svat

140 ms·

871.
by svat 7y ago
Related and similar: See also the blog post (“Why Textbooks Should Be Free”) “The Case for Free Online Books”[1] by Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, professor at Wisconsin and (co-)author of the fantastic Operating Systems book “Operating Systems: Thr
872.
by svat 7y ago
Yes there should be a \ after “Soc.” Proofreading the typeset output might have caught this error. :-) The “\null” after “NASA” is to show an example where the heuristic fails in the other direction: the “.” after the uppercase letter won&#
873.
by svat 7y ago
One of the comments there concisely summarizes history better than modern typographers do: > I think most books don't do this any more [have wider spaces between sentences]. Newspapers certainly don't. It's way too much
874.
by svat 7y ago
Oh oops, sorry about that, thanks for the correction — was doing something custom recently, and got myself confused. So just for completeness: at the default settings, for cmr10 (a 10pt font), • inter-word space has natural width 3.33333pt,
875.
by svat 7y ago
Minor quibble: having a non-integral “number” of spaces was not a TeX innovation; Knuth was just reproducing standard practice of fine typography. Using variable-width separators (TeX “glue”) is exactly how human typesetters did it for cent
876.
by svat 7y ago
See https://web.archive.org/web/20171218122807/http://www.heracl... for a great article on the history of wider spaces between sentences — how there were two traditions of typography and things started t
877.
by svat 7y ago
Those who enjoy this sort of thing might also enjoy reading Donald Knuth's “The Concept of a Meta-Font” (from 1982): http://visiblelanguagejournal.com/issue/61/article/748 — although the technology used
878.
by svat 7y ago
> One of the biggest things that can get you drawn into procrastinating is to go into a crazy website checking loop where you loop through Twitter, Hackernews, Reddit, BBC, etc in the hope for a new bit of information that probably has
879.
by svat 7y ago
Based on similar things he's said in many previous interviews, I think you should read "success in life" as "happiness in life", etc: read the quote as something like: A person’s happiness in life is determined by
880.
by svat 7y ago
When the very adjacent sentence is “Poets have to write poems”, I think this question is like asking “what kinds of poems, not for the sake of poems, can you actually write…”, then ask about how they change the world, etc. Even poets don&#x
881.
by svat 7y ago
Only a very tiny part of the books is in MIX/MMIX (by my count from 3 years ago; details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14520230 ) — if you don't care about it just ignore those programs/sections;
882.
by svat 7y ago
(Replying to myself.) For what it's worth, I somewhat regret the wording of the parent post. I was hoping for a thread on lessons from Emacs generally applicable to the topic of malleable systems — maybe things like: (1) periodically i
883.
by svat 7y ago
While I am a fan of Emacs (IMO any one of Org, AUCTeX, or Magit is in itself a worthwhile reason to use Emacs, though of course the ease of customizing nearly anything with just a few lines of elisp is the main comfort), I think it's a
884.
by svat 7y ago
This is an interesting article, and the result seems like a reasonable compromise. One thing I don't understand: is the font-designer's chosen line-height (consider the example of Zapfino in this article) completely ignored, on th
885.
by svat 7y ago
Such a long list even without mentioning: FRACTRAN, Conway's soldiers, the angel problem, the Conway base 13 function, the 15 theorem (and 290 theorem)… incredible how he got so many mind-bending and unique ideas. On Conway the showman
886.
by svat 7y ago
Along a different direction than larger displays: there was a popular post recently about an e-Ink display that doesn't require batteries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22604617 (alternative link to the product:
887.
by svat 7y ago
Your comment was very puzzling to me, as I couldn't figure out what kind of misunderstanding about this article would prompt a comment such as this. But finally a possibility occurred to me: perhaps you think the point of this article
888.
by svat 7y ago
Donald Knuth has the opposite view: he thinks recursion is more fundamental. Funnily, he uses an example much like yours. > On the other hand, recursion is quite fundamental. It is not inherently a high-level concept, suitable only fo
889.
by svat 7y ago
There's a website for this called Focusmate, which seems to have been around for at least two years going by past HN discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=true&que... I have not u
890.
by svat 7y ago
This is a great start on how scientists (and journalists) should communicate to the public! Thanks for writing this, and the world would be a better place if everyone remembered to follow these principles. I think in fact it would be better
891.
by svat 7y ago
Definitely, the definition of "good" is subjective and one can never get it fully right automatically — but as far as TeX's line-breaking algorithm goes, avoiding successive lines starting or ending with the same word wouldn&
892.
by svat 7y ago
Thanks, calculating subtrees only once makes sense. But can't you go further (as in TeX and in the comment you're replying to) — that is, if there are two "paths" of breaking that eventually end with the same break at th
893.
by svat 7y ago
> Note that “best” is a property of the entire statement being formatted. A line break changes the indentation of the remainder of the statement, which in turn affects which other line breaks are needed. Sorry, Knuth. No dynamic progra
894.
by svat 7y ago
Consider reflecting on what you or someone else might mean by "documentation". A submission from 3 hours ago titled "Please don't write your documentation in Markdown" was on the front page earlier: https:/&#x
895.
by svat 7y ago
Yes AMS Euler is very nontraditional as mathematical typesetting goes — to put it in terms of Zapf's oeuvre, it's not Palatino or Optima but rather Zapfino. :-) Looking at what was written/expected before it was created, it
896.
by svat 7y ago
Ah rasterization is another rabbit hole that I don't know much about and can't say anything without trial-and-error experimentation on the specific device :-) But first I'd recommend checking whether the image is being displa
897.
by svat 7y ago
Ah that's interesting, thank you. Looks like an interesting design choice, and would explain how it manages to be so fast.
898.
by svat 7y ago
Yes that's right. Consider a TeX file test.tex containing $\int$ \nopagenumbers \bye or if you prefer LaTeX, containing \documentclass{article}\pagestyle{empty}\begin{document}$\int$\end{document} If you run "tex
899.
by svat 7y ago
Broadly speaking: 1. Parse the user's input (e.g. "{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a}") into an internal data structure (math lists, etc -- MathJax apparently uses MathML internally) 2. Classify the symbols and operators into d
900.
by svat 7y ago
Any software project should be lucky to have a post like this written by a user, let alone as wonderful a writer as Brian Hayes. On comparison with KaTeX: • It appears from this comparison page ( https://www.intmath.com/cg5&#

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