svat

57 ms·

481.
by svat 4y ago
It seems pretty clear to me: - Trigonometric proofs of the Pythagorean theorem are rare, because many trigonometric identities depend on the Pythagorean theorem, so it's easy to end up with an argument that is in fact circular. - Never
482.
by svat 4y ago
To be clear: the essay “The Awful German Language” is indeed by Mark Twain, while the short note “A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling” is not.
483.
by svat 4y ago
This page has the correct century and more detail: https://www.lgny.org/historic-mansion > The main house at Locust Grove is a villa in the Italianate style designed in 1850 for artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse by
484.
by svat 4y ago
> If something does not exist, Wikipedia does not try to guess "what we want". Try it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&se... > Showing results for typographical error.
485.
by svat 4y ago
I was going to post this on another thread (the Neal Stephenson one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015121 ), but it also fits here: Donald Knuth does all his writing (even coding!) by hand with pencil on notepad, goi
486.
by svat 4y ago
Exactly. I ran into this when trying to set up Hugo, and wrote for myself a notes page with the following: # What is Hugo? `hugo` is a program that takes some .md files (ideally, conforming to a certain directory structure) and creates some
487.
by svat 4y ago
My vague impression is that BDDs are good for the kinds of problems Knuth is interested in: exact answers, exhaustive enumeration, naive backtracking would be too slow, etc. So things like "there are exactly 13,267,364,410,532 undirect
488.
by svat 4y ago
For what it's worth, I've found it ok (not great, but just ok) to write in Colab notebooks (maybe because I use it at work and I'm familiar with it). Here are a couple of such "blog posts" (which are basically just
489.
by svat 4y ago
> Referring to "Leonardo da Vinci" as "da Vinci" is like listing Lawrence of Arabia in the phone book as "Of Arabia, Mr. L," or > The mistake of referring to Leonardo as "da Vinci" is so entr
490.
by svat 4y ago
In Sanskrit, where poets have endlessly delighted in playing such tricks with language, there are at least a couple of such verses that contain all the consonants in order : one composed in a live performance by a poet who lived 1854–1914,
491.
by svat 4y ago
Yes. A comment on the post points to the TASS building in Moscow, which nicely illustrates this trick at a smaller scale: https://discovermoscow.com/en/places/dostoprimechatelnosti/z... — at first glance and
492.
by svat 4y ago
There are two main TeX distros: TeX Live and MikTeX. Both of them ship the binaries for pdfTeX, XeTeX, and LuaTeX. All three binaries (“engines”) have their users. There are also some other binaries (very few users use “plain”/“Knuth”
493.
by svat 4y ago
For some history/context on what this is based on: • During 1977–78, Knuth wrote the first version of TeX (now called TeX78) in SAIL and gave a talk[1] about it. Everyone was excited, and lots of people at other universities/labs
494.
by svat 4y ago
That's exactly my point: when you internalize the diagram, you'll be able to reason confidently about what happens: • In the case of "2.3 + 2.3", each "2.3" is “snapped” to the nearest representable value (gree
495.
by svat 4y ago
Thanks, I actually edited my post (made the second paragraph longer) after seeing your comment. The "physical" / "analog" idea does help in one direction (prevents us from relying on floating-point numbers in unsafe
496.
by svat 4y ago
This is useful but note that Python uses 64-bit floats (aka "double"), so the right values are: • "13.716" means 13.7159999999999993037 ( https://float.exposed/0x402b6e978d4fdf3b ) • "4.572" mean
497.
by svat 4y ago
If you have only a couple of minutes to develop a mental model of floating-point numbers (and you have none currently), the most valuable thing IMO would be to spend them staring at a diagram like this one: https://upload.wikimed
498.
by svat 4y ago
The linked post is not a comprehensive manual of LaTeX but just a collection of typesetting tips that the author found interesting. TeX is at heart a system for setting, breaking and laying out boxes. Each character (e.g. 'T' from
499.
by svat 4y ago
Even the books and essays he wrote before WWII have the same lucid style and clarity of thought: so it may be fair to say Orwell was always interested in clear (seeing and thinking and) communication, even before noticing how much of the op
500.
by svat 4y ago
While it's indeed true that the top two threads' root comments are sceptical, replies to them, and further threads, present counter-arguments — one could easily come away from reading the HN discussion thinking that there's s
501.
by svat 4y ago
Contrast with HN discussion of the purported breakthrough: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34235350
502.
by svat 4y ago
Yes indeed a structured environment and teacher would be best… another reason is that self-guided learning also tends to run out of steam/motivation more easily. But it's not as if there's an abundance of classes (online or o
503.
by svat 4y ago
You're describing a bad experience you had with a specific course (Rosetta Stone's Korean), and this data point is a useful warning, but generalizing from it to say that the method itself is “in practice it's just absolutely
504.
by svat 4y ago
See "Down Pens" by Saki, 1914. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Beasts_and_Super-Beasts/%22Do...
505.
by svat 4y ago
I attended this in person on Dec 7 (as I have every year it's been held, since 2014). A good text outline of the talk by David Cassel was just posted today, here: https://thenewstack.io/donald-knuths-2022-christmas-tree
506.
by svat 4y ago
I enjoyed this post, thank you! For the benefit of anyone else reading, some context that I felt would have helped: The toy problem being considered is the following. You are given a sequence of historical prices (of a single stock or index
507.
by svat 4y ago
Lovely, thanks for the example. I really like how the underline is subtle yet effective. The animation/effect where it seems to inch forward is also intriguing; how does that work? (Also, this is subjective but have you considered maki
508.
by svat 4y ago
This is a great idea; I really enjoy all these "two channels simultaneously" (side-by-side translations, video with subtitles, and in this case video with a readable transcript, where you can scroll in the video or scroll in the t
509.
by svat 4y ago
Where does he say that? What I could find was these two bits: > modern programmers would immediately compare the workings of Pāṇini’s rules to those of string functions in modern programming languages (this is not about Sanskrit as a l
510.
by svat 4y ago
> “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agricultu

More ›