Syzygies

15 ms·

181.
by Syzygies 3y ago
Herb Wilf shaped my career as a mathematician. As an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, I took an elective in combinatorial algorithms that he had agreed to travel from U Penn to teach. Up to this point I had only experienced harsh lesson
182.
by Syzygies 3y ago
Does this only work with "mainstream" languages? Swift, perhaps. Chez Scheme? Haskell? Lean 4?
183.
by Syzygies 3y ago
It's easier than that. You access the asteroid, the prices drop.
184.
by Syzygies 3y ago
This is the same website that publishes stories with ignorant, idiotic headlines like "There's an asteroid out there worth $100,000 quadrillion. Why haven't we mined it?". Um, don't write about economics if you don&
185.
by Syzygies 3y ago
Yes, easily. I came out of the mechanical keyboard rabbit hole with multiple Leopold FC660C Topre switches (there's no going back to any mechanical switch) and Hasu replacement controllers that support QMK. Here's an out-of-date v
186.
by Syzygies 3y ago
I have experience with both the FrogPad and the Matias Half Keyboard (I paid $95; now $595). The Frogpad never caught on with me. https://matias.store/products/half-keyboard The Matias Half Keyboard is based on a theor
187.
by Syzygies 3y ago
> The first words out of her mouth to her rescuer were: “Am I going to be okay?” RFK's last words were "Is everybody OK?"
188.
by Syzygies 3y ago
https://homotopytypetheory.org/book/ I disagree. There's a migration from Haskell to Lean 4, which is influenced by HoTT, and is a credible general purpose programming language. Arguably, _the_ credible general pu
189.
by Syzygies 3y ago
One gets Bose-Einstein statistics from the same urn setup: if you draw two marbles from such an urn, the three combinations RR, RG, GG are equally likely. An obvious visual proof: Line up 101 marbles. Choose one to be the divider; to the le
190.
by Syzygies 3y ago
> The Simons picked the first set of members https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Peyton_Jones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Marlow
191.
by Syzygies 3y ago
A legendary xkcd: "Did you really name your son Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;-- ? https://xkcd.com/327/
192.
by Syzygies 3y ago
This reminds me of anti-harassment training at my college. We were asked to go to a web site with interactive videos. I was struck that none of my colleagues could have achieved tenure creating cartoonish materials like this. Moreover, the
193.
by Syzygies 3y ago
Yes. Alas, mathematicians not in number theory tend to have p-ness envy. A more troubling example of imposing this world view is decomposing 3-manifolds, where people like to think of S^1 x S^2 as prime. This only makes sense as a form of r
194.
by Syzygies 3y ago
This should be easier in software, reconstructing a 3D model of the relaxed open book from a stereo or multiple photos, then using AI to "upsample" to the scalable PDF document most likely to produce the modeled image. I was part
195.
by Syzygies 3y ago
Sorry, I was thinking abstractly. I was opening up the question of how different models for aggregating reviews would be naturally immune to review bombing, using Chess and Tennis ranking systems as inspiration. There's nothing about t
196.
by Syzygies 3y ago
Chess and tennis rating systems work reasonably well. Academic grading does not. Academics will never change; the humanities will never go along. While sites like Netflix use all the AI they can muster to tune and individualize their recomm
197.
by Syzygies 3y ago
It's worth reading the original article; the link is a poor summary. The first of two problems is a generalization to any dimension of finding a maximal non-set in the game of Set. That's lines over Z/3Z. Over R, for n > 1
198.
by Syzygies 3y ago
Pimsleur is my favorite system for learning foreign languages, based on spaced repetition. I'm a casual tourist, who likes to pick up some rudimentary language skills before travel. There are many of us; we understand the importance of
199.
by Syzygies 3y ago
I don't agree with your "X dimension" assumption. I've seen the poor performance of current phone apps. My point is that one could do better for less coding effort with access to a 3D model. Either a pair of photos, or a
200.
by Syzygies 3y ago
Casual book scanning could benefit from stereo cameras, if there's a way for iPhone apps to access this data. As a mathematician I've long wanted to figure out the code to match up several photographs for a 3D model of an open boo
201.
by Syzygies 3y ago
I am addicted to a fault to Mentour Pilot's studies of flight incidents. Again, here, he goes into greater depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSMe1wAdMdg
202.
by Syzygies 3y ago
"Extraction yield" may be a good thing, but that hypothesis goes untested. Distilling, one wants to control extraction yield to isolate the best flavors. Done carefully, one makes armagnac. Maximizing extraction yield makes moonsh
203.
by Syzygies 3y ago
As for "you don't have to evaluate", from the article: > you could also build a syntax tree, in which case the operands would be subtrees.
204.
by Syzygies 3y ago
The last time I saw John, he was talking at a Mathematical Sciences Research Institute donor dinner. I was audience filler, after consulting on "A Beautiful Mind". He was describing games from his book with Berlekamp, and needed s
205.
by Syzygies 3y ago
There's a fixed, rapidly vanishing probability distribution on bin occupancies, which evaluates to a constant per bin when one applies a sorting algorithm. One gets linear algorithms with different constants, depending on the sorting a
206.
by Syzygies 3y ago
Yes, distinct elements. Fixed. That's the only way what I said makes sense, like how one error-corrects listening to a talk. They were concerned with the case where n could be absurdly large, and wanted no time or space dependence on n
207.
by Syzygies 3y ago
yep, thanks. "n log n" is how one always says it, it becomes a local variable in its phrase. Oops.
208.
by Syzygies 3y ago
In college in the 1970's, I took a combinatorial algorithms class with Herb Wilf. He explained that choosing a subset of k distinct elements from 1..n uniformly at random was likely k log k, because you needed to detect collisions, and
209.
by Syzygies 3y ago
I doubt that SRFI 49, or any other proposal I've seen online, has been battle-tested. I've written thousands of lines of Scheme using my own preprocessor, and it's my favorite code to look at. I prefer Haskell, for incredible
210.
by Syzygies 3y ago
My missive a few years ago about APL at Swarthmore in the mid-1970s: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27460887 > In the mid-seventies at Swarthmore College, we were mired in punched card Fortran programming on a sing

More ›