svat

52 ms·

571.
by svat 4y ago
There's another very nice description, with useful pictures, by Martin Blais (as part of the documentation of Beancount) at https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_m... (example picture that I w
572.
by svat 4y ago
This is from August 2016, and see also the follow-ups by the same author (who is here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=commandlinefan ): • Reflections on another year of reading Knuth (September 2017) https:&#x2F
573.
by svat 4y ago
Right, this is about the negative Pell's equation, x^2 - dy^2 = -1 (rather than +1). The question is for which d this has a solution. (For the usual +1 case, which is what you're talking about, there are solutions for every d, a
574.
by svat 4y ago
See also Knuth's TAOCP section 7.1.3 "Bitwise Tricks & Techniques" which makes references to this book Hacker's Delight and covers some similar ground, in Knuth's unique style. (Published as part of Vol 4A in
575.
by svat 4y ago
As someone wrote:[1] > Let’s say I made a movie about the US where an African-American boy born in the hood, has his mother sell him to a pedophile pop icon, after which he gets molested by a priest from his church, following which he g
576.
by svat 4y ago
I think I found the answer you mean! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3637668/why-are-scriptin... — the topic matches, there's a table comparing syntax (though I wouldn't call it huge), and it include
577.
by svat 4y ago
Yes that's what I thought too (which is why I found the complaint hard to understand until I thought of the alternative interpretation). But clearly at least the person I was replying to understood it differently, and it was also the t
578.
by svat 4y ago
It took me a while to understand your comment, until I realized there are two interpretations of the question of where these numbers come from: • One is a historical question: who first used these numbers and when? who copied from where
579.
by svat 4y ago
See also diff-pdf https://vslavik.github.io/diff-pdf/ that I usually use for this. (Seems to be relatively popular; 1.4k stars on GitHub: https://github.com/vslavik/diff-pdf )
580.
by svat 4y ago
In case there is interest in other implementations of TeX: I'm collecting the ones I know here: https://github.com/tex-other and have an answer here: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/507846&
581.
by svat 4y ago
See similar discussion from a couple of weeks ago where I too mentioned "about a millisecond a page": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32204910 — yes some overhead comes from LaTeX, and even more from heavywei
582.
by svat 4y ago
There are some here, as test files in the qpdf library: https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf/tree/main/qpdf/qtest/qpdf (But still, note: A couple of months ago I wrote a low-level PDF parser—just parse
583.
by svat 4y ago
Yes by email (search the posted page for "@" or look under "Rewards" at https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html#:~:text=Rewards ) And when I said "invited" I meant "strongly incenti
584.
by svat 4y ago
Just to clarify, you can email him to report errors in any of his books (and I have done so, several times). It's only for other general communication that he insists you use physical email.
585.
by svat 4y ago
You may also like this other speech by the same author (Herb Wilf) that I love too (on an unrelated topic): • Epsilon Sandwiches https://www2.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/website/MAASpeech In fact everything by Wilf tha
586.
by svat 4y ago
Related tweet from Russ Cox: https://twitter.com/_rsc/status/1483899960684863493 > Knuth is making backwards incompatible changes to fix bugs in something he wrote 54 years ago (TAOCP volume 1, 1968)! And mine:
587.
by svat 4y ago
This data's definition of "famous" or "notable" is in the "Measuring notability" section of the linked paper: we build a synthetic notability index using five dimensions to figure out a ranking for this b
588.
by svat 4y ago
Umberto Eco wrote an essay called "Casablanca, or, The Clichés are Having a Ball" that I quite like / find interesting ( "Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us." ): https://web.archive.org&
589.
by svat 4y ago
See also a different comparison (on ~the same problem) at StackExchange: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/188133/bentleys... (Copying from my comment the last time this was posted: https://n
590.
by svat 4y ago
That's precisely my point: the slowness comes not from TeX but from the LaTeX macro packages that the user has included on top. And if you want to make things faster for the user, you don't have to replace TeX (which is already pl
591.
by svat 4y ago
The screencast looks good! For parallel/prior work in this sort of "live update" of the typeset document (and to learn from their experiences), you may also want to look at: • SwiftLaTeX ( https://github.com/Sw
592.
by svat 4y ago
• As a rough rule of thumb, TeX can do about 1000–3000 pages a second on today's computers.[1] This is for a (presumably typical) book that was written in plain TeX. • So if your LaTeX document is taking orders of magnitude more than a
593.
by svat 4y ago
Yes! Not only that, here's something I found mind-blowing: for almost all real numbers, the nth root of the nth convergent's denominator has as limit the same value, and that value is e^(pi^2/12ln2). Am typing from phone
594.
by svat 4y ago
This trick, like several others like it, is easier to remember and work with if one adopts the notation x̅ for ten's complement (10-x), e.g. 4̅ means 10-4=6. So the trick this post gives is (essentially) that: [x̅] × [y̅] = [x̅+̅
595.
by svat 4y ago
It is not clear what this argument gets at, because: • Other languages also have had a printing press for centuries, and typewriters for decades. (Not just "Romantic" languages, by which I assume you mean the Romance languages.) •
596.
by svat 4y ago
> If we value intelligence, in and of itself, we’ll eventually face a crisis of sorts. Related, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Water — > […] pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
597.
by svat 4y ago
Yes, in particular the main consonants part is arranged like the periodic table: the rows are ordered by place of articulation, and each column a different manner of articulation. ---- In fact, it is possible that Mendeleev was inspired to
598.
by svat 4y ago
While the article goes into history and detail, here are a couple of analogies that may help explain what this thing is: • The convention of specifying phone numbers using words, e.g. 1-800-FLOWERS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/
599.
by svat 4y ago
Whether or not that's true, you can remove "beginning" from my statement as it's not necessary (done, just edited, thanks): most programmers, most of the time, don't need the speed of floating-point everywhere (co
600.
by svat 4y ago
A couple of thoughts I've always had about floating-point arithmetic: 1. IMO it's unfortunate that most languages default to floating-point. Most programmers, most of the time, would be better served by slightly slower but less co

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