Syzygies

66 ms·

691.
by Syzygies 8y ago
We bought panels outright with Solar City, end of 2007. Overall, we're satisfied. We didn't get exactly the rig we wanted. As a typical HN reader, I learned more about solar than their customer-facing staff, and had to periodicall
692.
by Syzygies 8y ago
I do exactly this today, using Phone.com as my home VoIP provider. One "universal" number rings both my cell and the VoIP land line determined by my travel schedule. Not on my whitelist? A prompt asks the caller to dial 7. No robo
693.
by Syzygies 8y ago
Wouldn't a meteorite impact be even more visible in the dark part of a new moon? Why did researchers go out of their way to observe one during a lunar eclipse? (In elementary school during NASA's Mercury program, a joke made the r
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by Syzygies 8y ago
- how much code can one fit on a screen, still maximum legibiilty? - Is there a lighter weight variant from which one can steal ()[]{} ? Essential for Lisp programming, nice for every language. My current winner is Roboto Mono Regular, with
695.
by Syzygies 8y ago
Scheme is a stunningly beautiful language with inferred parentheses: define | edge? g e let $ es | edges g e2 | reverse e or (member e es) (member e2 es) I used to rely on a preprocessor that transla
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by Syzygies 8y ago
Did you like how that looked? I didn't. The resolution wasn't ready. The resolution certainly didn't support going lighter. I'm trying to understand why lightweight Lisp parentheses haven't been a thing for 50 years
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by Syzygies 8y ago
I'm using the standard terminology in the font industry. My borrow font for brackets is called SourceCodePro-ExtraLight, not SourceCodePro-ExtraThin. And yes, lowercase as in the same height as lowercase letters. That was an interestin
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by Syzygies 8y ago
Lisp is the canary in the mind shaft. All programming languages have a bracket problem; Lisp just has a more intense bracket problem. Until the recent advent of 4K and "retina" displays, it wasn't practical to have significan
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by Syzygies 8y ago
Lisa Su has a PhD in electrical engineering from MIT. She's not a medical doctor. One sees the "Dr." moniker used by insecure lesser educational institutions. No self-respecting MIT PhD goes by doctor, unless they're an
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by Syzygies 8y ago
And don't waste decades thinking you're not that smart. Some people have prodigious technical skills. They'll use absolutely all of their abilities to try to lift the truck off the baby, and the wall of equations they produce
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by Syzygies 8y ago
Wow, the HN filter ignored my advice completely, refusing to post my comment. It was a shorter version of engaging more in the recreational form of reproductive activity, while your body is in its prime.
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by Syzygies 8y ago
Have more sex?
703.
by Syzygies 8y ago
Haskell without ligatures -> <- => <= looks every bit as amateurish as Lisp without lower case parentheses.
704.
by Syzygies 8y ago
This edition is an amazing improvement on the original ebook: https://sicpebook.wordpress.com/ What mathematics? Now that many states have legalized cannabis, SICP should be read while high in the middle of the night. Its n
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by Syzygies 8y ago
I like lower case parentheses, for Scheme and Lisp coding. The ligatures in Hasklig gave me this idea. I'm currently using Courier Prime Code with 60% parentheses, vertically centered around the lower case "o", and moved a bi
706.
by Syzygies 8y ago
Kodak's goal was to keep customers happy while selling less silver. Less silver means more grain, so they envisioned digital methods for reducing grain, before printing photographs at some centralized facility (obviously not the pocket
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by Syzygies 8y ago
At Kodak in the 1970's, my father devised the "Bayer filter" used in digital cameras. At the time, he wrote a research system for image processing in sed.
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by Syzygies 8y ago
I was going to bring up the quaternions if no one had. When I was asked to bring in a fictional approach to the Riemann Hypothesis for the film "A Beautiful Mind", the quaternions were my first thought. There's a pecking orde
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by Syzygies 8y ago
"Codes that are similar are located closer together than codes that are different." I dug hoping to find out how they handle boundary effects, and gave up. The numbers 0.999999 and 1.000000 are far apart in Hamming distance but cl
710.
by Syzygies 8y ago
If you understand why a purely functional language like Haskell rocks at parallelism without worrying about deadlocks, then: same answer here. I'll agree this isn't ready yet to be the first example of functional parallelism in so
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by Syzygies 8y ago
I interviewed a full day at a mathematical hedge fund. Not exactly brainteasers, rather a barrage of good, solid math and stats questions. Such a day is exhilarating (like skiing the Olympics) but truly exhausting, and only partially relate
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by Syzygies 8y ago
I see a rising consciousness that "sold by Amazon" products are often likely to be stale-dated or counterfeit. Read the reviews. Read manufacturer responses to complaints. This is broad-spectrum: Fake SDXC cards. Adulterated Moroc
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by Syzygies 8y ago
The book is unusually expensive, and scientists have grants.
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by Syzygies 8y ago
Yes. I don't mind the parens (syntax highlighting can subdue them), but every time I actually fire up Common Lisp to try it, I see all caps somewhere, like someone even older than me is shouting at me, or I stumbled across a box of my
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by Syzygies 8y ago
The big issue here is: Who does our browser work for? People worry that self-driving cars will take us to "promoted" coffee, if we're not specific. More generally, software agents as a rule are loyal to their creators, not to
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by Syzygies 8y ago
Talking Machines https://www.thetalkingmachines.com/ Human Conversations about Machine Learning Podcasts are better for flying. You can close your eyes, and if you don't stay awake, all the better.
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by Syzygies 8y ago
Haskell is the obvious answer. Rust is the bastard child of Haskell and C (my two loves). If one needs cyclic data structures in Rust, the existing theory of functional data structures is a great model for how to solve such problems. Persis
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by Syzygies 8y ago
I wouldn't call this "An engineer's guide". It's a lay guide written by a German using metric. If one wants an engineering level of scientific expertise, look at "Advanced Bread and Pastry" by Michel Suas.
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by Syzygies 9y ago
Bill Stein is a genius programmer, and Sage is quite the accomplishment. I wish he was more Chern, less Yau. I go to talks where people credit Sage where I know decades of Singular effort were responsible. (I coauthored a similar system; th
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by Syzygies 9y ago
After the mid-air collision over Brazil in 2006 ( https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/business/03road.html ) I corresponded with a well-known pilot columnist. We didn't agree. I revealed myself to be a

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