The h Bar

Semiclassical

20:02

:/

bolbteppa

Weber electrodynamics

Weber electrodynamics is an alternative to Maxwell electrodynamics developed by Wilhelm Eduard Weber. In this theory, Coulomb's Law becomes velocity dependent. In mainstream contemporary physics, Maxwell electrodynamics is treated as the uncontroversial foundation of classical electromagnetism, while Weber electrodynamics is generally unknown (or ignored). == Mathematical description == According to Weber electrodynamics, the force (F) acting simultaneously on point charges q1 and q2, is given by F = ...

Semiclassical

ugh. that feeling when you get halfway through writing up an example and you realize it's more complicated than you wanted it to be

enumaris

fun beans

ACuriousMind

@Shing I don't think this is a question about "inertial frames" at all - an accelerated frame, such as being in free fall, is not an inertial frame in Newtonian mechanics. Nathaniel's point is that you can't actually feel acceleration that applies evenly to the entirety of your body - humans are not "Newtonian inertial frame detectors".

bolbteppa

We have found 'alternative quantum theory, alternative electrodynamics, alternative fluids' today so far

ACuriousMind

20:06

@enumaris Why beans, I wonder? (You really like that turn of phrase :P)

danielunderwood

It'll be interesting the day someone tries to present an alternative theory to classical mech

Anonymous

@ACuriousMind Sounds like a variation of "cool beans" ;)

Semiclassical

@bolbteppa i can give you another one: stochastic electrodynamics as an alternative to QED

enumaris

@ACuriousMind :D beans is a fun word

Semiclassical

(Note: my mentioning of it should not be construed as an endorsement)

Shing

20:10

@ACuriousMind I am confused, but we surely feel acceleration when we are in an accelerating car (even when our heads is "fixed" by the sit)

ACuriousMind

@enumaris 'kay, fun carrots

Shing

okay, I kind of missed the comments.

Anonymous

fun broccolis

enumaris

time to fix my code

Semiclassical

But SED comes up in Bush's review on pilot wave hydrodynamics, so that's how I know about it

ACuriousMind

20:11

@Shing What you feel is the force the seat exerts on you as it pushes against you, not the acceleration.

Semiclassical

see page 286 here: math.mit.edu/~bush/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/…

Anonymous

@Shing You could try paragliding to check :P

enumaris

I bet @JohnRennie is sad about that last minute game-tieing goal that just happened...

bolbteppa

Yeah, there's about 4 or 5 formulations of classical mechanics but they're all equivalent while these examples all have issues

enumaris

fun game: name all the formulations

ACuriousMind

20:13

There are the Hamiltonian, Lagrangian and kindergarten formulations :P

Anonymous

@enumaris JR watches football?

Semiclassical

Hamilton-Jacobi :P

enumaris

he bet that England and Japan will meet in the finals

ACuriousMind

@Blue Yes, but only as a stress test for his laptops

enumaris

Japan lost yesterday

Anonymous

20:14

@ACuriousMind lol

enumaris

(But I'm guessing he doesn't follow closely since they couldn't have met in the finals anyways)

Anonymous

@enumaris They played well though

bolbteppa

'In Maxwell electrodynamics, Newton's third law does not hold for particles. Instead, particles exert forces on electromagnetic fields, and fields exert forces on particles, but particles do not directly exert forces on other particles. Therefore, two nearby particles do not always experience equal and opposite forces...

The Weber force law is quite different: All particles, regardless of size and mass, will exactly follow Newton's third law. Therefore, Weber electrodynamics, unlike Maxwell electrodynamics, has conservation of particle momentum and conservation of particle angular momentum.'

Anonymous

But Belgium had a swift comeback

enumaris

oh wait

I'm wrong, they could have met in the finals

I thought they were in the same half

bolbteppa

20:15

There's also the Gauss formulation of mechanics and a Mach one and a Hertz one I think

Shing

@ACuriousMind yeah, you are right. but it is still strange to me. does human really sense acceleration that way? I can tell I am in a accelerating car when I can't stand stably. (also, I can simply hang a ball in the car, and measure its inclined angle. )

bolbteppa

Apparently the first or one of the earlier uses of hypergeometric was Wallis who called a series like
$$f(z) = 1 + z + z(z + 1) + z(z+1)(z+2) + z(z+1)(z+2)(z+3) + \dots $$
hypergeometric, now I can kind of see one placing these terms as the coefficients in a power series
$$f(z) = 1 +az + a(a+1)\frac{z^2}{2} + a(a+1)(a+2) \frac{z^3}{3!} + \dots$$
but what maniac would form
$$f(z) = 1 + \dfrac{a \cdot b}{c \cdot 1} z + \dfrac{a(a+1)b(b+1)}{c(c+1) 1 \cdot 2 } z^2 + \dfrac{a(a+1)(a+2)b(b+1)(b+2)}{c(c+1)(c+2) 1 \cdot 2 \cdot 3} z^3 + \dots $$

Anonymous

@Shing That's mostly non-uniform acceleration

ACuriousMind

@Shing When you can't stand you are feeling the difference between the force applied to your feet and to your head; likewise, the ball on the string is "feeling" the difference between the force at the attachment point of the string and the ball itself

Anonymous

Also your legs are on the floor

Anonymous

20:18

So any acceleration of the car will affect your legs first

Anonymous

And then the rest of the upper body

Anonymous

Basically your lower body will pull forward or backward your upper body as ACM says

ACuriousMind

You are only ever detecting differences in acceleration, otherwise you could distinguish being in free fall from being outside the influence of gravity entirely.

Realise that the astronauts on the ISS are continually under the effect of Earth's pull, yet they feel none of it.

Anonymous

If you want to experience real uniform acceleration without spending years trying to become an astronaut, just jump from a really tall building ;)

Anonymous

You'll fall with $g$ :D

ACuriousMind

20:21

^Don't try this at home :P

Balarka Sen

RIP

Avnish Kabaj

@Blue drag?

ACuriousMind

Also jumping in the atmosphere is not a good example because there's air

Balarka Sen

Relevant

Felix Baumgartner Space Jump World Record 2012 Full HD 1080p [FULL]

►

Danu

@ConstantineBlack No problem; let me know if you have more questions.

Anonymous

20:23

@AvnishKabaj Eh, air drag wouldn't affect a human. At least not a considerable amount. But yeah, if you're paragliding...

Anonymous

Our surface area too less

ACuriousMind

@Blue You'll feel the air rushing past you, therefore being able to tell you're accelerating.

So for the purposes of this discussion, neglecting friction is not such a good idea

Avnish Kabaj

Ride a bike in a cylinder

You'll feel centripetal force

Semiclassical

@bolbteppa the article here includes the following sentence:

Anonymous

@ACuriousMind Well, "cheap" alternatives are never perfect :P

Avnish Kabaj

20:25

@Blue if I want to live I'll paraglide

Semiclassical

"Later Euler generalized the factorial sequence in the form $$\Delta : n = a(a + b) (a + 2b) \cdots (a + (n - 1) b)$$ and this is what he (and his immediate successors) understood as a hypergeometric sequence."

Shing

@ACuriousMind and @blue ok, you are right. what about assuming I am a box standing very still. and let there be friction. surely there the car accelerate large enough, I will "slide" backward?

Semiclassical

So that tells you something about how the terminology evolved.

Anonymous

@AvnishKabaj On a side note: I had once searched for "paragliding deaths + statistics", but surprisingly the number of deaths is very very low. Like 0.0001% or so. I was a bit surprised, especially considering that there are so many things which can go wrong

Semiclassical

it also notes Euler as having studied the hypergeometric DE in 1778

Shing

20:28

anyway, human probably really sense acceleration that way.

Semiclassical

no idea why he chose to study it

bah, i'm reading it backwards

he studied the series expansion of that kind and noted that it satisfied a certain DE

bolbteppa

Yeah

Wallis was in the 1600's I think

It's a bit confusing

I think Gauss first wrote it in general form, maybe not

ACuriousMind

@Shing Whether you slide depends on how strong static friction is.

Semiclassical

math history is weird

especially stuff from back then

Anonymous

"Statistically, paragliding is as safe as driving. Each year, about 1 out of every 10,000 Americans is killed in a car accident – there were about 32,000 deaths in 2011, for example. In Germany, where paragliding is much more popular than in the States, about 3 people are killed per year, out of 33,000 pilots."

Anonymous

20:33

Ah, okay, the value I gave was off by an order of magnitude

bolbteppa

The Wallis form $1 + z + z^2 + z^3 + \dots \to 1 + z + z(z+1) + z(z+1)(z+2) + \dots$ explains the name a bit

enumaris

attempted fix #1 completed...running tests now :D

Semiclassical

@bolbteppa i don't follow

Anonymous

Oh, and paragliding is popular in Germany? @ACuriousMind I didn't know

ACuriousMind

@Blue Uh

I've never met anyone who paraglided, fwiw

Semiclassical

20:34

it's all relative

enumaris

what % of germany have you met?

bolbteppa

If $1 + z + z^2$ is geometric then $1 + z + z(z+1)$ is hyper-geometric :p

Semiclassical

ah, fair

bolbteppa

$1 + z + z(z -1)$ anti-hyper-geometric

:(

Semiclassical

hyper-anti-geometric

ACuriousMind

20:36

@enumaris Probably <0.01% :P

enumaris

high sampling error maybe

bolbteppa

hypo-geometric (hypo opposite of hyper :p)

Semiclassical

I approve

I guess you could sorta see hypergeometric arising by doing $\frac{a^n b^n}{c^n}\mapsto \frac{(a)_n (b)_n}{(c)_n}$ where $(a)_n=a(a+1)\cdots (a+n-1)$

ACuriousMind

@enumaris Sure, the kind of people I meet are typically not the adrenaline thrill seekers

bolbteppa

England fell asleep, historic pentalties for their failure now

Semiclassical

20:38

where by comparison the Wallis version is just $a^n \mapsto (a)_n$

bolbteppa

That's interesting

Avnish Kabaj

@Blue paragliding is generally done in controlled conditions.

Balarka Sen

England is tired indeed

Anonymous

@AvnishKabaj That's what it seems from the statistics...although I'm still scared to try :P

Anonymous

What if I get stuck on the top of a tall tree?

Avnish Kabaj

20:40

@Blue pull a znmb with your friends

Anonymous

I don't even know tree climbing :P

Avnish Kabaj

@Blue *impaled

ACuriousMind

@Blue Then the tree is your home now; embrace your inner monkey!

Anonymous

Lol. Though the scarier part is of course the parachute not opening in time :P

Anonymous

Or me getting entangled with the parachute ;)

Balarka Sen

20:42

Parachute is also scared of you not opening in time

Avnish Kabaj

Paragliding and base jumping are different I think

Balarka Sen

Think about that for a bit

enumaris

are they already kicking penalties or are they setting that up?

ACuriousMind

@Blue Schrödinger's paraglider?

Avnish Kabaj

Aaah no

I'm the one confused

ACuriousMind

20:43

You're not dead until someone observes you.

Anonymous

^ That's an interesting thought :P

Avnish Kabaj

@Blue hangliding

Go for that

Balarka Sen

That's indeed an interesting though

ACuriousMind

If a @Blue crashes in the forest, does it still make a sound?

enumaris

I like to subscribe to Quantum Immortality

ACuriousMind

20:44

@enumaris I subscribe to Quantum Immorality.

enumaris

sounds kinky ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

2

Anonymous

@enumaris That's the nicest emoji nose I've ever seen

Anonymous

100/100

enumaris

lol

bolbteppa

1-1

Balarka Sen

20:46

the commentator is pure british

K A N E A G A I N

enumaris

feels like watching penalties from a google text-based update is not good lol

Balarka Sen

Columbia 3 England 2

enumaris

only cus England kicking second right?

Balarka Sen

Columbia still 3!!! on the bar

@enumaris nope, blocked

bolbteppa

Unbelievable

Balarka Sen

20:50

Columbia 3 England 3

equalizer

enumaris

whelp

Balarka Sen

now one more round

enumaris

basically sudden death now lol

Balarka Sen

RIP

Avnish Kabaj

My money's on colombia

bolbteppa

20:51

Oh my god

Balarka Sen

England blocked!!!!

bolbteppa

England will do it

Balarka Sen

Great save

Now win or sudden death

for england

England wins

enumaris

wowzers, down to the wire lol

Balarka Sen

the britass commentator is going crazy lmao

Anonymous

20:53

@AvnishKabaj Send the bitcoins now

Semiclassical

So England Belgium? Neat

enumaris

all the bitcoins?

bolbteppa

That's what they get for fouling players all the time

Balarka Sen

@Semiclassical England Sweden, not?

Semiclassical

Oh

enumaris

20:53

England Sweden

easier half imo

Semiclassical

Dunno why I jumped to that

enumaris

Englad half is Sweden, Croatia and Russia

Balarka Sen

@bolbteppa Yeah columbia kinda sucked in this game

England has a bad luck, lots of definite shots missed by inches

enumaris

other half is Uruguay-France and Brazil-Belgium

Balarka Sen

Belgium vs Brazil... I wish Japan played on that one

bolbteppa

20:55

Friday will be nuts

Balarka Sen

'cuz Japan was actually p good

but then Belgium recovered quickly as well

so maybe they'll beat Brazil - I just want them to go

enumaris

Belgium has some good players

Avnish Kabaj

@Blue only Zimbabwe dollars

enumaris

last I checked (2 years ago lol) Eden Hazard was in contention for best player

Balarka Sen

Interesting

Anonymous

20:58

@AvnishKabaj Well, around 100,000 trillion Zimbabwe dollars should suffice. I'll buy a pizza with that ;)

Anonymous

Actually, what's the conversion rate...lol

Balarka Sen

1 Z = nearly 5 in our broken currency

Anonymous

Where Z stands for?

Balarka Sen

zimbabwean dollar

Anonymous

"Zimbabwe's central bank allowed its citizens to exchange the country's almost worthless currency for US dollars. Its 100-trillion-dollar note is worth just 40 U.S. cents."

Balarka Sen

21:01

wut

did i misread google

Anonymous

Indeed. 1 Z = 5 definitely not Rs. 5 :P

Anonymous

"

Use of the Zimbabwean dollar as an official currency was effectively abandoned on 12 April 2009. It was demonetised in 2015, with outstanding accounts able to be reimbursed until April 30, 2016.[5][6] In place of the Zimbabwean dollar, currencies including the South African rand, Botswana pula, pound sterling, Indian rupee, euro, Japanese yen, Australian dollar, Chinese yuan, and the United States dollar are now regularly used.[7][8]"

Balarka Sen

im the worst

DanielSank

@ACuriousMind Go on...

Sid

Colombia-England at some stage looked like they would murder the ref

ACuriousMind

21:04

@DanielSank My message after that is me going on ;)

Avnish Kabaj

@Blue memes are the source of all knowledge

Sid

(There's actually a hilarious video on YouTube about Referees getting hit)

Unfortunately I can't find that video now

Anonymous

@Sid Did Zlatan hit a referee? I expect him to be in the video :P

Sid

@Blue yup!

Fairly sure he was thers

Anonymous

Yay, guessed right :D

enumaris

21:08

Fair bet that Zlatan would be in there

Sid

In one part, The ref is showing a red card to a player. The player takes the card and shows it to the ref. :P

Anonymous

Awesome XD

enumaris

welp, all tests passed on modified code

seems to be correct now :D

ACuriousMind

@enumaris A bug in tested code is not a bug, it is a test not written.

enumaris

there's probably bugs

I mean, if you want to get rid of every bug you'd never push anything out for production

ACuriousMind

21:12

@enumaris Tell that to the people writing code for e.g. the space shuttle.

I mean, sometimes a bug slips even past them, but surely they don't have that attitude

enumaris

obviously if your work is mission critical you need to be more thorough

but even then, they have shown bugs in the past...

good thing I don't produce anything on that level lol

Anonymous

Speaking of that, I find it very weird that so much of academic code is never released. I get hesitant to trust any "simulation" based papers due to that

ACuriousMind

@enumaris All work is mission critical. I'm firmly opposed to viewing programming as this discipline where it's somehow okay to deliver faulty products by default. The "A bug is not a bug, it is a test not yet written" is serious: If you're diligent, you should have tests for any reasonable permutation of inputs you expect to your programs.

Anonymous

There might be so many bugs in them, especially because the people writing them are not professional coders

ACuriousMind

@Blue Two reasons they don't release it: 1. They're ashamed of it. 2. They don't want anyone to steal it.

These are not mutually exclusive

enumaris

21:15

Mostly 1

Good thing I don't deliver products

I'm the only one who actually uses my code lol

Anonymous

@ACuriousMind Well, they can obviously use appropriate licenses. Hardly they contain any "novel algorithm" or anything like that

enumaris

see point 1.

Anonymous

1 seems more reasonable, lol

Anonymous

I've seen FORTRAN code written by some condensed matter people. It's one of the cruelest forms of torture to make anyone decipher and debug those :P

ACuriousMind

@Blue Licenses can't prohibit someone else taking the ideas (optimizations, algorithms) in your code and expanding on them.

Anonymous

21:18

They don't even write comment lines!

Anonymous

Phew

ACuriousMind

Well written code doesn't need comments! ::thinks of the large legacy codebase he partially maintains and weeps::

Anonymous

lol

Anonymous

@ACuriousMind But on the flip side, see, making it compulsory to reveal academic code, will improve quality of research and publications overall

Anonymous

In the current state, it gets difficult to say who is faking results

Anonymous

21:21

Especially if the person is not a renowned scientist already

ACuriousMind

@Blue I wish I shared your optimism

How many people are really gonna read through other researcher's poorly documented code?

And how many are just gonna cut and paste the bits they think they can use, proliferating erroneous throughout the discipline?

Anonymous

@ACuriousMind That's exactly what I was getting at. If they're forced to share code they'll also be forced to document it properly, to avoid embarrassment

Anonymous

Well, there are some good arguments on both sides of the line :P

enumaris

my prof in undergrad

published his code as and addendum

to a paper

it was written in fortran 77

I could not get it to compile

ACuriousMind

@enumaris Mhhhhhh, spaghetti.

Anonymous

21:26

@enumaris lel

enumaris

I spent like 3 months trying to get it to compile

then I gave up on the project

ACuriousMind

I once implemented a Monte-Carlo algorithm in C, claimed by papers in the 70s to yield particular results. I didn't reobtain the results, but insisted I could not find any error in my code (the code was horrible in retrospect, btw :P). I eventually got full marks for it (probably because the grader couldn't be bothered) but I still don't know whether my code was wrong or those papers were wrong.

Anonymous

Unfortunately, yeah. Graders hardly check code assignments

Anonymous

Same here

DanielSank

@ACuriousMind Interesting.

Anonymous

21:34

@ACuriousMind Speaking of that, what's the formal way to transition from Poisson brackets to commutator brackets, and the classical Hamiltonian to the Hamiltonian operator, and Hamilton's equations to Schrodinger's equation? I can understand them well as intuitive analogies but haven't yet found a mathematically rigorous formulation

ACuriousMind

@Blue There is no fully rigorous formulation, due to the Groenewold-van Howe no-go theorem - you cannot directly map all Poisson brackets to commutators in a naive and desirable fashion. Rigorous formulations are e.g. deformation quantization, mapping a deformed classical Poisson bracket - e.g. the Moyal bracket - to the commutator.

Anonymous

"Groenewold-van Howe no-go theorem"

Anonymous

wow, such a big name theorem

Anonymous

There's no wiki article apparently :/

Anonymous

@ACuriousMind Interesting, I'll check those out

Anonymous

21:38

(hearing them all for the first time in life :P)

ACuriousMind

@Blue Either google "Groenewold van Howe" or look at e.g. physics.stackexchange.com/q/297279/50583 for a start

DanielSank

@ACuriousMind is it obvious that diagonalizing the matrix associated with Hamilton's equations of motion is the same as solving $\{H,f\} = cf$?

ACuriousMind

@DanielSank Sort of. The time evolution of any phase space function $f(x(t),p(t))$ is given by $\{H, f\} = \partial_t f$. When you diagonalize that matrix, you are looking for functions such that $\partial_t f = c f$.

DanielSank

I suppose that's true.

ACuriousMind

I mean, all this is still valuable insight - but it is also "well-known", for certain values of "well-known" ;)

ACuriousMind

21:54

And, come to think of it, this is why I advocate learning Hamiltonian classical mechanics firmly before embarking on quantum mechanics - many of the quantumly important structures are already there, hidden in plain sight

3

Anonymous

That's really good advice, yeah ^. I've come to appreciate a lot it recently :)

Anonymous

Tbh, I find classical mechanics a lot more elegant in many ways

Semiclassical

and then you start doing QFT and wonder where all that nice Hamiltonian stuff went

heather

@JohnRennie, just saw England beat Colombia - congrats!

ACuriousMind

@Semiclassical It's still there, this time hidden in murky sight

Semiclassical

21:58

which I guess is really my way of slagging off the Lagrangian formulation

(it deserves respect, i'm just not fond of it)

Anonymous

22:31

1

Q: If quantum speed-up is due to the wave-like nature of quantum mechanics, why not just use regular waves?

The intuition I have for why quantum computing can perform better than classical computing is that the wavelike nature of wavefunctions allow you to interfere multiple states of information with a single operation, which theoretically could allow for exponential speedup. But if it really is jus...

Anonymous

Umm, does anyone understand this question? ^

Anonymous

Computation using classical waves and dynamical systems doesn't make much sense to me

danielunderwood

22:50

@Blue Half the people in software that think they're professional coders aren't either

Anonymous

@danielunderwood That's true too

Anonymous

The entry bar for software is way too low

Anonymous

Which is both fortunate and unfortunate

ACuriousMind

@Blue The world is becoming software. You can't sustain an exponential demand for developers with trained and disciplined professionals

There's a good talk by Uncle Bob about how Turing was the first "true programmer" just 75 years ago, and today there's hundreds of millions. If you keep up doubling the number of programmers every five years, half of all programmers will always have less than five years experience

Anonymous

Yeah, that's the "fortunate" part ;) Also, software is slowly becoming the profession guaranteed to pay at least a minimal salary

heather

22:58

@Blue I mean, engineering...

but yeah.

Anonymous

@ACuriousMind That's very true, and not necessarily a bad thing either. But one concern for sure is that a lot of tasks are gradually getting "automated". So the clerk-type software jobs will probably get wiped out in the future

Anonymous

For example, being able to use MS-Excel was once a "skill"

ACuriousMind

@Blue It still is one.

heather

^

Anonymous

@ACuriousMind Most companies would hate it if you list it in your resume :P

Anonymous

22:59

It's like a basic requirement

heather

@Blue uh, no. my mom uses excel all the time at work, and it was a skill she listed on her resume. it's the same sort of thing as being able to type at a high wpm, etc.

ACuriousMind

@Blue I'm not sure what a "clerk-type software job" is. Data entry is not a programming job. When I say "programmer", I do mean someone who's writing actual code

danielunderwood

Funnily enough, excel is how I got into software. My freshman year, I was in a research group and tried doing my data analysis in excel. I eventually found out that using matlab took like 5 lines to do the same thing that an hour of excel did and I went from there

heather

you'd also be surprised at what she's been able to do using excel that other people were doing manually.

ACuriousMind

@Blue I haven't used Excel in like forever, and I don't think I could do anything beyond the most basic with it if you asked me to. It's definitely still a skill valued for certain positions.

Anonymous

23:01

@ACuriousMind For instance, a lot of website designing has become automated - you have websites like Wix now. People tend to hire lesser web developers nowadays for designing websites for them, as they can easily do it themselves

heather

@Blue uh...[citation needed].

ACuriousMind

@Blue They still hire a metric ****ton of web developers, though.

heather

yes, a lot of websites are built using wix or whatever, but most professional companies hire web designers/web developers.

dmckee

The hover-over text of today's xkcd

Since delays should get less likely closer to the launch, most astronomers in 2018 believed the expansion of the schedule was slowing, but by early 2020 new measurements indicated that it was actually accelerating.

is a riot.

heather

lol

ACuriousMind

23:03

And what they don't hire in web developers they hire in data analysts to control their ever growing influx of prima facie meaningless data

Anonymous

@heather My point was basically that a majority of web designing can be and will be made automated in the near future. Although, yes, a lot of web developers are being hired, the bar for becoming a web developer is much lower than becoming a programmer or algorithm designer

heather

@Blue i think i am going to continue to disagree =)

it really depends on the job, doesn't it?

dmckee

@Blue This is very context dependent. It's mostly in IT and the programming heavy fields where people would look askance at putting it in your resume.

heather

there are programmers who can't do FizzBuzz stuff, but web developers that can put together crazy stuff. there's a spectrum, like for anything.

Semiclassical

Are there industry projections about web design becoming increasingly automated?

dmckee

23:07

And if you mean that you know some of the sophisticated tools the hide under the surface then you really are claiming experience with a Turing complete programming envrionement.

danielunderwood

Web development should be a crime

dmckee

@danielunderwood Much of web development is a crime.

I'm looking at anyone who thinks it is OK for a webpage to hijack my keybindings.

And I include Stack Exchange in that group.

Semiclassical

I never know quite what to say when people ask if I can program

certainly I can do scientific programming/scripting

danielunderwood

Extra keybindings I can sometimes live with, but overriding scroll drives me insane

Anonymous

@heather Well, I don't know what you define as "web development". Would you consider designing another "Facebook" as web development?

dmckee

23:09

The content does not get to change how the actual application works.

EVER.

Semiclassical

but that's a far cry from development

and that I have basically no insight on

heather

@Blue i dunno, facebook isn't just web development, is it?

it's a lot of stuff.

Anonymous

@Semiclassical Well, writing scientific programming scripts can be considered to be a type of development

Anonymous

Especially at a R&D type company

Semiclassical

i suppose

but I think there's definitely different levels of programming expertise, and I'm not near the high end

Anonymous

23:12

@heather True. By web development, I mostly meant creating a website like this one

Anonymous

@Semiclassical I think one of the main aspects of becoming a good programmer is having a sound knowledge of algorithms and data structures. I'm continually surprised by how many orders of magnitude my programs get speeded up, using the right algorithms and the right choice of data structure (normally with the help of the SO guys)

Semiclassical

yeah

that's consistent with my experience doing big matrix eigenvalue computations in mathematica

my computations ran so much faster when I figured out how to do them in not-stupid ways :P

danielunderwood

Structure is a big one too. Not necessarily overly-complex structure, but just not writing stuff like
`if: for: for: if`

Semiclassical

(for instance, realizing that the Eigenvalues command had a Method for banded matrices...)

Anonymous

Also, you know, the little things like - calling rand() in C is much more time consuming

Anonymous

23:17

than say XORShift

Anonymous

All those little details matter so much, when you're writing a large program with lots of loops

Anonymous

In a single iteration it is not much noticeable

Anonymous

But once you have like 10,000 iterations, things get pretty slow

Semiclassical

yeah

Anonymous

23:34

@dmckee I think a very few companies do mention "Advanced Excel" or something similar as a requirement, but that's very rare

Anonymous

Oh, and that classic Turing complete joke :P

enumaris

23:59

dang, my order shipped past 3 pm...

so it won't be picked up by USPS today...and tomorrow is a holiday...so...won't get it for a while :(

Transcript for