btrettel

5 ms·

1.
by btrettel 11d ago
I've thought exactly that "writing is thinking" before as a reason to not let a LLM write for me. Then again, I've seen a counterargument [1] by someone who clearly heavily uses LLMs for writing (going by both their LLMy
2.
by btrettel 11d ago
I assume this was supposed to link here: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117207849921390904 This was interesting as I had wondered whether Terence Tao realized that the Navier-Stokes Millenium Prize problem was kinda usele
3.
by btrettel 15d ago
Location: United States (Open to any US location) Remote: Yes, open to remote, hybrid, or in office Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Fortran, Python (Matplotlib, Numpy, Pandas, Scipy), OpenMP, Git/GitHub, Linux, Bash, others... R
4.
by btrettel 28d ago
I haven't seen anything like this before, but I think it's a good idea. I would suggest starting it yourself and putting it on GitHub something similar so that anyone can submit more via pull requests.
5.
by btrettel 1mo ago
I have a PhD in mechanical engineering. I would back up and instead ask whether getting a PhD is a good idea. Unfortunately, academia is a minefield. PhD students are largely cheap labor. Getting a PhD can be a valuable apprenticeship, but
6.
by btrettel 1mo ago
Location: United States (Open to any US location) Remote: Yes, open to remote, hybrid, or in office Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Fortran, Python (Matplotlib, Numpy, Pandas, Scipy), OpenMP, Git/GitHub, Linux, Bash, others... R
7.
by btrettel 2mo ago
Some comments not addressing your question: I think you are holding climate science to a far higher standard than the other physical sciences. In the physical sciences, blinded experiments are rarely done. The need for blinding is greatly r
8.
by btrettel 2mo ago
Drag-and-drop of the PDF file worked for me in Zotero 9 (latest version). I never used this feature before. This would be greatly preferred to my earlier suggestion to get a LLM to generate a list of DOIs.
9.
by btrettel 2mo ago
Zotero is not just a front-end to BibTeX. Here are some things I like about Zotero off the top of my head: Zotero integrates well with various online services. This I think is Zotero's most valuable feature. The simple fact is that not
10.
by btrettel 2mo ago
> First I used Claude Code to generate all the BibTex files for the PDFs I think this has an unnecessary risk of hallucinated bibliographic data. For anyone doing something similar in the future, it would be more reliable to make a LLM g
11.
by btrettel 2mo ago
I would suggest looking at more powerful file managers. I use Midnight Commander, which isn't perfect, but is far more powerful than what is provided by default and is also extensible through things like its user menu. My organization
12.
by btrettel 2mo ago
I think part of the problem is that the people hiring are looking for shortcuts and won't accept any approach that requires more than a certain amount of time. I've read comments about how X company got hundreds or even thousands
13.
by btrettel 2mo ago
I'm a mechanical engineer who has written similar tools for work and hobbies. Producing pretty pictures does not mean that the model is physically accurate. Unfortunately, such tools seem be evaluated much more on flashiness and not on
14.
by btrettel 2mo ago
Unfortunately, running an online forum has been a pain for a long time. You have to promote the forum to keep it active, deal with various bad actors (historically spammers, trolls, and black hats), maintain the forum, deal with drama, etc.
15.
by btrettel 3mo ago
Location: United States (Open to any US location) Remote: Yes, open to remote, hybrid, or in office Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Fortran, Python (Matplotlib, Numpy, Pandas, Scipy), OpenMP, Git/GitHub, Linux, Bash, others... R
16.
by btrettel 3mo ago
A spell checker, grammar checker, and tutor change a relatively small fraction of the writing, preserve the writer's style/voice, and rarely introduce errors that are hard to detect like hallucinations. A translation app changes n
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by btrettel 3mo ago
Recommender systems for papers tend to be pretty bad, so there's a lot of room for improvement. I'll use Semantic Scholar as an example. I have a bunch of folders in what they call a "Library" with recommendations turned
18.
by btrettel 3mo ago
I also use a unique email address for Hacker News, and I get no spam to that address. The (different) address I use for the HN jobs threads gets only spam, though.
19.
by btrettel 3mo ago
Are you loosely paraphrasing here? The closest thing I could find by Scott Adams was "Whenever you have a lot of money in play, combined with the ability to hide misbehavior behind complexity, you should expect widespread fraud to happ
20.
by btrettel 3mo ago
I had a similar experience before [1]. I fully agree that too many interview tests select for dishonest people. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35496976
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by btrettel 3mo ago
Unfortunately, when managers expect a certain throughput, solutions like this often appear. I saw similar systems when I was a patent examiner at the USPTO. From what I recall being told, the USPTO's "form paragraphs" started
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by btrettel 3mo ago
Getting Western researchers to not ignore papers published in languages other than English is a serious uphill battle. During my PhD, I tried to do a truly global literature review of all languages. I tried to be a lot more comprehensive th
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by btrettel 3mo ago
I don't think I experienced discrimination during admissions either. Off the top of my head, I don't know any US citizens who told me that they wanted to go to grad school but were unable to be admitted to a school.
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by btrettel 3mo ago
As a US citizen with a PhD, I didn't experience any clear discrimination in favor of foreign students during grad school. I think the main reason so few US citizens get PhDs is because PhD "student" (they're actually wor
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by btrettel 4mo ago
Even if it wasn't a large size, it likely wouldn't be great. During my PhD on sprays, I did some (unpublished) experiments using isopropyl alcohol to reduce the surface tension. The nozzles I used were around 1 mm in diameter as I
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by btrettel 4mo ago
Fluid dynamicist here. The word "compressible" has multiple meanings and this might be confusing you. You don't need compressible flows in the sense of high Mach numbers. There are other models where the flow is variable dens
27.
by btrettel 4mo ago
Location: United States (Open to any US location) Remote: Yes, open to remote, hybrid, or in office Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Fortran, Python (Matplotlib, Numpy, Pandas, Scipy), OpenMP, Git/GitHub, Linux, Bash, others... R
28.
by btrettel 4mo ago
I think the type of speed that you're referring to is different from the type of speed the linked article is referring to. I'm not sure what the best way to distinguish the two is. With slow software, you're presumably gettin
29.
by btrettel 4mo ago
One approach for testing with multiple compilers that I use on some Fortran projects (where testing against multiple compilers seems more common than in C) is to use a variable from the command line to specify the compiler, for example:
30.
by btrettel 4mo ago
I had a similar setup in 2023, but the computer was reformatted after I moved. I wrote a HN comment about the setup before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37792204 I liked it and intend to use a similar setup in the f

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