Syzygies

56 ms·

631.
by Syzygies 7y ago
Comment characters, and compound operators without ligatures, are ground glass in my eyes. The first thing I checked for here was ligatures; this font would not have gotten five seconds of my time otherwise. If one doesn't want ligatur
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by Syzygies 7y ago
High level languages succeed by exposing the components of computation as combinators one can manipulate like algebra. I was given access to an APL terminal as a 19 year old math major familiar with punching cards (first with a paperclip).
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by Syzygies 7y ago
Haskell. I'm at almost fifty years of programming (APL was an early highlight; punched cards weren't) in many languages. Haskell isn't the be all / end all of languages, but when I want to add ten lines to a program and
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by Syzygies 7y ago
Lions are also unaware of radio waves. We could be unaware of self-organizing ripples at the scale of subatomic particles. That's a life form that could efficiently colonize the universe hitching rides on rocks.
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by Syzygies 7y ago
One should code in Haskell as if it were a small language like Scheme (or Standard ML, or early OCaml, or..). It's a wonderful language for that. The deep stuff isn't actually necessary.
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by Syzygies 7y ago
So I'm scrolling through this article, reading more carefully at first to model his thought processes, then picking up a few words per paragraph, formulating a hypothesis as to what he's saying in that paragraph, making a spot che
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by Syzygies 7y ago
I'm reminded of early Unix, with default permissions that made one's files public, in the spirit of sharing. Well before one could Google, I wanted good examples of TeX vitas, so I searched all unprotected files of every math depa
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by Syzygies 7y ago
I'll give a skeletal answer that will only make sense if one has read what's out there. These are just my choices where choices matter, leaving out the canonical: Measure cal by weight as a proportion of total weight of corn and w
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by Syzygies 7y ago
With forty years experience cooking and some formal training, I'm much more comfortable experimenting with procedures and the technical aspects of a recipe, than with creative flavor combinations. To be honest, I don't believe tha
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by Syzygies 7y ago
This reminds me of how Piaget's theories of childhood development were discredited. The researchers would spread out three pencils, and ask the kid if there were now more pencils. The kid knew there weren't, but generously tried t
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by Syzygies 7y ago
The first chapter of Berstel and Reutenauer's "Noncommutative Rational Series with Applications" presents Schützenberger's theorem that every noncommuting rational power series is representable, and conversely. The idea
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by Syzygies 7y ago
Yes, and Bose Einstein statistics can be obtained either by assuming indistinguishable particles, or that this probability distribution fluctuates uniformly. No experiment can decide between these explanations; the physics comes out the sam
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by Syzygies 7y ago
As a math professor recalling reactions back in 1990, there were various forms of "Marilyn vos Savant" bias in play. A good cover for gender bias was the absurdity of the world's highest IQ writing newspaper columns. There ar
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by Syzygies 7y ago
So when did you first realize he was discussing Windows, reading this? The "of course everyone is a straight white male" attitude that the OS need not be stated, so often seen in Windows posts, gave it away for me. However, my bia
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by Syzygies 7y ago
Easy. A basic font editor can do it. I for example experimented with changing the weight of parenthesis, thinking they're not evil in Lisp, just tuned badly for that purpose.
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by Syzygies 7y ago
Clearly stating that the model is unrealistic doesn't make the model realistic.
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by Syzygies 7y ago
Bingo. I read the code to be sure there wasn't a factor to model this. The answer should depend on the relative probability of choosing a whole pill or a half pill. The code assumes equal odds, with no state dependence on the remaining
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by Syzygies 7y ago
It certainly affects gut biome, personal observation and what I've read. Michael Douglas also believes this caused his cancer. It's a cliche that the kids from the rich side of town, who didn't put dirt in their mouths growin
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by Syzygies 7y ago
Many of us Caesarian babies didn't get "vaginal seeding" at birth, but have been trying to catch up ever since.
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by Syzygies 7y ago
I disable hyperthreading for better performance. In my experience as a mathematician building parallel compute servers, hyperthreading generates more heat than it is worth. I can overclock further without hyperthreading, to more than overta
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by Syzygies 7y ago
Finally! A symlink is a file like any other. You don't want sync software going off and "thinking" about what a symlink really means, anymore than you'd want sync software going off and "thinking" after finding
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by Syzygies 7y ago
Good also for lacing a rolled pork belly for chashu for ramen noodles. (The end knots can be simpler.)
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by Syzygies 7y ago
It missed Earth by 73,000 kilometers; Earth has radius 6,371 kilometers. (79371 * 79371) / (6371 * 6371) = 155.2 This was a game of darts in a galactic pub. The dart hit the dart board, but not the bullseye (Earth). One in every 155 ti
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by Syzygies 7y ago
My professor uniform used to involve a closet full of Brooks Brothers Oxford button-down shirts. Not that the brand resonates with me; the quality was simply better than similar mass-produced shirts. They felt like the denim shirts I was ad
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by Syzygies 7y ago
In nearby Concord, yes. Have you been to Berkeley? I love the sense of class humor in Berkeley weather. Down in the affordable flats, the fog often clears. Up in the "four bridge view" hills, not so often. Annual sun striking the
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by Syzygies 7y ago
My first language (not counting Basic or Fortran on punched cards) was APL, and my current language is Haskell. I'm a PhD mathematician. Luckily, I was trained far enough down the street from MIT to escape their Lisp world view, so we
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by Syzygies 7y ago
Yes, it's distracting. I imagine a review on nymag's site, explaining the "immediacy" that comes from mods leaving such obvious errors unfixed. Or, a discussion of roads and traffic. Build bigger roads, congestion gets w
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by Syzygies 7y ago
Never forget that cultural differences look odd in either direction. My favorite passage from "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs": > One reason that the distinction between process and procedure may be confusing
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by Syzygies 7y ago
> Boomerang is a language for writing lenses — well-behaved bidirectional transformations I love this unabashed reference to the original use of the term "lens". I love Haskell, but I'm embarrassed by its later, different
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by Syzygies 7y ago
We flirted with unquestionably native California grasses. There's a significant fire risk. Humans are all about overcoming natural cycles, which include burning us out of here periodically, killing any of us who can't run fast eno

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