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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

I worked on a previous project that was sort of an ancestor to this. We used grid computing (before "cloud" was even a thing) to rapidly scale up compute- right after an experiment, you want to recalculate the optimal parameters based on what you just learned from the experiment and then start over as fast as possible. This was well before anybody could say "reinforcement learning" or "neural network" around physicists without being pilloried.

The best part was the name of our collaborator- "General Atomics" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics

Here's a writeup, https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.58...

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Very cool, I came several years following and we too had a grid for similar tuning work on LHC. My fondest memories were the bizarre hangups that could occur in custom stuff like this, and the way you'd find out that you done fucked up. My favorite time was when I broke a database by sending an accidental "query all the stuff", but it was really stupid, like from the console all you had to do was type a partial "ls" and it would assume a wildcard. So when the authority in my group attached me in the email and said I broke the main monitoring database I told them they had stupid defaults and never heard anything again. My second favorite memory was when I found a way to gain production access to grid resources just by naming your output datasets in a particular way. I was sat down in a hush ceremony with the Pakistani post-doc from my group and the Russian? programmer of the system and asked to keep it quiet. I kept it quiet, and am pretty sure I failed some sort of spy test that day. It wouldn't be the last time I felt like I failed a spy test, I guess that is my third fondest memory from my time in grad school.

Please tell me you went on to be an SRE. Because you have the phenotype.

Well, my nickname in my first job out of grad school was Murphy (as in murphys law). I was essentially a dowsing rod for corner cases and it was very much not intentional and extremely distressing. You could say I have some experience.

I've worked in a number of factories and it seems like everyone of them has a Murphy. The people who get confronted with problems that begin with everyone saying 'thats not actually possible'. I will always remember the poor guy who had to figure out the local fire department's radio repeater was rebooting ONE SINGLE piece of equipment in a factory from about a third of a mile away.

I have always wondered if there is a way to detect this particular trait either using MRI or possibly smell. Once you are in a space you can usually identify them because everyone seems to slightly avoid their workspace out of fear of being infected.

> I will always remember the poor guy who had to figure out the local fire department's radio repeater was rebooting ONE SINGLE piece of equipment in a factory from about a third of a mile away.

Old relays (especially when switching large DC currents) are fantastic for this purpose. The arc will essentially give off a mini EMP across the whole spectrum and woe to you if your gear isn't shielded and grounded properly.

I have a family member like that. She walks into the room: all computing equipment mysteriously crashes. I haven't been able to pin it on a real world cause yet.

Love the picture! I can't decide if the monitors being huge feels stranger, or people wearing collard shirts.

I know this is maybe weird, but I kind of wish programmers and other "technical" people dressed up at least a little bit more for the office. It makes the work environment feel a bit tidier and more professional to me.

you can wear whatever you like in your home office. go ahead and dress up for yourself

Personally, I consider it a mark of professionalism if people aren't blinded by trivial external markers (like what clothes their colleagues wear)

And I say that as somebody who likes dressing up for work.

I think it is relative, and mostly a question of balance. Every workplace has its culture and norms.

Making a little effort to blend in is a question about showing respect for your co-workers. But on the other hand, how you dress is self-expression.

If you're going to spend 8 hours per day with your butt in a chair facing a monitor you may as well dress for comfort rather than for looks.

Precisely this.

If you meet clients have a shirt. For daily coding, dress in what you like.

I, as many of my colleagues, certainly dressed up for the office, carefully selecting only the most witty but understated T-shirts.

I've often wondered about dress code for programmers. From a quick poll conducted at lunchtime, we concluded that there definitely is a way to dress for acceptance among devs, it's just hoodies and witty T-shirts instead of suits and ties.

Several people confirmed that they would probably be biased against applicants for dev positions coming in for an interview in a full on business suit with tie and slicked back hair (think "slick salesman" look). Perhaps not justified or fair, but interesting as a data point nonetheless. N=4 though, so don't take it too seriously.

I remember going to a meeting with fellow students I never met before.

It was at a time I applied for jobs after university and so I thought, I might wear a collars shirt to the meeting, to get in the mood.

All of my fellow CS students (aged 25-50) were wearing tshirts and generally more casual attire.

The first thing I was asked: Oh, do you study management?

It's not weird, it's controlling. Needing everyone to wear mono-colored shirts with buttons on it to feel tidy is a you problem.

A company I worked for (that I did generally like working for) implemented a suit and tie policy for management and above. It didn't affect me but I started looking for the door immediately and left a few months after.

Don't want to be in a company that is still clinging to 19th century values.

But buttons, collars, ties, and other artefacts of 1500s tailoring technology have such respectability and gravitas!

I always wear a collared shirt to work because I like them and they do look neat, but I cannot stand people that demand it from others.

Hygiene is pretty important in the business I work since some of our devices come in contact with drinking water. But I can assure you that hygiene often does not correlate with outside appearances.

Still, we have rules for people that have customer contact because people are still judgemental, even if they are often demonstrably wrong.

To underscore, I would bet that washing hands frequently, wearing gloves when touching food and masks/hood when working near food is much more important than the difference between wearing a fresh white-collar shirt vs a sweat shirt you change every other day.

That is vastly more important. It is mandatory to wash your hands before visiting production as well as changing clothes. Regardless of how clean they look, they will contain foreign matter. The cafeteria is pretty much declared a hazard zone, not only because of that one colleague who has a weird cheese experiment going on in the fridge.

Downside for management is that we are only allowed to drink water in our offices and are not allowed to eat outside the cafeteria. With time I have grown to like it that way, even if I am a coffee junkie. But it never smells bad in the office in exchange.

There is still some strange association with cleanliness and neat shirts.

The problem is, that alot of humanity still relies on cliches to communicate "base-truth". Suite and tie looks professional in movies, so you get more credit and respect for superficial looks on the job.

One must not support such a ridiculous look based culture by heart, its instead more a - "I want to reap the benefits & rewards from idiots in awed reference to work uniforms"

Ironically the same happened to the hoodie, after various hackermovies. Wear a hoodie and sit with a laptop, obviously improves your coding ability.

It’s not a ‘you’ problem per se, but just accepting that people are different, and that one size never fits all.

Nice clothes have a reason to exist, determining where that fits in your life or your teams’s life may be worth thinking about:)

I wished that people would stop focusing on exteriors so much and dealt with others based on merit rather than looks, age, height, weight.

There is a notable difference between those characteristics and the sartorial. That will be left as an exercise for the reader.

Nobody said anything about looks, age, height or weight.

> "I wish people dressed up at least a little bit more for the office. It makes the work environment feel a bit tidier and more professional to me."

That's very specifically about looks.

No, it's about what people wear.

Which is all about what they look like, really you're being pedantic beyond irritation.

The distinction, and its relevance, are obvious. If you're going to feign ignorance I have better things to do with my day than argue with you about it.

Then why do you argue about it?

Yes, there is a distinction, no it is not relevant. Just like to a blind person it would not matter what you wore so therefore 'looks' and 'what you are wearing' are closely related, related enough to both be used in this context.

So you say that what someone wears does not contribute to how someone looks.

That's quite the impressive opinion. Do you eat soup with a fork?

"Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform. Don't kid yourself." - Frank Zappa

I agree. But I’m old fashioned. I would never dream of going into the office without a collared shirt.

Go ahead, dress up if that floats your boat. But don't force it on others!

One of the funniest things I've ever seen was behind the scenes at TGIF at Google. Sundar was wearing some nice bay area gear (ie, ready to climb a mountain or meeting a corporate board room) and there were a couple PMs nearby wondering what brand he was wearing and how they could buy it.

Sorry, I don't see how this has any similarity to the posted project, apart from being also related to fusion?

I'm just an old man, pointing out that it's all been done before, and it will all be done again. The big difference is it looks like they're in the realtime controller for the plasma, rather than determining static settings for a subsequent run.

This is super cool, thanks for sharing. Also, you’re right, that name is dope.

Silicon valley would name it, ahem... Atomicly. Uber for atoms.

Since the .com domain would be gone, it would most likely be Atomcly

Yours was a tools and infrastructure project, and this is about learned, autonomous control. They are completely different goals.

> determining static settings for a subsequent run.

AFAICT, your software didn't do that. Rather it provided infrastructure for the researchers to do that themselves more efficiently.

From your paper:

> The ultimate goal of FusionGrid is to allow scientists at geographically distributed sites to participate fully in experimental and computational activities...

Exactly what are you saying has been done before?

The guy was saying nothing, people have done computer work in fusion and they will use computers again!

Profound.

He was merely giving a shameless plug of whatever infra project he was involved in.

Congrats - it involves computers and fusion.

I have no problem with a shameless plug -- it's an interesting show of how things used to be -- but he claimed more than that

> a previous project that was sort of an ancestor to this

> it's all been done before

implying that the current work build on his work in some way, which I don't see.

Could you be a bit clearer why you're being critical? Much of what DeepMind does is rooted in prior projects, they just sprinkle a little more RL and have a great press team. Nobody would use their system for real in production, just like when they published how they could run Google datacenters 5% cheaper in real time- turns out, nobody actually deployed that because the settings it came up with don't make sense to humans.

I'm not trying to be critical of your project, sorry if it came off that way. I'm just trying to clarify when you say "it's all been done before", exactly what in the current work had been done in your project. Although they are both in the fusion domain, I don't see how the current work builds on anything done in your work, even in a very distant way.

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