svat

20 ms·

211.
by svat 2y ago
My Knuth checks amount to a total account balance of 0x$b.40 at his "Bank of San Seriffe" (the equivalent of eleven "errors" and two "suggestions") — mostly accumulated over a short period several years ago. Pr
212.
by svat 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33083384
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by svat 2y ago
> But for Bhartrihari it goes even further than this. [...] learning new words for experiences is not just learning a new way to communicate. It is, in some sense, gaining new experiences. When we expand our emotional vocabulary, we ex
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by svat 2y ago
> there are multiple words for shame, but a distinction is drawn between hiri, the sense of shame that prevents one from doing wrong to begin with, and vrida, the shame that sets in after wrong has been done and which prompts act
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by svat 2y ago
Look at "Blog archive" in the sidebar; you can click on each year/month to expand; it looks something like this: https://imgur.com/a/Q91LC4k And you can find more recent posts at his newer blog: https:&
216.
by svat 2y ago
The inspection paradox in renewal theory that you linked (for every t the interval containing t is on average larger than the average interval) is an instance of the inspection paradox described in the article (the mean seen by a random obs
217.
by svat 2y ago
A special case of selection bias is sampling bias (as you said with "specifically"), and the inspection paradox is a special case of selection bias — it is specifically about whether you “inspect” a member of a population or the p
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by svat 2y ago
A comment on the post gives this similar example: > My favorite example (true in many European countries): most families have a single child, but most kids have siblings.
219.
by svat 2y ago
Thank you! The first one says it has been tested with “Case Institute SuperSoap” (which was the compiler/assembler that Knuth and his college friends worked on), so there's hope! I can't figure out how to use it though :-) If
220.
by svat 2y ago
Knuth's tribute to his first love; a delightful article which I've read multiple times. One thing that he wrote in this 1986 article about the 1950s has remained true for several decades since: > During my student days I had n
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by svat 2y ago
Related, written as humour but exemplifies this effectively: “I Thought I Would Have Accomplished a Lot More Today and Also by the Time I Was Thirty-Five” (by Alex Baia): https://web.archive.org/web/20200826002046/
222.
by svat 2y ago
Nice! Looking into them a bit deeper, they all rely on two facts involving quantities that are off by 1 ulp: √2 - 2/√2 as a float64 is exactly equal to 2^{-52} √2 * √2 as a float64 is exactly equal to 2 + 2^{-51} and al
223.
by svat 2y ago
See also: "Representing numbers using only one 4" written by a 26-year-old Donald Knuth in 1964 ( https://www.jstor.org/stable/2689238 reprinted as Chapter 10 of his Selected Papers on Fun and Games ) — it us
224.
by svat 2y ago
This is a nice post; a few comments: * TeX's boxes-and-glue-and-penalties model is remarkably simple and flexible, as the author says. I've long been planning to write a post about this; the Knuth–Plass paper has some beautiful ex
225.
by svat 2y ago
I appreciate the author's goal of not requiring readers' browsers to run Javascript to render the mathematics. The tradeoffs between images, SVG, and MathML are also unfortunately as stated. Note though that another option is to u
226.
by svat 2y ago
Where has Knuth said that? Sounds like the opposite of what I've generally heard from him (not caring about popularity etc).
227.
by svat 2y ago
Both papers are linked very clearly in the article, and it was easy to quickly find them just skimming through the article without even reading: > This problem was introduced in a 1981 paper where "1981 paper" links to https
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by svat 2y ago
> but not to write the exercises As the post mentions in passing, the integer-valued polynomials are completely characterized by the property that when written as a sum of {c_i (x choose i)}, all the coefficients c_i are integers. I im
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by svat 2y ago
It is not typical that being good in one area of mathematics makes one proficient in another — mathematics has a lot of depth, and to reach the frontier in any specialization requires years of study. However: - There are skills that carry o
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by svat 2y ago
That blog post is specifically about the question about whether a polynomial taking integer values on positive integers (or any sufficiently large subset thereof) necessarily is an integer-valued polynomial (the answer is yes). The OP blog
231.
by svat 2y ago
Just finished reading the article finally (thanks!). The crux of it for me was: - They had a "dictionary" of 30000 words, and accepting a ~1/4000 rate of false positives meant that if they hashed each word to a 27-bit string
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by svat 2y ago
Context for that quote: > Children are one’s greatest happiness, but often & often a still greater misery. A man of science ought to have none, — perhaps not a wife; for then there would be nothing in this wide world worth caring fo
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by svat 2y ago
Looking at https://one.google.com/about/plans it seems that the plans currently (in the US) are: - "Standard 200 GB" ($30/year) - "Premium 2 TB" ($100/year) - "AI Premium 2 TB" (
234.
by svat 2y ago
> bit like Tom Hanks suddenly playing a vicious assassin FWIW, Tom Hanks was in Cloud Atlas, where he played at least one evil character (though it was Hugh Grant I remember as more vicious, which was also out of type for him, at least
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by svat 2y ago
It was Brian Kernighan and P. J. Plauger ( The Elements of Programming Style (1974, 2nd edition 1978), chapter 2, page 10): > Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as c
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by svat 2y ago
+1 for Babbage/Lovelace history, however IMO, although the two facts are separately true: (1) he was let down by precision machining not existing (Tim Robinson https://www.meccano.us/difference_engines/rde_1/
237.
by svat 2y ago
It's linked in another comment, but repeating anyway: a high-resolution PDF (i.e. using vector fonts and not a scan) of the error log itself is available here: https://mirrors.ctan.org/info/knuth-pdf/errata&#x
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by svat 2y ago
Just curious: The comment you're replying to had the link with timestamp 4:01:38 which is basically just before the move happens; is that not enough as it is?
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by svat 2y ago
Naming conventions vary, and when you consider names across history/geography, it is the present-day Western convention of "GivenName FamilyName" that is unusual and needs explanation. Generally speaking, someone is born and
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by svat 2y ago
It's the same "useful when we're learning" vs "useful when we're working" dichotomy, isn't it? :) When I want to tell someone about the idea of organizing their documentation into four buckets — or re

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