svat

97 ms·

901.
by svat 7y ago
This is a nice article, and gently (with great explanation) introduces: • The idea of approximating a real number by rational numbers (e.g. √2 ≈ 99/70), • Dirichlet's approximation theorem, that every real number x has a rational
902.
by svat 7y ago
> So.... this is just a fancy name for the advice "give your functions a name"? Not quite: "defunctionalization" is a name for replacing functions with not-functions (data structures). (And IMO it's the most unfa
903.
by svat 7y ago
Ah that makes sense, thank you. Always good to explain acronyms; it just didn't occur to me that it was a reply to the whole subtree of comments, so I was confused how to respond.
904.
by svat 7y ago
Sorry, I don't understand: could you clarify why you're telling me this? Was there anything in my comment that seemed like it was talking about something else?
905.
by svat 7y ago
That's interesting; my personal experience is the opposite: for most things in TAOCP, it is written more clearly than its source material, especially as it gets to the more advanced topics within each section (often only published in p
906.
by svat 7y ago
Similar story: Stuart Feldman, the author of `make`, on why Makefiles require tabs by default: > After getting myself snarled up with my first stab at Lex, I just did something simple with the pattern newline-tab. It worked, it stayed.
907.
by svat 7y ago
Wasn't expecting to see this here. I created this article about 10 years ago, when I was a lot more active on Wikipedia. Every time I remember this article I keep expecting it to get deleted sooner or later, but somehow it's made
908.
by svat 7y ago
Just to clarify: > TeX is used because it's a convenient interface between higher level descriptions… I think you mean LaTeX, not TeX. (LaTeX is a macro layer on top of TeX that provides these convenient interfaces, while TeX is a
909.
by svat 7y ago
Thank you, the voice of experience counts for a lot, and I'm glad to hear from a rare person who has actually tried LP seriously (I'm not one of them!). I'd like to dig deeper for your thoughts on a couple of your interesting
910.
by svat 7y ago
It's my comment you're referring to (linked from the post). The full sentence was “BTW, TeX's error handling is phenomenally good IMO; the opposite of the situation with LaTeX.” You've reversed the meaning(!) but I stand
911.
by svat 7y ago
I'll avoid repeating my comments from the previous thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406070 ) and say just the ones that I think didn't get enough attention: 1. I can't speak for Hillel Wayne who
912.
by svat 7y ago
Yeah as I said it was a tongue-in-cheek comment and I don't believe it, just wanted to provoke some discussion. :-) But in any case what I meant is that TeX/MF are among his biggest programs (that I know of), not that 20000 line
913.
by svat 7y ago
Agreed; I just didn't want to continue arguing with myself and post a counterpoint to the counterpoint; glad others are doing it :-) (Actually I posted a comment along the same lines in another thread: https://news.ycombinat
914.
by svat 7y ago
I think the idea is that if you want to make changes to an existing program, you get up from your desk, go look at your shelves and pull out the sheaf of paper for that program, read/study it, think about what changes are needed, write
915.
by svat 7y ago
For TeX he has written a single large test called the TRIP test: described in "A torture test for TeX" ( http://texdoc.net/pkg/tripman ). This is a conformance test (to weed out bad reimplementations), written
916.
by svat 7y ago
Unfortunately we can't control what other people do; everyone does what they are driven to do / what they find valuable. (We can at most create the environment and incentives that will influence them strongly, if their own intrins
917.
by svat 7y ago
The .web file is not supposed to be read directly. You're supposed to read the "woven" version: https://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/generic/knuth/tex/tex.pdf
918.
by svat 7y ago
I love this comment, and probably wouldn't even disagree with "It's basically horrible" :), but just to point out a few things: - "The generated result won't even have proper indentation." Actually, what y
919.
by svat 7y ago
That's a good question! 1. Note that these were not quite "two solutions" as one might think from the phrase, but rather a commissioned program, and a review of it (which also happened to contain an alternative approach). 2.
920.
by svat 7y ago
Counterpoint[0]: Knuth really is a fan of writing monolithic (rather than "modular") programs from scratch, in a way that goes against all the experience of software engineering accumulated over decades, so that criticism is wel
921.
by svat 7y ago
I'm glad to see this here, for two reasons: (1) In general it's nice when people return to the primary sources rather than second-hand accounts, and (2) this particular topic is of interest to me; here are a couple of previous com
922.
by svat 7y ago
See https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article "Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering" for some of the design goals of Go and how they led to its current design. (For example, gofmt/go
923.
by svat 7y ago
In the late 1960s/early 1970s, before he went to Xerox PARC and Apple, Larry Tesler wrote an early document system (page formatter) called PUB, for use by other computer programmers at the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL). He has put up the old
924.
by svat 7y ago
Oh thank you. I looked up page 715 of my copy of Volume 4A and can see the \`a. :-) I also see both corrections you mentioned in the online errata, that's cool. :-)
925.
by svat 7y ago
That's interesting, can you go into more detail on those two -- what was the pedagogical improvement, and the typographical item? Just curious...
926.
by svat 7y ago
> when's the last time Knuth wrote a check for TAOCP? Got one in the mail yesterday (check was written Feb 10). In fact you can figure out how many checks were written in the last month, roughly: compare https://web.archi
927.
by svat 7y ago
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19890918 discusses https://xmonader.github.io/letsbuildacompiler-pretty/ which is a prettification of these plain .txt files — thanks to it I was able to read
928.
by svat 7y ago
BTW, that .web file is not meant to be read directly (even Knuth doesn't read that file, except to make edits). The form in which it supposed to be read, and the form in which it was published as a book (though with some added typograp
929.
by svat 7y ago
The immediate context for this is this post https://v8.dev/blog/v8-release-80 on the v8 blog, where they announced that in v8 version 8, they saved an average of 40% memory, and (unlike usual memory-time tradeoffs) a
930.
by svat 7y ago
The posted article is by 3blue1brown (Grant Sanderson) himself. Where the article says "Early in 2019, I published a set of three videos about Galperin’s result..." the link is to the playlist https://www.youtube.com&

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