gjulianm

37 ms·

421.
by gjulianm 5y ago
> The way math is "built", with too generalizing theorems, non-constructive statements, etc makes it fall into traps like the Russel's Paradox I don't think Russel's paradox is a problem with ZFC set theory. Buil
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by gjulianm 5y ago
To add to this comment, a lot of times we didn't even care what the solution was, only that it existed, was unique, or was bounded by some constant (and we didn't usually care about the value either). The more you advance into pur
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by gjulianm 5y ago
> This isn't just hypothetical either, I've been in enough math classes to see the students of ordinary intelligence struggle with this. I honestly have not seen that. Maybe some minor confusion between sin and asin maybe, but
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by gjulianm 5y ago
> Surely a student who is learning them and thus by definition doesn’t know them would have even greater difficulties But a student who is learning them will not start by looking at the equation, but at the concept, and that concept will
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by gjulianm 5y ago
> Incorrect. In the example I gave one merely needed to understand multiplication, addition, and the distributive property. And you, who are observably skilled in the art of mathematics, failed to follow a grade school level formula. So
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by gjulianm 5y ago
> As I said, there are hundreds of examples on that site. In that article or in the whole site? Because the article just seems like different notation, no great improvements. > In many cases for example it's sufficient to know th
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by gjulianm 5y ago
> If I give you suggestions, you're just going to say, "well that's the way we've always done it and people will be confused if we change now", which is exactly what they said about C until someone decided enoug
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by gjulianm 5y ago
> I can search the words. I can ask people what the words mean. If don’t even know what the symbols are called then how do I begin? Usually by looking at the words that surround the equation. Most math texts will introduce notation in w
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by gjulianm 5y ago
> Mathematicians seem to go out of their way to make their work as obtuse as possible. Mathematicians go out of their way to make their work as understandable as possible. If they wanted to make it as obtuse as possible, you'd just
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by gjulianm 5y ago
> I’m not trying to be controversial, but traditional mathematicians are decades behind the best computing scientists when it comes to crafting formalisms. Could you provide examples? The Dijkstra article doesn't seem like a marked
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by gjulianm 5y ago
I can't put subscript on HN (or at least I don't know how), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_Stokes_theorem (first equation) for how it should be typeset.
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by gjulianm 5y ago
> It's unintuitive, uninformative, excessively complicated jargon which exists only to gatekeep and save paper. As a mathematician, notation exists because it's easier to read things with good notation than without. I have some
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by gjulianm 5y ago
Variable naming is important because variables are used to represent almost anything, you have autocomplete and search so longer variable names are quickly typed, and most lines of codes will have one, two or three of these names. On the ot
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by gjulianm 5y ago
> With math papers my experience is that you have to go 3/4 references deep before startit to understand where the notation comes from which wastes hours and hours. Most of the time you'd need even more hours to understand not
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by gjulianm 5y ago
For context, mathoverflow is for math professionals, that is, math degree and above, so high level mathematics. I wouldn't expect CS majors to know about topology, complex analysis, advanced algebra... But for math majors, these are co
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by gjulianm 5y ago
> I know people see this as rent seeking, but journals DO provide a service which costs money. I don't know the specifics of Nature, but the main service provided by journals (peer-review and selection) is usually done by other rese
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by gjulianm 5y ago
> That was mostly a single large file downloaded over http, so not super hard to tweak anyway Well, my point is that most servers don't just download single large files over HTTP. Even if you only look at storage servers, going into
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by gjulianm 5y ago
> In my experience even saturating 25Gb links is rather easy to do when using 9000 byte MTU on mid-tier server hardware. But that's tweaking the setup already, it requires changes, testing and verification, and can cause problems i
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by gjulianm 5y ago
Even 100GbE is hardly seen on company datacenters. Yes, it's cheaper than before, but still more expensive than 10G, and that's extra cost multiplied by all the devices that need to have the improved hardware to take advantage. Pl
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by gjulianm 5y ago
If you're tracking changes to a given state and seeing which other parts of the state affected those changes, you end up inspecting the same spots, whether it's with a debugger or not. > inspecting megabytes of disassembly is n
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by gjulianm 5y ago
> Put a breakpoint early on startup, once hit put a data breakpoint on the part of the state which messed up, reproduce the bug, and there's very high chance debugger will take you to the code which broke the state. Knowing which pa
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by gjulianm 5y ago
> I especially do this when the code has destructive side-effects (a file gets moved/deleted, a database get updated, whatever), so I can skip over any external actions I don't actually want to occur until I'm ready for a
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by gjulianm 5y ago
I don't use a debugger routinely and by default. First reflex is to add logging, telemetry or tests because those are useful when another issue pops in a similar place: instead of attaching a debugger (which might alter the program flo
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by gjulianm 5y ago
I only use the debugger when I'm really lost or when I'm suspecting compiler/inheritance/indirection shenanigans. Most of the time I try to add logging/tracing because those are reusable and can help me debug other
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by gjulianm 5y ago
I noticed how much caffeine was affecting me when I started getting way too sleepy at a certain new job after lunch. It was weird, because before I didn't really feel tired after eating unless I stuffed myself, but now I was really tir
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by gjulianm 5y ago
In some instances you'll be able to walk barefoot, but at a certain cost (attention to terrain that you wouldn't need to pay so much attention with shoes). In other instances you won't be able no matter how much you train: go
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by gjulianm 5y ago
Is your body designed for swimming? Or for going on a bike? I don't think so. These are modes of exercise we invented (even when we aren't optimally designed for them) and yet they are good for us. If you followed the "primit
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by gjulianm 5y ago
I don't think shoes are aesthetic. Temperature, grip, protection against injuries, hygiene... > In a lot of cases I think natural arguments are correct. Our environment has changed far more than we have in recent times. Precisely be
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by gjulianm 5y ago
You can eat normally and swim or go on a bike, neither of those are things "humans were designed for", and yet they help. If you think something is good/bad for you, the argument must be about the thing itself, not the fact t
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by gjulianm 5y ago
> It's not about eating less. It's about eating less frequent Well, that's what I meant. I haven't found a difference between eating more or less frequently, other than hunger, of course.

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