svat

39 ms·

421.
by svat 3y ago
Obviously to use a character you need some font containing that character — this is not specific to XeTeX; it's just that in many other programs this “font fallback” happens silently behind the scenes (will pick up a random font from y
422.
by svat 3y ago
Dupe (4 months ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36012360 626 comments
423.
by svat 3y ago
Newton may have been rough/arrogant with other people , but this is entirely consistent with being humble in the face of the mysteries of the universe etc — there is nothing in his biography to suggest otherwise. In fact, you can see
424.
by svat 3y ago
I dug deeper in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37517597 — it's mentioned in many books, but Newton's very thorough biographer Richard Westfall authoritatively says “According to a story tha
425.
by svat 3y ago
That AMS article ("A Close Call: How a Near Failure Propelled Me to Succeed") is great and sobering. I am sure it has helped some people, by showing that even Terence Tao cannot succeed without working hard. > this was the fir
426.
by svat 3y ago
> manually make some allocations downward from the top and some allocations upward from the bottom Incidentally, this is what Knuth does in TeX, if I understand correctly: http://mirrors.ctan.org/info/knuth-pdf&#x2
427.
by svat 3y ago
In fact, just the part on Satisfiability was previously published (2015, before Volume 4B published 2023) as "Volume 4, Fascicle 6: Satisfiability", and the even-earlier draft (pre-fascicle) is available online at https:/&#x
428.
by svat 3y ago
It's apocryphal, found in Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes etc. Levenson's book (which BTW has a lot more of interest beyond whatever I put in the blog post) cites two sources for this point: • Richard Westfall, Never at Rest:
429.
by svat 3y ago
Thank you. I don't know how deep you want to go into Sanskrit literature, but if you liked the blog posts, you may also enjoy my friend's posts/essays on Sanskrit literature (I had a small part in proofreading and making some
430.
by svat 3y ago
I don't think this is a reasonable understanding of the story. Chaloner cannot be called “Newton's rival” in any usual sense of the word: he was born destitute, turned to various horrifying crimes from a young age, was barely educ
431.
by svat 3y ago
No problem :) Mysterious are the ways of upvotes. It's not entirely random—I would expect a post from ciechanow.ski to be reliably upvoted—but there's a fair amount of chance (which is why there's a manually curated "sec
432.
by svat 3y ago
This is not a copy of Levenson's 2009 article. This is a copy of Levenson's 2009 book (the good parts) (as mentioned in the first sentence), that I wrote as a blog post in 2010 before returning the book to the library, and which
433.
by svat 3y ago
Awesome story! And all this before 28… Though not a contender for “greatest counterfeiter”, there is also William Chaloner (1650–1699), who had a similar idea (“the safest place from which to pass his money was the Mint itself”), and did ba
434.
by svat 3y ago
Yes actually! Knuth says he got into computer science because he could see that the example programs in the IBM 650 manual were not very good, and he thought "if I, a college student just getting started with computers, can do better t
435.
by svat 3y ago
It looks like you're talking about just the phrase “how about never?”, but the full text of the cartoon—the quote attributed to him—is: > No, Thursday's out. How about never—is never good for you? It's the whole second s
436.
by svat 3y ago
That film of Log Driver's Waltz was animated by John Weldon, who has a bunch of… unique films (hard to say they're good for kids!): • To Be: https://www.nfb.ca/film/to_be/ • Special Delivery: https:&#
437.
by svat 3y ago
The dialogue was original to the film, but in terms of plot and characters, Umberto Eco actually thought that Casablanca was full of clichés, and that this was the secret of his success: he titled his essay “Casablanca, or, The Clichés ar
438.
by svat 3y ago
I have the book (memoir) that this article is about. It's a fun read (yes it mentions the Seinfeld episode about how incomprehensible some of the cartoons are); my favourite part is the chapter about the New Yorker cartoon caption cont
439.
by svat 3y ago
One of the other comments ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37335912 ) mentions that it's possible to use `nu` for its (5) solutions without switching to it as a shell: nu --commands 'ls | where size >
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by svat 3y ago
My reading is that for an individual theorem or proof, having it checked by computer may well be more "secure". But a culture where all mathematics is done (only) by computer would be worse, because you'd have outsourced the
441.
by svat 3y ago
I wouldn't characterize him as being sceptical about Lean; this is what he says: > Some terrific developments have happened with proof verification. Like [the proof assistant] Lean, which has allowed mathematicians to verify many p
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by svat 3y ago
Nice interview / thoughts. There was a great article almost exactly 10 years ago, revolving around the same example (Mochizuki's claimed proof of the abc conjecture) that this article starts with: http://projectwordswor
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by svat 3y ago
This may be obvious, but what I realized recently, when I tried to switch to one of the “alternative” shells (xonsh, based on Python), is that the experience of using a shell is (at least) four (overlapping) experiences: 1. The basic intera
444.
by svat 3y ago
The author is making fun of the long s in the quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s (rules: https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Blog/2006/06/rules-for-long-s.h... ), by reading it as &quo
445.
by svat 3y ago
It is numerology, with impressive pedigree: sum-of-divisors and “perfect numbers” are in Euclid: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Perfect_number&ol... (for the numerology connection, search the page for
446.
by svat 3y ago
I completely and very strongly agree that simple concepts should not be pitched at professionals, and should be explained as simply as possible! To get there, I'm trying to figure out the precise way in which you say this article could
447.
by svat 3y ago
It seems the root comment here had confusion/difficulty not with “proper divisor”, but with “the sum of all the” proper divisors. In any case, if your problem is that this page doesn't explain "proper divisor", then note
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by svat 3y ago
I think you missed the (implicit) definition of “ the sum”: If someone asked you “what is the sum of all the proper divisors of 8?”, would you say it's 1+2+4=7, or would you say, “well, it could be either 1+2+4=7, or 1+2+2+4=9, or 1+1
449.
by svat 3y ago
The page does have concrete examples in the very first section after the lead? https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Untouchable_numbe... (avoiding edits from today) — it gives the example of how 4 is not untoucha
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by svat 3y ago
You could ask the same “Other than <its value>, what value does <it> have?” question about anything. (The answer is: none. For that matter, how would you answer questions like: what value does the concept of even-and-odd numbers

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