Recent submissions

Comment · 9 months ago
where do you purchase yours out of curiosity? My incandescent light bulb dealer on Ebay stopped selling them...
Comment · 7 years ago
one nice thing about having the terminal within vim is that you can manipulate the output like any old buffer. So for instance if you want to copy something from the terminal into a script you're editing, you can yank the text from the terminal and paste it into your script, taking advantage of vim's editing features and without needing to move your mouse.
Comment · 8 years ago
Do you regret doing your PhD in math? Reason I ask is that I thought about going to grad school for math but decided against it. It just seemed like it would be postponing the inevitable of finding a job that had little to do with my "passion". I definitely see the appeal of doing a PhD in a field with better industry employment prospects (e.g. AI in CS if you're into that), but less so for fields like pure math that aren't as employable outside of academia. I'm curious if you felt the experience was worth it, though
Comment · 8 years ago
I've found that I often get better results on google if I click "Tools" under the search bar and change "All results" to "Verbatim". It seems to force it to just do the query without as much of the magic.
Comment · 8 years ago
I'm still using my "dumb phone" from 2010. I like it cause it has a physical keyboard, a long battery life, and I can drop it without worrying about breaking the screen. Plus I don't have to worry about the privacy issues that come from apps collecting data.

Honestly the only feature I feel like I'm missing out on is GPS. But I've actually found that not having GPS improves my sense of direction, since I force myself to actually learn the map of my surroundings instead of just always relying on the phone.

Comment · 8 years ago
Using bit manipulation to calculate chess piece movements is really quite satisfying. If magic bitboards are too confusing, the precursor - "kindergarten bitboards" - are a bit easier to understand. I have a description here if anyone is curious: https://github.com/cglouch/snakefish#sliding-pieces

I think once you understand the principle behind kindergarten bitboards, magic bitboards start to make more sense. It's basically a more clever way of indexing into a precomputed move table, that takes advantage of the redundancy in occupancy states, and requires even fewer instructions to determine the index. Although it does still feel kinda magic!

Comment · 8 years ago
Does anyone have any recommendations for learning to write modern, idiomatic C++? I used C++ in college for data structures and algorithms, so I have some familiarity with the basics. But we were mostly restricted to using C++98, and I'm not sure what the best practices look like these days with the changes introduced in 11, 14, and 17.
Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
If you find out, let me know! One thing I'll caution you about is there's sometimes a bit of a disconnect between "doing math" as perceived by someone who studied e.g. CS versus someone who studied math. For some people, doing math means maybe doing some trigonometry or some basic stats; whereas others won't be satisfied unless they're working on algebraic k-theory or something similarly next level. For people in the former category, there are certainly jobs available with just a bachelors degree and ideally some programming skills, whereas for the latter, you'll almost certainly want a PhD (and even then you may not get to use that knowledge outside of academia, depending on your area of study.) You'll want to find out where you are on that spectrum, and how you feel about grad school / work life balance / etc.

Personally, I got a bachelors in math and ended up working as a software developer. There's enough overlap in the sort of thinking required that makes it reasonably enjoyable. I do wish I had more opportunities to use math in my job though!

Comment · 9 years ago
I prefer listening to a familiar podcast to fall asleep. It's easier to do while lying down in bed and I can do it with my eyes closed, unlike TV/Netflix. The lack of visual stimulation is nice, at least for me.
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