svat

31 ms·

331.
by svat 3y ago
From the article itself: > At first, these stories seemed to me a bit too scary for little children. And my knee-jerk reaction was to dismiss them. But my opinion flipped 180 degrees after I watched my own daughter's response to si
332.
by svat 3y ago
A caption in the article says “A lot has changed in the Arctic since the Canadian government forced Inuit families to settle in towns. But the community is trying to preserve traditional parenting practices.” (and earlier the article says
333.
by svat 3y ago
In Sanskrit literature, a term often used when describing heroes like Rama and Arjuna is jitakrodha , “one who has conquered his anger”. The idea is for you to be in control of your anger, rather than for anger to control you. Rather than
334.
by svat 3y ago
The book Innumeracy that you linked: why did you call it "the Erdos book"? It is not connected to Erdős in any way, as far as I can tell.
335.
by svat 3y ago
More precisely, if there are N students, the probability is (min(N,100)/100)^N. This is 1 for N ≥ 100. And the probability at N=30 is indeed a tiny 2e-16, which shows that the children's "random" picks were far from unif
336.
by svat 3y ago
What I understood: they assume a hypothetical bipartite graph with text nodes (like hypothetical paragraphs / chunks of texts) on one side, and “skill” nodes on the other. The skills could be things like: • ability to understand the wo
337.
by svat 3y ago
Quanta is usually careful to link to the actual papers (even if the reader has to be equally careful to find them), so it's surprising that the link is missing here. Another paper (linked from the article) is https://arxiv.o
338.
by svat 3y ago
> Essentially, in Chinese philosophy, any given situation has a propensity (water tends to run downhill). It is therefore more effective to work with that propensity, than it is to work heroically against that propensity. Interesting,
339.
by svat 3y ago
Thanks for sharing! That video is part 1, and here is part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK9yGNuGWKE And here are the transcripts: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text&#x2
340.
by svat 3y ago
More accurately, this could be titled "most frequently mentioned books in replies to 'Ask HN' posts that have 'book' in their title". (Like "Ask HN: Math books that made you significantly better at math?&q
341.
by svat 3y ago
I loved the book, though more for its humour and observations about culture, than for any sort of practical advice about what to read or not. Incidentally, the title of the book apparently had a question mark in the French original which wa
342.
by svat 3y ago
> If I install TeX on my Linux machine now, is that still compiled from the original Pascal source? If you install TeX via the usual ways–TeX Live and MikTeX are the most common—then the build step runs a program (like web2c) to conver
343.
by svat 3y ago
How did you (or how does one) discover that the game state consists of the variables enemy.{x,vx,eyeVx}, player.{x,vx}, powerTicks? (And are there others?)
344.
by svat 3y ago
Yeah I agree; there are several strategies for the game as a question asker. For me when answering (only a few hundred answers across all Stack Exchange sites, so I'm already in the "tail" and probably not representative of t
345.
by svat 3y ago
People who complain about their experience of posting questions on StackOverflow often seem to have started with the idea that it was a website for getting help, rather than what it actually is: a way to compete for the attention of a certa
346.
by svat 3y ago
A few years ago, I wrote a summary of Napier's conception and construction here: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/47927/motivation-fo...
347.
by svat 3y ago
Ah I see, you were suggesting an existing article on Wikipedia where this information could be added. (It doesn't yet make sense, per Wikipedia policy, to create an article for XCC, for the reasons I mentioned.) Thanks, I'll look
348.
by svat 3y ago
The 'exact cover' problem has been studied for decades, possibly centuries. The generalization to "primary" and "secondary" items is Knuth's terminology, but the idea itself is a natural one and has been c
349.
by svat 3y ago
Whatever small faults there may be, each year these are the only reporting of these lectures at this level of detail. And the attention to humorous anecdotes or Knuthisms is not a problem; these are what those of us who attended the talk
350.
by svat 3y ago
While I love these videos, they have been online for several years now. The Slashdot headline is a misunderstanding of the article it is based on[1] which, when it says "Recently Stanford uploaded…", means a few years ago (before
351.
by svat 3y ago
There's a reason there's no IOCCC for Perl or TeX. :-) BTW there's a 2017 followup called xii-lat.tex: https://github.com/davidcarlisle/dpctex/tree/main/xii-lat ( https://mirrors
352.
by svat 3y ago
The equivalent from the TeX world is `xii.tex`: \let~\catcode~`76~`A13~`F1~`j00~`P2jdefA71F~`7113jdefPALLF PA''FwPA;;FPAZZFLaLPA//71F71iPAHHFLPAzzFenPASSFthP;A$$FevP A@@FfPARR717273F737271P;ADDFRgniPAWW71FP
353.
by svat 3y ago
This is basically the design of UTF-8 or varint encoding. The integer's representation is read one byte (8 bits) at a time, which can then be interpreted by looking at the first bit which says whether the integer is "done" or
354.
by svat 3y ago
It uses "efficient" everywhere, only alluding to polynomial-time here: > Theoretical computer scientists use a technical definition for “efficient” that can be debated, but it serves as a useful proxy for the colloquial concep
355.
by svat 3y ago
Most familiar to me from Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven , where the deranged narrator asks this to the bird: “Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!— Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest toss
356.
by svat 3y ago
This is called the "LSD" system, for obvious reasons.
357.
by svat 3y ago
The main problem is the rasterization. There's an amazing tool to fix this, called pkfix: wget "https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/Papers/change2.ps" pkfix change2.ps change2-fixed.ps ps2p
358.
by svat 3y ago
Love this! Remember a thread from years ago on 1/999999999999999999999998999999999999999999999999 giving the Fibonacci numbers ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9815839 — was even linked from https://kot
359.
by svat 3y ago
"Removed" implies it was there at some point; is this true? Or has this blog just never had RSS support? (I searched for this blog in Feedly and it didn't show up any older feed, but that may not be a reliable method for chec
360.
by svat 3y ago
Direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=622iPkJfYrI The talk is going to be about “Dancing Cells”, something about sparse-set representation and backtracking. ( https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/musing

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