jwmerrill

11 ms·

61.
by jwmerrill 10y ago
Atoms are an abstraction, just like the higher level abstractions you mention. They happen to be a very good/stable abstraction over the time/energy scales relevant to day-to-day life, but they too are made of pieces that can disi
62.
by jwmerrill 10y ago
Not an answer for this particular case, but there are lots of named hydrodynamic instabilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrodynamic_stability#Applica...
63.
Geometry, Algebra, and Intuition(shapeoperator.com)
3 points by jwmerrill 10y ago|0 comments
64.
by jwmerrill 10y ago
People waste a lot of time arguing over charges of hypocrisy. In practice, it ends up being a way of shifting the conversation from the argument that someone is making to the person who is making it. Hypocrisy isn't great, but practica
65.
by jwmerrill 10y ago
You (re)discovered dual numbers! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_number
66.
by jwmerrill 10y ago
Skilling wrote a nice critique of information geometry that's worth reading: http://djafari.free.fr/MaxEnt2014/papers/Tutorial4_paper.pdf The main point is that KL-divergence is not a metric, so imagining it
67.
Sunset geometry(shapeoperator.com)
27 points by jwmerrill 10y ago|0 comments
68.
by jwmerrill 10y ago
But they won't be sold for $89 at Best Buy.
69.
Video and multiple choice: what took us so long?(blog.desmos.com)
2 points by jwmerrill 10y ago|0 comments
70.
Why we don't need a 'Netflix for Education'(edsurge.com)
1 points by jwmerrill 10y ago|1 comments
71.
Discovering Planet Nine(newyorker.com)
54 points by jwmerrill 10y ago|43 comments
72.
by jwmerrill 10y ago
The article mentions using Electron or NW.js if you want to continue building apps on web technologies that need deeper platform access. Is there a reason that those are worse options than Chrome apps?
73.
by jwmerrill 10y ago
A lot of mathematical notation is optimized for hand-written algebra. One of the main things you "do" with expressions like these is to transform them into equivalent expressions that have some desirable form, or examine special c
74.
by jwmerrill 10y ago
New Jersey style is a reference to Richard Gabriel's "Worse is better" essay. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better [2] http://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
75.
by jwmerrill 10y ago
There's some information about how to collect (and visualize!) JS compilation artifacts in the IRHydra documentation [1]. It's v8 specific, though. The other writings on that site are worth studying if you want to learn more about
76.
by jwmerrill 10y ago
Yes, the results are the same for 0^f(x) where f(x) is any monotonic function with f(0)=0.
77.
by jwmerrill 10y ago
> The XHR wrapper can easily be replaced with the fetch API. Browser support for fetch is still pretty weak, so you'll need some kind of polyfill to use it today. http://caniuse.com/#feat=fetch
78.
by jwmerrill 10y ago
I think Charge meant to use it to show you what happens when you visit an unregistered domain. This being the Internet, someone registered it and pointed it at Rick Astley.
79.
by jwmerrill 10y ago
At the time that the request resolves, it has received and processed the response headers, but it may still be receiving the response body (which is represented as a stream). All the body representations (like .text() or .json()) need to wa
80.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
Since we're discussing various math rendering technologies for the web, I'd like to plug MathQuill [1]. The big advantage MathQuill has over other solutions is that the math is live editable in the browser in typeset form. We use
81.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
FedEx and UPS. Maybe also DHL sometimes? I've had much better experiences with these than USPS. Package tracking with USPS is a fiction, and they have claimed to have attempted to deliver a package that they never attempted to deliver
82.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
> How do you guys pay the bills with no premium features like all the other calculators on the app store? We license our calculator API to people who want to use it to make math content, or integrate it as a tool for students into their
83.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
> What are you guys planning on doing next? One of the big things that we've been working on is building interactive lessons that a whole classroom can do together: https://teacher.desmos.com/ Some of these use the
84.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
We just use canvas for drawing. SVG is tempting because it would help with things like figuring out which curve a user clicked on, but we've been disappointed by SVG performance and cross browser differences every time we've tried
85.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
You can already plot bivariate equations as implicit plots; e.g. things like "x^2 + y^2 < 9" or `sin(x) + sin(y) = 0.2` already work. Are you asking about numerically solving systems of equations? Or 3D plotting? We might do on
86.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
> 1. Is there a way to do integrals? Are there plans to add that support? We don't do integrals right now, but I hope we'll be able to add them at some point. It can be pretty tricky to do integrals accurately for non-smooth or
87.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
Lead calculator engineer here. I'm happy and a little surprised to see our work on the HN front page this morning. We've been at it since 2011. Our biggest goal with the calculator has been to make it easy to immediately see the c
88.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
> Moral of the story: higher N is always better. This is true in a way, but finding and studying larger effects is often a better strategy. To some extent, why talk about something that needs huge N to get above the noise?
89.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
As far as I can tell, this "buckshot theory of photons" is a heuristic that is never actually formalized or used in serious calculations. In actual quantum optics calculations I have seen, a photon is a quantized excitation of a m
90.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
> The model he has in mind is the e-print distribution platform arXive. > Other disciplines are emulating the arXive pre-print model > ...something like a gigantic open-source version of arXive for all scientific research That&#x27

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