svat

111 ms·

961.
by svat 7y ago
There's a related very nice article about the calculator in Android, by Hans-J. Boehm: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/8/219594-small-data-comp... Small-Data Computing: Correct Calculator Arithmetic
962.
by svat 7y ago
Computer Modern looks decent in print, which it was designed for (pick up any book by Knuth, not a modern book typeset with LaTeX). It looks less good on screen, partly because on-screen output barely existed at the time it was designed,
963.
by svat 7y ago
I agree with the spirit of this comment: good typesetting is a delight, and TeX is the best tool I've seen for achieving it. We are lucky that its author made the result of his researches freely available, and that a community has kept
964.
by svat 7y ago
To put it differently, Knuth's perspective is that of someone who's fundamentally a programmer at heart, but also happens to be a supremely competent/skilled mathematician. There are not many people like that (Bill Gosper com
965.
by svat 7y ago
Note that this paper (Knuth's “P69”) was reprinted as Chapter 6 of Selected Papers on Analysis of Algorithms , and this material is covered (in compressed form) in Pre-Fascicle 5B of The Art of Computer Programming .[1] This will be
966.
by svat 7y ago
All that's fine, and good luck to you; I wish you well. But I guess I wasn't clear. This project is described as a TeX engine “in Rust”. Has any code been actually written in Rust —as opposed to either Rust code that wraps C code
967.
by svat 7y ago
Thanks. Is there any code to look at? (Couldn't easily find anything relevant on that repo…) I didn't mention it earlier, but I'm collecting a list of alternative TeX implementations[1] so if there's even (say) a dozen l
968.
by svat 7y ago
I looked into this project when it was first announced. The “in Rust” part seems more aspirational than reality. For those who may not know, Knuth originally wrote TeX in a language called WEB, which is basically Pascal with some preprocess
969.
by svat 7y ago
Thank you for sharing your experience. It may be useful for, say, those writing an introduction to the Gita for certain audiences. Contrary to your impression, the Bhagavad Gita is not a “story”. Although the first chapter (of 18) does have
970.
by svat 7y ago
The Sanskrit tradition is uniquely centered around language itself, starting with its origins in the preservation of the Veda. There is an ancient tradition of Śikṣā (≈phonetics) for the correct pronunciation thereof, and there are further
971.
by svat 7y ago
"Quantum supremacy" is a technical term that simply means demonstrating that a quantum computer can in fact perform some computation (something artificial like sampling from a certain kind of distribution) faster than a classica
972.
by svat 7y ago
Factoring into primes doesn't really affect the lower bound on complexity. Note that for N=2^64, the number N! is about 10^(10^20.5), i.e. just the number of digits in N! is itself about 3×10^20. The number of bits in N! is itself
973.
by svat 7y ago
What “format-preserving encryption” gives you is a hard-to-predict (pseudorandom) permutation on the N elements. The resulting permutation is not guaranteed to be uniformly distributed on the space of all N! permutations; it just comes fr
974.
by svat 7y ago
How do you pick a random permutation function over 64-bit integers? On a set of N=2^64 integers, there are N! permutations, so you need lg(N!) ≈ NlgN random bits to generate a uniformly random permutation, and thus at least that much time.
975.
by svat 7y ago
I meant that they would successfully parse the words in context (and recognize the specific words and meanings), using their language ability. To use an example from an interview with a modern master of Sanskrit constrained writing ( http:&
976.
by svat 7y ago
The problem asks to find k cards (integers) out of n, in time O(k) and O(1) additional space — this means additional to the k required to store the output. So while holding n items wouldn't fit in memory, it is implicit that k would. B
977.
by svat 7y ago
That's a great point and very interesting comment. I imagine one of the reasons for this formalized (or if you don't like it, over-precise) language to arise and take hold in the Indian setting may have been the fact that Sanskrit
978.
by svat 7y ago
Starting in about the 11th century, philosophers in India of the Navya-Nyāya school adopted a similar artificial dialect of Sanskrit, to make their arguments precise. Of course there was no computer implementation backing the formalization,
979.
by svat 7y ago
Yes, those were two other options I considered. Ultimately both require higher effort from the reader (view the PDF, or mentally parse LaTeX syntax or have something special installed that does so), neither of which is conducive to quick sk
980.
by svat 7y ago
That's a good question. The actual size of the images is not large: the problem is that I can visually see the email take a while to load properly, even for an email containing just two PNG images that are 2941 bytes and 6333 bytes res
981.
by svat 7y ago
I'm just now trying to send some mathematics in an email (where most recipients will be reading it in Gmail), so I'm having to figure out what subset of HTML and CSS Gmail supports. (Found this reference for CSS: https:/&#x2
982.
by svat 7y ago
Wow, just realized English has two phrases that are homonyms but mean very different things: • “rite of passage” = “a ceremony or event marking an important stage in someone's life”, “when an individual leaves one group to enter anothe
983.
by svat 7y ago
The HN submission links directly to https://google.github.io/eng-practices/review/reviewer/ but if you start at the top namely https://google.github.io/eng-practices/ then there's a
984.
by svat 7y ago
It's a good idea IMO, but the two aren't alternatives, i.e. not mutually exclusive — you can do both. See Knuth's “A Flame About 64-bit Pointers” from 2008 ( https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html , st
985.
by svat 7y ago
Forgot to mention: this site https://www.metaflop.com/modulator ought to be better known, and I ought to remember to mention it every time I mention METAFONT. One great drawback of METAFONT, which held back (still does, but
986.
by svat 7y ago
I upvoted this comment, but sadly I wouldn't call METAFONT a “popular” system. The number of people who have successfully created “true” meta-fonts as Knuth intended is tiny. Nevertheless, when used with skill it can be very satisfying
987.
by svat 7y ago
You shouldn't accept slight variations IMO. One of the primary motivations for TeX (also the largest chapter in The TeXbook ) is "Fine Points of Mathematics Typing". If someone types something that results in slightly diff
988.
by svat 7y ago
BTW the person you're replying to is roughly but not quite correct: TAOCP doesn't have a separate references section, and when citing papers (inline in the text) Knuth does cite names as the authors typeset them, except for abbrev
989.
by svat 7y ago
The poster's activities ("studying logic programming", "NLP experiments", "work on Haskell") are the equivalent of painting or composing poetry: a creative activity done for enjoyment. A better analogy f
990.
by svat 7y ago
Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_About_Hansel_and_Gre... The book is still available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Die-Wahrheit-über-Hänsel-Gretel/dp/34... (and

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