HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ApostleMatthew

44 karma · joined February 1, 2017

submissionscomments
ApostleMatthew··on PowerToys – open-source Windows utilities
I’ve totally fallen for Directory Opus. Most powerful file manager I’ve ever used, and I’ve only used a fraction of its features.
ApostleMatthew··on Moskva cruiser sank while being towed in a storm – Russian Defense Ministry
Russia uses a similar system, the Kashtan CIWS. This article (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61103927) indicates that the Moskva did have one installed, though I don’t know why it didn’t help in this case.
ApostleMatthew··on Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
Statistical mechanics/Biophysics:

Introduction to Modern Statistical Mechanics - David Chandler

Physical Biology of the Cell - Phillips, Kondev, Theriot, & Garcia

ApostleMatthew··on AMD once again have a top performance crown
Interesting. I, for some reason, was unaware that the benchmarks were user sourced. It appears to mainly be a system for bash scripts to run the program and then automatically format the results, is that correct? There's a benchmark for LAMMPS, but it'd be interesting to get one up for Gromacs or CHARMM.
ApostleMatthew··on How a coding error fueled a dispute between two condensed matter theorists
It’s much the same reason why you wouldn’t go to work wearing a days old, stained shirt and ripped pants — yeah, you’re more than likely going to work just as hard and as well than if you were wearing clean clothes, but that’s not going to stop people from judging you based on your appearance.

Most academics write code to just work. Not work well, or to be generalized, or to be efficient, just work. And while that’s absolutely fine, as your results being reproducible from the code is all that really matters, a lot of people don’t see it that way and will only see code slapped together haphazardly and dismiss you because of it.

ApostleMatthew··on How a coding error fueled a dispute between two condensed matter theorists
Embarrassed by its cobbled-togetherness. Not in whether or not it works.
ApostleMatthew··on How a coding error fueled a dispute between two condensed matter theorists
Oh, I meant making the error in the code fell under the we all make mistakes. Not the refusing to share it.
ApostleMatthew··on AMD once again have a top performance crown
I wish tech review sites would do a molecular dynamics benchmark for processors like these. It's pretty easy to set up just a simple MD simulation, and there'd be tens of us interested in seeing the results.
ApostleMatthew··on Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’
I think your first paragraph is a result of you viewing this from the perspective of someone knowledgeable about technology. The vast majority of people using Android phones get their apps exclusively from the Play Store and assume Android is exactly the same as iOS in that way.
ApostleMatthew··on How a coding error fueled a dispute between two condensed matter theorists
In my case, it is very much column A.
ApostleMatthew··on How a coding error fueled a dispute between two condensed matter theorists
My PhD adviser was a good friend of Chandler's, and a lot of my doctoral work was based on previous work done in his lab. I'm honestly really surprised one of his students/post-docs made a mistake of this magnitude -- generating a velocity distribution which does not follow the Boltzmann distribution is not something I'd expect to be a result of code coming from his lab. But we all make mistakes, and this really just lends more weight to the idea that all code used in producing published results should be posted along with the article itself, just like data sets often are (at least from studies with government funding).
ApostleMatthew··on Nvidia Unveils Quadro RTX, a Raytracing GPU
Wow. I haven't seen the sequel yet (unfortunately), but the differences is incredibly striking.
ApostleMatthew··on A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos
I agree with your latter two points, but I must take issue with your first point about mental health. I've posted some links below for your further reading which can explain the stressors better than I can, but graduate school is a breeding ground for mental health problems -- you have constant pressure to always be working (often up to 80-100 hours a week), constantly comparing yourself intellectually to other graduate students, and dealing with the overbearing reminder that you need to take a candidacy exam and defend your thesis. As a poster above said, 30% is absolutely not normal for society as a whole. Most articles point out the dearth of students who seek help, which I don't think is uncommon, but what is uncommon is the additional stressors.

I don't know if you've been through a PhD program, but as someone who has, it's really difficult to explain the pressures and stress that you encounter during it to someone who hasn't.

https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2014/02/paying-graduate-s... https://psychcentral.com/blog/highlighting-mental-health-in-...

ApostleMatthew··on That $35 that scientific journals charge goes 100% to publisher, 0% to authors
In my field (computational biophysics), it's pretty common practice to post published code on a git repository. Code used to produce published results absolutely should be accessible.
ApostleMatthew··on That $35 that scientific journals charge goes 100% to publisher, 0% to authors
It's a (fairly) standardized, robust, and trusted way of peer-reviewing data and results. Without some mechanism like that, there's no easy way to tell if Dr. X's results are as well peer-reviewed as Dr. Y's, at least as it currently stands.
ApostleMatthew··on Massgate – The central server for the game World in Conflict
I'm relatively new to C++, is this style common? I refer to, for example, putting the return of function on a separate line from the name and each of the passed parameters on a separate line as well.
ApostleMatthew··on The PhD pioneers
My former adviser told me that out of the 150+ committees he's been on, only one failed, and that the person who failed known for stealing research from his labmates and demonstrated in the defense itself that he didn't know what he was doing.

As far as I'm aware, defenses at most institutions are formalities. Your adviser has already decided you're done and its just the bureaucracy. Some places don't even have defenses (I don't think Berkley does, at least the chemistry department).

ApostleMatthew··on Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans
And even beyond that, comments that bring up endowments usually come from a misunderstanding of what an endowment is. Its not like Brown has a bank account with $3B in it which they can access whenever and however they'd like. Endowments pay out a certain amount of money each year (I think its around 4% each year for most universities), and usually have strict stipulations on how its spent.
ApostleMatthew··on Reuters' position on covering Trump
I think the evolution of how the media operates over the next 4ish years will be very interesting to watch.