Bob Harris

Researcher in bioinformatics at Penn State.

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@nomad421 Was it at least a No. 2 pencil? 🤪

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@nomad421 I wonder, for those same folks, how anti-aliasing of wheel spokes must truly blow their minds.

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@nomad421 I went straight to grad school, had a melt down and didn't finish my first semester. Tried again 15 years later. And failed again (ran out of money). Tried again after another decade and finally succeeded.

Admittedly, not the typical path. 🤪

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@nomad421 They didn't address the peephole. I block that — usually with a wadded up piece of toilet paper.

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@pierre_marijon I've posted suggestions as an issue at the repo.

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@nomad421 Doesn't that mean you can't receive any of that equity until you die? A workaround might be to fake your own death soon after leaving the company. Perhaps chatGPT could expand that plot premise into a movie script. Would doing so qualify as "disparagement"?

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@lemire Mine may be the strangest reason you hear — I wanted to move to a specific town, and the only "job" I could find there that provided health insurance was to be a grad student.

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@lemire This has me pondering autocompletions of "I'm a real ...".

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@nomad421 In my own experience (which was outside academia), this was a change that took place in the mid 90s. Before that I got responses or rejections from everyone I sent my resume to. After that, I rarely got any response, occasionally even after an in-person interview.

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@lemire @geofflangdale @pshufb Will do. Not sure how to contact them though. Perhaps an email to Jan Schultke?

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@lemire Actually, I find that CA$50K ≈ US$38K, and the U.S. marginal tax rate for that is only 10% (for a single person). Assuming I'm interpreting the tax tables correctly. And that I converted CA$ to US$ correctly.

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@lemire 12% is the U.S. Federal marginal rate in that bracket. So the 12s are explained by states having no income tax (or none in that bracket). I'd thought Alaska had negative income tax due to oil company revenues. Either that's no longer true, or this map doesn't account for it.

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@nomad421 @ctitusbrown In the late 1990s I hacked the URL encoding for some online comic site (so I could avoid slow-loading ads). Part of it involved dividing the number of days since Jan/1/0000 by the current date expressed as YYYYMMDD. (Or maybe vice versa?)

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@nomad421 @ctitusbrown For about 40 years, I've been writing dates as MMM/DD/YYYY, e.g. Apr/2/2024. This came about because I regularly interacted with colleagues in the Netherlands in the mid 1980s.

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@lemire Circa 1990 I worked for a company that delivered software+hardware systems (think license plate reader). They contractually agreed to deliver source code but ran it through an auto-obfuscator before delivery. Not their only shady exploits. I quit without a new job lined up.

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@pickover Reminiscent of Winsor McCay.

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@lemire That result is on par with middle-of-the-class efforts in a freshman programming class. Poor error handling. Checks for allocation failure in one case but not the other. Reporting "Memory Allocation Failure" to the user is only marginally better than allowing a segfault later on.

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@curious_coding Yeah, and certainly python isn't the only language in which 1 == True. Worse, to me, is that any non-zero numeric value behaves the same as True in a logical expression. This is a holdover from the early days of fortran, of not earlier.

[Bob Harris @RSHarrisPSU]

@adad8m That blog post attributes the method to Michael Vose. But the contribution of Vose's 1991 paper was 'just' the (very nice) O(N) preprocessing. The O(1) sampling scheme is older — the earliest paper I ever found for it was a 1977 paper by A.J. Walker (which Vose cited).