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knlje's comments

knlje | 8 years ago | on: Why is the Quintic Unsolvable?

Numerical methods quite easily give the roots of arbitrary polynomials of much higher order. QR-iteration works well up to some polynomial order, say at least 20. The idea is to construct a matrix that has the studied polynomial as its characteristic polynomial, and find the eigenvalues using a repeated QR decomposition. This gives you all complex and real roots.

knlje | 8 years ago | on: IBM unveils its most powerful quantum processor

I missed the first release of 5 qubit processor since the IBM website has so much marketing jargon. I find some papers in arXiv where they use the processor. Is there any reference demonstrating that this is a true quantum processor? I'd like to see some non-classical scaling with respect to N, etc.

knlje | 8 years ago | on: Interactive Mind Map for learning

Mind maps are great for recalling terminology hierarchies (for the lack of better word). I have not used them much in my engineering studies but I have taken some courses in history and philosophy where I often had to recall lots of terminology related to, for example, certain time periods or philosophical theories. The spatial aspect of a mind map really helps me. Just drawing the map is usually enough for me to remember everything that's in it for a few days. I simply close my eyes and picture the map in my head.

This, however, requires that I draw the map myself by hand. Drawing it by hand forces me to carefully look at every pixel of the map. Adding some fancy fonts and pictures like in your example can help in the sense that you spend more time looking at the pixels.

knlje | 9 years ago | on: NeoVim 0.2.0 released

On the other hand there are not many reasons for not doing the switch. Thus, it's more like choosing whether you want to support the project or not.

knlje | 9 years ago | on: A Competitive Programmer's Handbook

Programmers participate to ICPC in teams of three. According to my experiences, teamwork is a fairly important part of success since there is only one computer for each team.

knlje | 9 years ago | on: Taking the Gaia Hypothesis Seriously

I just wanted to add a counter point that there exists lots of serious(ly-taken) science that cannot be based merely on hypotheses and on attempts of proving or disproving those.

Each practical research project starts by defining the context and bounds of research. It seems to me that he is proposing the adaptation of a more general strategy when defining the context. He does not make any claims other than that the limited context apparently present in some astrobiological, geological, etc., studies might cause you to miss crucial things. A very hard claim to prove or disprove a priori but this does not render the viewpoint useless.

knlje | 9 years ago | on: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

0 years ago when I was in grad school, everybody was still using Matlab. Ok, some used R and NumPy but 80% Matlab. Such a collection of sparse matrix routines (direct solve, iterative solve, preconditioning, eigensolvers, SVD) is very useful in applied sciences.

knlje | 9 years ago | on: Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results

I must say that I was slightly surprised of it as well. I had to replace a fuse on the motherboard (screen was black) but otherwise it was in a pristine condition. Before this I had a 2011 Thinkpad x200s which is a more typical finding at waste electronics racks.

knlje | 9 years ago | on: Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results

I will never buy a computer again. You can find lots of very powerful computers in trash bin (e.g. my current 2013 MBP). People buy a piece of very precious materials and throw it away in 2 years. I think this is one of the most unethical things a man can do.

You think that you need your computers up to date because you are a geek and you must stay up to date to remain competent. This is not true. You can manage with less and you more than anyone else know how to handle a computer with slightly less resources.

These kind of numbers from a company advocating this throw away culture makes me very sad.

knlje | 9 years ago | on: The lost art of 3D rendering without shaders

I would quickly start drifting if I attended a class on 3D graphics and the teacher started writing everything open without matrices like that. You must admit the usefulness of a short notation when communicating ideas.

While understanding and talking 3D graphics is certainly possible without matrix notation, I really see no reason to purposefully omit it in teaching or other communication. Teaching situation is also a good place to practice standard notation.

knlje | 9 years ago | on: Python Versions Used in Commercial Projects, 2016 Edition

My colleagues at academia (scientific computing) mostly default to Python 2. Personally I'll switch to Python 3 when approximately over 50% of my colleagues use it or when some mind blowing new feature or library is introduced only for Python 3. Makes things simpler this way. Also, I don't currently have enough spare time to port all my code.
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