xelxebar

21 ms·

301.
Best engineering interview question I've gotten(quuxplusone.github.io)
186 points by xelxebar 3y ago|180 comments
302.
by xelxebar 3y ago
If by surface you mean a 2-dimensional manifold, then no. The Nash embedding threorms give upper bounds for how big the embedding target dimension needs to be for any n-dimensional manifold. In the case of 2-dimensional surfaces, at worst y
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by xelxebar 3y ago
The current git-saturated market certainly makes it quite challenging for other options to take off. That said jj[0] is super nifty, and it's git-compatible backing store means you can transparently use jj while the rest of your team u
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by xelxebar 3y ago
> This is more readable than both Except you sneak in alien symbols: +, - (used both as a unary and a binary operator!), *, ^, and /. See how readable they make things, though? :) Your quadratic_roots is, indeed, nice in isolation.
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by xelxebar 3y ago
Have you ever read Euclid's The Elements? It's all prose and relatively obtuse. Compare that against the modern notation equivalent and you'll see how empowering the algebraic formulation is. The semantics are the same, but t
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by xelxebar 3y ago
> There is no benefit to having these symbols Hard disagree. Which do you find more readable? -b/(2a) + 1/(2a) √(b²-4ac) or (plus (minus (div b (times 2 a)) (times (div 1 (times 2 a)) (sqrt (minus (pow b 2) (time
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by xelxebar 3y ago
> tri-diagonal matrices with stencil [-1, 2, -1], Just trying to understand these terms. So is a 5x5 tridiagonal matrix with your stencil look like this? 2 -1 0 0 0 -1 2 -1 0 0 0 -1 2 -1 0 0 0 -1 2 -1
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by xelxebar 3y ago
Or "Clifford algebra" for the generic mathematical structure.
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by xelxebar 3y ago
Jaynes is great, but The Logic of Science is a bit rough around the edges, with lots of errata. Jaynes died when the book was really just a very rough draft plus notes. Bretthorst had to go in and turn it into something publishable, not an
310.
by xelxebar 3y ago
Not at all. Using APL to solve real programming problems does lead you to cut concept space at different joints than mainstream programming, but once you have those concepts cached, APL isn't really "dense" so much as liberat
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by xelxebar 3y ago
Cool. Here are some other resources that I've encountered along the way of learning Forth: - JonesForth: https://github.com/nornagon/jonesforth/blob/master/jonesfort... This is legit a text that goe
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by xelxebar 3y ago
You absolutely rock. Thanks for taking a look at my project. It's currently on the back-burner right now, but I do have future plans. The ¯2 is specifically something I'm hoping to get rid of. It has to do with some specifics of h
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by xelxebar 3y ago
I'm the author. This is definitely a serious project of mine. I presented about it at the Dyalog '23 User Meeting last October: https://tv.dyalog.com/Dyalog23/?v=bb6sIAJjMeM In a sibling comment, mloch
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by xelxebar 3y ago
Excellent question. Thank you for asking. This might sound strange, but the most salient lesson I've gotten is that value lies 10% in the software and 90% in understanding the problem domain. My customers don't usually care about
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by xelxebar 3y ago
You're absolutely right that the kind of APL in my parser looks alien. And you're right that there would be a 100X blowup in code size for an equivalent C implementation. Part of the issue is that you're seeing the entire app
316.
by xelxebar 3y ago
I've been knee deep in APL for the past year, working on a YAML parser: https://github.com/xelxebar/dayaml . It's still very prototypy, but for ~30 lines of code it's surprisingly complete. The process of
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by xelxebar 3y ago
Forth is super cool for embedded work. The normal dev cycle of build, burn, not work, tweak, build, burn, repeat is quite slow and annoying. It was kind of revolutionary for me to discover Mecrisp[0], which demonstrates how can provide a (f
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by xelxebar 3y ago
Absolutely this. I've been phoneless for about 2.5 years now. It's been glorious in many ways, but as my business connection network grows it's becoming a lot more cumbersome to interact with people.
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by xelxebar 3y ago
Oh, cool. This is the first time I've encountered anyone else mentioning hand decompilation of x86-64 instructions. I spent some time doing that with small binaries a while back. The original motivation was SmithForth[0]. For those int
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by xelxebar 3y ago
Very interesting. When I was hand-writing ELFs, it took me a while to grok sections vs. segments. If you ever run across a history of executable formats and the motivations for the particular decisions made with ELF, I'd love to read t
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by xelxebar 3y ago
Also, don't forget LD_DEBUG for debugging your handmade ELFs: man 8 ld.so Your advice is completely on point. I spent some time a while back hand-writing ELF files in GNU Assembler. Statically linked executables are, indeed, q
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by xelxebar 3y ago
This is nuts! You've carved out your own universe. Thanks for sharing. Composability via pipes and whatnot in the CLI are a huge boost in power. Does Starcel have or is planning anything similar?
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by xelxebar 3y ago
Did you see the end of the article, where the author uses a small example and gets "B is A" generalization? These are the salient takeaways I got: - Is/Was wording might matter. This is something probably a bug. - 30 facts ab
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by xelxebar 3y ago
Output that doesn't end in LF is pretty annoying in general, since the shell prompt gets visually tacked on to the end. I have this as part of my PROMPT_COMMAND: printf "%%%$((COLUMNS - 1))s\\r%1s\\r" Effectively, it
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by xelxebar 3y ago
> your disk queue latency is pegged at your depth limit and your fs response latency is over a second You said words. And I totally, 100% understand them. But, like, for the plebs that are totally not me, could you elaborate on what you&
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by xelxebar 3y ago
The Section 7 manuals a great. It's worth perusing the list man -s 7 -k '' and reading through the ones that catch your fancy. Some that I like: ascii(7), boot(7), and standards(7). Section 5 also has some gems: elf(
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by xelxebar 3y ago
Oh cool! People here might appreciate this rendition: http://www.nam21.sakura.ne.jp/tao/ Along with diagrams of how various sections relate to each other, it's also a multi-text version with "the origi
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by xelxebar 3y ago
Personally, I find pithy comebacks like this to sound convincing to but to actually be mostly devoid of utility. They tend operate as a sort of social persuasion tool, but I'd like to Get Things Done, which requires deep domain knowl
329.
by xelxebar 3y ago
Nifty. That was a nice 4-page exposé of the correspondence. There are no general proofs, but the correspondence between notations is very suggestive and invokes interesting intuitions, I think. The example derivations with the uncurry examp
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by xelxebar 3y ago
Okay. We have a website with a blog announcement and a few papers. However, I'm having trouble finding out more information about what the Polymathic AI organization is. Curious where their funds are coming from. The website lists &quo

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