint and Latex/beamer. While the latter is far
19.
by BrandonS113 4y ago
It is easy to say this doesn’t matter, and personally, I couldn’t care less which is used. However, professionally, I have twice in the past two months had a deal with text that was edited by line editor for my organisation, where they stro
20.
by BrandonS113 4y ago
I just hired a R engineer, so not that tiny. For a data science job with a lot of stats and math. R still beats Python for stats/data science programing. In my market, R people have more math/stats than Python applicants,
21.
by BrandonS113 4y ago
Last time I tried Octave it was several times slower than Matlab. Why use Octave instead of R, Python, or Julia? There is nothing Octave/Matlab can do that they can't. And anybody needing Matlab surely can afford to pay the licenc
22.
by BrandonS113 4y ago
No. This week, the treasuries and other assets in capital are effectively cash equivalents.
23.
by BrandonS113 4y ago
You are conflating two things. Reserve requirements are not same as capital. And there is a modern capital requirement, as per Basel III, in effect since 2022. Capital historically was calculated very differently.
24.
by BrandonS113 4y ago
Yes, unfortunately were not exactly working in Amsterdam, and needed a tram to the local station and then a train to, perhaps Amsterdam. That said, I would love to know why 's-Hertogenbosch is spelled that way. I asked a few locals, an
25.
by BrandonS113 4y ago
yes. I dont want to make much out of this. One of the team came from a country close by and he brought his car. Problem solved. But just about every Dutch person we worked with had a car. They would meet us on weekends in villages, and most
26.
by BrandonS113 4y ago
Yes, private bike rental firms are happy to take my money. But they are not common. But the public OV are ubiquitous and more strict.
27.
by BrandonS113 4y ago
One needs iDEAL for many things in Holland, and needs to be a resident for that. My colleague tried to get a personal OV-chipkaart, https://www.ov-chipkaart.nl/en/apply-for-personal-ov-chipcar... , needed for bikes, he
28.
by BrandonS113 4y ago
I had to spend a few months in Holland for work. We we left with the problem of what do do on the weekends. You can't rent bikes if you are not Dutch, and visiting the lovely villages and other places Holland is full of is a time consu
29.
by BrandonS113 4y ago
R looks pretty much the same as Julia here. Don't think its unstable. Its all float. Nlopt passes parameters as float, data is float. Can't see how it could return int. But I'll take a second look at the julia version of it.
30.
by BrandonS113 4y ago
Yes I follow this. The load time keeps getting better. And am looking forward to 1.9. I really don't want to come across as negative, Julia is a fantastic language, and my hope is that that it will continue its impressive improvement p

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