erodommoc

5 ms·

1.
by erodommoc 3y ago
Every time an article like this comes up on Hacker News, I wonder just how much confusion could have been avoided if mathematicians just didn't use the word "size" for something that doesn't have "size" in the
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by erodommoc 3y ago
Off by over 5x: - The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) today released its 2022 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) Part 1 to Congress. The report found 582,462 people were experiencing homelessness on a single nig
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by erodommoc 4y ago
I feel like I'm missing something here - wouldn't the shortest program that returns the integer i just be "return i"? The length of that seems pretty easy to compute.
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by erodommoc 4y ago
Right - every time you add a '9', the difference gets smaller, but it's still there, it never completely goes away no matter how arbitrarily large number of times you repeat the process. However, most math doesn't treat
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by erodommoc 6y ago
Here's the charts for a number of states in the US. It's pretty dramatic. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/28/us/coronaviru...
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by erodommoc 6y ago
And this I think is the real issue. When someone says that 0.999... = 1.0, what they are saying is that this is true given a number of assumptions that we are taking for granted that would not be obvious to a non-mathematician. There&#x27
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by erodommoc 6y ago
Right, but many things make sense for finite sets that don't make sense for infinite sets. Just because you can extend that definition doesn't mean that it's "true" for infinite sets.
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by erodommoc 6y ago
Well, the answer is equal because of how you define equality of infinite sets (one-to-one and onto). It's a very useful definition, but it's hardly the only possible definition.
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by erodommoc 8y ago
Treesize ( https://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/ ) is a great one for Windows.
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by erodommoc 9y ago
I see what you did there...
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by erodommoc 9y ago
Of course, this is all based on a single study from the 1960's (Solomon, David, "Accidents on main rural highways related to speed, driver, and vehicle"), which has been pretty thoroughly debunked ( http://casr.adel
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by erodommoc 10y ago
So if you want to change the world, blindly accept orders from authority figures, no matter how inane? Sure...
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by erodommoc 10y ago
This seems to come up over and over again, and it always comes down to what assumptions you start with. If you accept all of the axioms and methods, the proof holds. If you don't, it doesn't. Articles like this one, aimed at an