Syzygies

24 ms·

271.
by Syzygies 4y ago
> Galois connections may be used to describe many forms of abstraction in the theory of abstract interpretation of programming languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois_connection
272.
by Syzygies 4y ago
My father Bryce Bayer studied this question fifty years ago at Eastman Kodak; his approach is known as ordered dithering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordered_dithering One is effectively posterizing a grayscale image
273.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Thank you. I suppose I was downvoted, hiding your careful response, because I appeared to be pitching a product. I was attempting a precise analogy, I had nothing to gain from the promotion. I was robbed on BART recently, and my judgment is
274.
by Syzygies 4y ago
I'm a math professor who has lost years to this question. I've met various authors involved in successful proofs. My 1976 grad school application from the University of Illinois came postmarked "Four Colors Suffice" (App
275.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Your credit card company is the entity you can expect to apply basic logic. In the short term, that logic will be to refund your money to keep your annual spend, but not to bother Uber. In the long term, this could raise the fees Uber pays
276.
by Syzygies 4y ago
The "Honey Souk" in Morocco's Marakech medina sells the best and most diverse selection of honey I've ever seen. If I could travel one hour at a time, I'd go get Shirunashi Tantanmen ramen noodles at King-ken in Hir
277.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Thanks! When we put in solar twenty years ago they kept patching me through to engineers they normally protect from customers, because I'd learned more than any customer-facing staff. You're saying, same drill here.
278.
by Syzygies 4y ago
I was blown away years ago, visiting the Anchor brewery in San Francisco. They approximated traditional steam beer in an enormous shallow pool. To improve consistency the whole room was at positive pressure, using state-of-the-art hospital
279.
by Syzygies 4y ago
When I can, I run a pair of box fans exhausting through the windows in one room, letting the air in through the windows in the other room. This feels roughly like living on a houseboat, and is how I can read 450ppm. I'm now at 728ppm a
280.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Returning to college teaching mid-pandemic, I bought an SAF Aranet4 Home CO2 meter for measuring my classrooms. It mostly lives in my apartment, waiting to alert me in case I didn't realized I was using my gas range. There's good
281.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Dunno whether I'm having more fun watching the Musk bonfire, or the FTX collapse. My digital timestamping paper is cited by the original bitcoin paper, so people assume I appreciate cryptocurrencies. They're an environmental crime
282.
by Syzygies 4y ago
A high school friend's older brother did PhD research in short-acting drugs that were legal because they were so obscure. We got banned from my high school chem lab after an after-hours session left a uniform white residue on all surfa
283.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Yes, I'd take this as Level arrogance. For another data point, I never managed to pick locks in my twenties, but something aligned for me in an evening lock picking course in my sixties, and I picked everything in the room. One wants a
284.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Yes, surely they would have told you had they lost. Instead, silence and a change in spending habits. I don't know here that "not easily verifiable" is deliberate, but it could be. In the case of the Fields Medalist, one can
285.
by Syzygies 4y ago
> Stephen Wolfram would die before he gave up control, the entire thing is his precious child. I understand that Wolfram made unrealistic agreements with the original programmers, incompatible with growing a large organization to support
286.
by Syzygies 4y ago
I too thought about becoming a "code shrink". I helped my department found a "Mathematics of Finance" masters program, teaching numerical methods for the first three years. Three guys were trying to combine all their cou
287.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Belt buckles taught me that conventional behavior can have unwanted consequences. Using Windows is conventional behavior.
288.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Conventional and unconventional behavior can both have unwanted consequences. We each pick our poison. Another senior here. As a child I scratched my father's guitar with a belt buckle I had been told to wear. I learned to distrust adu
289.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Carpentry is a great analogy. Half of all woodworkers have no concept of the properties of wood grain; they'll mix up edge and end grains on decorative cutting boards. I wish I understood the "grain" in programming better. It
290.
by Syzygies 4y ago
The Fibonacci sequence is characterized by satisfying the simplest recurrence relation, just as the exponential function is characterized by satisfying the simplest differential equation. It's hard to think clearly about anything when
291.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Ha! Erdős–Bacon numbers originated in a 2002 Telegraph article by Simon Singh, referenced by Wikipedia as [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20121112081753/http://www.telegr... I came up with this game aft
292.
by Syzygies 4y ago
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence." I fly American between JFK and SFO regularly, including today. They have the best prices these days for an "international" business class on this route.
293.
by Syzygies 4y ago
My name is Dave, and I'm an addict. Charlie Watts wasn't just into jazz, he was into all music. George Harrison understood that jazz could deepen him as a musician, but found Indian music. If one wants to write a language that is
294.
by Syzygies 4y ago
When I gained access to an APL terminal in 1975 I was coming from FORTRAN punched cards on an IBM 1130 (think Apple ][ but dumber and half a room, shared by my entire college). APL blew my mind. I worked one summer as a commercial APL progr
295.
by Syzygies 4y ago
I read the first edition of K&R when it came out, and switched to C for a computer algebra system that got me tenure as a math professor. K&R is a religious scripture, and remains the benchmark against which I measure all other prog
296.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Yes. I'm missing an unusual screw from the armrest of my office Ekornes Stressless chair, and the closest Amazon length didn't work. I've seen the Mcmaster website before, but thanks for the reminder! I jumped on it, found th
297.
by Syzygies 4y ago
My copy, found somewhere once on the web, is a complete 416 page scan of a book. As a Harvard math PhD student around 1980, Fridays were amusing. In the math department was "wine and cheese" and inebriation levels were high by mod
298.
by Syzygies 4y ago
Haskell can be a beautiful small language. One can enjoy it like a walk in the woods, without worrying about which typeclass models our light cone in the universe. My first functional language was APL; I later moved from C to Standard ML. I
299.
by Syzygies 4y ago
>> With the danger of hurting HN Rust hipsters They engaged in a rewrite, and they chose a modern language. These are orthogonal. Even in academia, one sees a prevailing view that language choice is picking a brand of toilet seat. Oth
300.
by Syzygies 4y ago
A far better Conan story is his private opening for Johnny Carson, remembered after Johnny's death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TazTAqBQakQ Johnny told him "Just be yourself. That's the only way it CAN wo

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