bollu

Got any chewey bread recipes?

What's the RPN based calculator you use on your terminal? I'd love to learn!

What is an anaphoric function and why would I want it?

What is an anaphoric function / macro? I've seen this term floating around and I don't know what it means!

Most "hard results" in any subfield of math cannot be derived from pure categorical nonsense like adjunctions. At some point, you have to roll up your sleeve and do the work.

How would you prove the tychonoff theorem purely with adjunctions? How about the representation theorem of finitely presented abelian groups? And on and on and on...

The math of QM underpins so much of modern technology, like transistors, MRIs, high precision clocks..

I feel like there's been a humongous failure of science communication if the applications of QM aren't obvious to you :( I don't mean that in a mean spirited fashion, I really do feel despair that someone on HN who enjoyed physics wasn't shown how quantum physics has been the bedrock for so much technology!

EDIT: quick list of places QM/quantum physics is used in the real world: https://scienceexchange.caltech.edu/topics/quantum-science-e...

And what's the problem with living in an ivory tower, as someone who also lives in one?

A monad is a mathematical idea. It has some learning curve, some inherent complexity that you can't magically solve.

The post you're mocking attempts to draw a helpful analogy. Maybe it helps the original author who said they couldn't find an explanation of monads that they liked. Maybe it doesn't help.

I don't see how name calling such conversation as "ivory tower" helps anyone

I am very interested to learn about your workflow. What language do you program in? How does acme help programming in this language? Do you have a video or a stream I could watch? I'd love to know!

What's a non flat address space, and what would I use it for?

The original papers that introduced quantum mechanics might well be unreadable and mired in jargon. However, the community has come together, digested these ideas, and written textbooks that are accessible to anyone with a minimum of preparation. Furthermore, what preparation one is expected to know (some linear algebra, some calculus, some classical mechanics) is clearly laid out, and has textbooks one can use to study.

No such path of learning is ever presented for any of postmodernism. The twin obsessions of (a) treating only primary sources as authoritative , coupled with (b) the dense jargon of the primary sources that makes it unreadable to anyone but the experts is what makes postmodern philosophy unapproachable.

This forces people to discredit much if postmodernism. It seems to be a community that refuses to expand and make approachable their work, while claiming that their work has important ramifications. That reeks of snake oil salesmanship to me.

Zig documentation isn't crap; the documentation *does not exist* yet. There's an important difference between the two which seems to be ignored.

Zig is young. They're spending their time maturing the core ecosystem --- the compiler, the standard library, and so forth. It's perfectly reasonable to expect early adopters to "RTFS/read the fucking source". *When* they start writing documentation, I'd be perfectly happy to hear comments like "The zig documentation is crap".

At this stage of the project, I'll be honest, I find it upsetting to read comments like this.

Idempotence is a desirable property of systems whereby repeating an action has no effect. Mathematically, an operator is idempotent if f(f(x)) = f(x).

Idempotence is handy because it implies that one can retry safely if one isn't sure whether something succeeded or failed. Not sure if your file was saved? Save again! If it was indeed saved, the file continues to be saved. If the file was not saved, it is now. Yay.

I would kill for such descriptions of every system I work with.

I'd like to learn nuclear science. Where would I begin? I know basic classical mech, quantum mech, and classical field theory.

I don't doubt it, but I don't immediately see the proof either. What's the key idea?

I don't follow the comment about analyticity. I thought fields were real analytic, which meant one needed to use a power series to expand them, which has a potentially infinite amount of information in the Taylor coefficients? So I don't see how the local data "effectively" captures non local information.

What are these different types of codes you mention? Got a textbook/lecture series to learn more? :)

Do you have a textbook in mind to teach high schoolers QFT? I'm dubious one could write such a textbook, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

I ask since I have taken a course on QFT lite. We had to spend three weeks just doing tensors, and this was after everyone was comfortable with linear algebra and calculus and so forth.

Q. what is geometry? A. Adjoint functor to algebra

I don't grok the real difference between the positive and negative rights example. Do these lead to different policy decisions? I'd like to know.

I'd like some intuition --- is that very low frequency? Is that very high power? Can I have some context for how I should think about 82 hz and multi megawatt? (For example, I know that few bits a minute = well, that's a couple ASCII characters a minute)

Does the trie help in memoizing the edit distance between multiple words? Or do you pay the O(n^2) cost per word? I'd love to hear details of how this works!

What reason is that?

What was it called, the practice in south india? I live there and I've never heard of this!

What IDE do you use for racket? In emacs, I've found SLIME and its associated debugger to be more powerful than GEISER. I never could come to like Dr. Racket due to its lack of autocomplete and things like parinfer / paredit.

Yes, which is why a photon experiences zero proper time.

I would say that this is intuitive. For any direction you pick, there are (n-1) orthogonal directions in nD space. It's only natural that the expected inner product drops to zero.

Do correct me if I'm wrong: I thought Spin(3) was a double cover, with the quaternions being one sheet of the covering, that of the connected component of the identity?!

What does it mean to elevate onseelf as an individual? I don't follow

Since you answered: do you have a good way to visualize the curvature of spacetime? I really don't understand how to think about light-cones being distorted, because it's the curvature of a lorentzian manifold that stiches together light cones with distortion.

As best as I understand: light travels in space. Thus, if space is scrunched up, light can't escape. Gravity IS space. The scrunching up IS gravity. There is no "escaping", because gravity is literally the substrate.