gjm11

25 ms·

271.
by gjm11 1y ago
Are you suggesting some connection between "most European" and "some areas of concern", and if so what? Or are you just making two completely independent statements? I'm guessing from past comments of yours that i
272.
by gjm11 1y ago
I'm pretty sure that more than half the times I've seen "quintic" are in one single context: talking about the fact that while you can solve polynomial equations of degree 1-4 by doing arithmetic and taking n'th roo
273.
by gjm11 1y ago
But the specific word they were looking for is "quintic". (And the corresponding word for 4th-degree, in case anyone is curious, is "quartic"; one sometimes sees "biquadratic", which unfortunately is also somet
274.
by gjm11 1y ago
Ah, duh, I see. Yes, indeed the <title> is the question while the text heading is the statement. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
275.
by gjm11 1y ago
I think either they changed it or there's some A/B testing thing going on. For me too, the title is "The age of dumb phones is here". (I think the "question" version of the title is correctly answered by Better
276.
by gjm11 1y ago
Oops, one thing in the above is completely wrong (I wrote it before thinking things through carefully, and then forgot to delete it). It is not at all true that "it's not even well defined", and indeed the following couple of
277.
by gjm11 1y ago
The value of one person's anecdata is in fact not zero. I agree it's small. That's why I festooned what I said with caveats about how my own experience need not be representative, etc., etc. But it's not zero, which is w
278.
by gjm11 1y ago
Yes, obviously strictly speaking "famous to me" makes no sense. On the other hand, you correctly understood what I meant, and I made it clear at the outset ("One pair of data points") and at the end ("my sense is th
279.
by gjm11 1y ago
My sense is that they're pretty comparably famous. I think MacIntyre gets a bit of extra press from people who like him for basically religious reasons (e.g., the OP's author bio begins by saying he's "the Honorary Profe
280.
by gjm11 1y ago
Excellent -- thanks! Do you know where/when he said it?
281.
by gjm11 1y ago
Fun fact: in English law "time immemorial" has a very specific meaning: it means "any time before 1189". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_immemorial for more.
282.
by gjm11 1y ago
Now I want to know whose work McIntyre described as "the philosophical equivalent of Vogue ".
283.
by gjm11 1y ago
I'm sorry, but I think you are just wrong about convolutions and cumulative distribution functions. Let's take the simplest possible case: a "random" variable that's always equal to 0. Its cdf is a step function: 0
284.
by gjm11 1y ago
This submission is currently marked as [flagged] but I can't see what is supposedly wrong with it: it's an interesting article about an interesting idea, and while it's kinda politics-adjacent it's not the sort of party-
285.
by gjm11 1y ago
If you have independent votes on everything then you run the risk that there are a bunch of mutually-incompatible things that all get majority approval. (Would you rather higher taxes or lower? Lower, of course. Higher state pensions or low
286.
by gjm11 1y ago
Surely this isn't quite right. Max of variables = product of cumulative distribution functions . Sum of variables = convolution of probability density functions . So both of the equations you write down are correct, but only if you i
287.
by gjm11 1y ago
"... whose design is based on it" would seem to cover all the, er, bases.
288.
by gjm11 1y ago
I think xg15 was just making a joke about the tendency for every quotation that could possibly be assigned to Einstein to be assigned to Einstein. (Perhaps you too are making a joke and it's gone over my head, in which case my apologie
289.
by gjm11 1y ago
sieve[i] is nonzero precisely when 2i+1 is an odd prime or i=0 (because it's initialized to all-1 and nothing ever zeros the first element). So np.nonzero(sieve) is all the indices for which i=0 or 2i+1 is an odd prime. Except that t
290.
by gjm11 1y ago
My point about #5 was just that their emphasis on "complex numbers" isn't necessarily (and I think probably isn't) an admission that their algorithm can't be applied recursively. If it can be, then it is a genuine a
291.
by gjm11 1y ago
My understanding of the situation is that: 1. Waksman's algorithm works in any commutative ring admitting division by 2. 2. In particular, it won't work when the matrix entries are themselves matrices, which means you can't
292.
by gjm11 1y ago
I wonder whether it also has something to do with the use of its phrase "careless people" as the title of a currently-famous book about how awful Meta's senior management is.
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by gjm11 1y ago
Oh, good catch! I hadn't noticed they had a separate credits-for-exercises section. I did notice that ex 5.36 references a paper of Knuth & Wilf, but references aren't transitive :-).
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by gjm11 1y ago
I checked: the result is in Concrete Mathematics, as exercise 5.36, but there is no attribution to Kummer there. Incidentally, I found the name of the theorem (and the Wikipedia page about it) using a new kind of tool called a "search
295.
by gjm11 1y ago
I don't know whether it's in Concrete Mathematics, but perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kummer%27s_theorem will do? (That page has a link to another beautiful theorem with a similar feel, Lucas's th
296.
by gjm11 1y ago
I don't know of applications offhand, sorry. For me it's in the "appreciated for its own sake" category :-).
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by gjm11 1y ago
Here's a possibly-too-highbrow explanation to complement the nice simple one in the OP. "As everyone knows", you get a Sierpinski triangle by taking the entries in Pascal's triangle mod 2. That is, taking binomial coeff
298.
by gjm11 1y ago
There was a big patent lawsuit related to this, which as I understand it Ocado won pretty comprehensively. ( https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/ocado-wins-... -- case in UK court concluded that AutoSt
299.
by gjm11 1y ago
It's entirely the wrong sort of media, but this really ought to be posted on TikTok just for the sake of the title.
300.
by gjm11 1y ago
In case it isn't obvious to everyone: the actual article title is " How Google measures and manages tech debt". I am not sure I have seen a single case in which the HN delete-initial-"how" transformation improves a

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