fiforpg

This Quanta trickled through my head

Like water through a sieve.

One thing I remember liking in this post was his personal homepage (a little further down). There has been a recent HN discussion of Glance, a personal dashboard, but Wolfram's seemed more effective.

Nice work!

Emacs folks may also like the Maxima mode, a very capable interface to a full-blown CAS: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MaximaMode

Surely, many do? The ones I interacted with did, for example. I'd venture that the preferred CAS varies with schools and countries.

One has to be a little careful with designing courses like this. They are most likely to be of interest to people who already know, at least to some extent, both (i) calculus and (ii) programming. That is, the (presumable) target audience — those who are learning either of these subjects — is not really ready to take in such a class.

Anecdotally, my personal attempts at incorporating only slightly exotic CASes (Maxima or Sagemath) into calculus courses were met with tepid response at best. Part of the issue was, I believe, that freshmen are rarely interested in setting up software for a non-CS course.

That being said, for slightly higher-level classes it can work quite well as an optional component — I've had really good results with Python projects in an ODE course. Python not being a niche language certainly helped, too.

Me, I'd go for the smelly cheese option.

The statistics for those doing more exercise and those suffering from obesity are likely describing two different groups of people.

> professor X in field Y likes esoteric language Z, so his grad students write out libraries A/B/C to corner the Z library space

This description seems to fit Julia really well. What other languages are like this?

> and perhaps Python-using academics also never make packages.

Your guess is (largely) correct. For most users, the workflow is exactly as you described:

> They make the notebook, use the build-in R functions and then their work is done.

The way negation is concealed in the middle of that title reminded me of Zizek philosophizing about subtleties of the negative: continue to no longer attend, coffee without milk vs coffee without cream, and so on, and so on.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uuTkuy9D5lY

As can be easily verified by turning the sign upside down, it is not a Rabbit, but a Яabbit.

If you need pdf viewing and management (indexing, annotations, citations), it might be useful to look into citation managers, which are built to do exactly these things: check out Zotero.

There is a very nice short proof of John's ellipsoid theorem by Gruber and Schuster:

https://www.dmg.tuwien.ac.at/gruber/gruber_arbeiten/johnelli...

— one elegant trick I remember from there was that the value of a quadratic form with matrix A on vectors u and v (^T for transpose):

u^T A v

is interpreted as the dot product between the matrix A and the tensor product u v^T,

A • (u v^T)

— and dot product • on matrices is just from them being n×n vectors.

With that a lot of things are really nice now, e.g. interiors of ellipsoids correspond to intersections of halfspaces of matrices with the positive semidefinite cone. And halfspaces are simple to reason about and intersect!

This trick is also implicitly in the parent post, of course.

In addition to being a very independent philosophical thinker, Spinoza was deeply interested in more practical study of nature, something that may have had to do with his day job as a lens grinder. He published two short texts on probability and optics of the rainbow (the latter following Descartes).

A philosopher interested in the real world: something that became quite a rarity in later times...

Given that they used position evaluation from (a search chess engine[1]) Stockfish, how is this "without search"?

Edit: looking further than the abstract, this is rather an exploration of scale necessary for a strong engine. Could go without "without search" in the title I guess.

[1]: IIRC, it also uses a Leela-inspired NN for evaluation.

Yep. But to be really scared of the man you can consider that during the later years of his life he lost eyesight, first in one eye, then went completely blind. All without slowing down.

The anecdote goes that with his eyesight already severely deteriorated, he would dictate papers with a grandkid or two in his lap and a cat on his shoulder.

Such discussions show that teaching of calculus often tends to be overly algebraic, for no good reason.

Clearly, Leibniz notation does not intrinsically contain any deep insights since at one point Leibniz himself was erroneously induced by it to think that d(xy)= d(x)d(y), which is false. Newton on the other hand thought in terms of simple geometric concepts (areas), which make it crystal clear that d(xy) = x d(y) + y d(x).

On the topic of history of early analysis I cannot recommend enough this collection of anecdotes from Arnold:

https://archive.org/details/huygensbarrownew0000arno

> revolveth in heaven inside a flame produced by his own mouth, whilst his own form is invisible

Such a beautiful hermetic formula. It could totally describe a god in Lovecraftian universe. That, and also the fact that a minor deity was so easily transplanted from an Egyptian myth into a Japanese video game to me illustrates the amazing unity of human culture.

I mean, I get that a lot of biblical material was lifted from e.g. the myth of Osiris, but this is on another level.

> but I needed a good reason that would justify the time investment

It should be understood though that there are cases when math(-like) language is abused, leading to overcomplication and obscurantism [1]. In mathematics, there is always the temptation of formalizing for formalization's sake. Indeed, 99% of pure math is non-constructive ("there exists a group such that", "the algorithm converges in O(N) steps"), as opposed to the practical CS and applied math ("here are the runtimes on real world data") which are likely the primary concerns of the HN crowd.

None of this can diminish the sheer impractical appeal of pure math and pure CS, not unlike that of poetry, but I would rather not oversell either of the two.

[1] A good illustration is a rant by Cosma Shalizi at http://bactra.org/notebooks/nn-attention-and-transformers.ht..., recently posted on HN.

Gelbaum-Olmsted Counterexamples in analysis is a standard reference for various pathological examples in analysis:

https://archive.org/details/counterexamplesi0000gelb

It could be that the author was thinking about sequential compactness: every sequence of elements of the space has a convergent subsequence (with its limit also in the same space).

For metric spaces, sequential and usual compactness coincide:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequentially_compact_space

Not directly related, but also a (sort of) brutalist architecture book that comes to mind is Soviet Bus Stops:

https://archive.org/details/sovietbusstops0000herw

Edit: I see that the book about Spomeniks and the one linked above were actually both released by the same publisher — Fuel.

These are fantastic art works, and driving around to check them out would a perfect euro tour for a future summer. Still I can't help but be intrigued by the wistful tone of the website. Judging by the "about" page, the guy running it is relatively young, so he can't quite have the Yugo-nostalgia. And yet passages like

> there were many in Yugoslavia who refused to fully integrate into this communist-led multi-cultural society [...] During the hey-day of Yugoslavia, this resentment and anger was very much kept in check by the Yugoslavian government's intense efforts in stamping out inter-ethnic retaliations, nationalism or religious hatred in any form, accompanied by the intense promotion of the ideals of 'Brotherhood and Unity'.

— to me read like they celebrate the Yugoslav communists. Would be curious to know if it's just me, or others also share the impression.

We used Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ for my high school classes, and I have very fond memories of both. This must have been on Windows.

Borland really had a series of these fantastic products, it's a shame they are no more. The only modern company in this space is JetBrains, it seems, so the niche is small.

> Some alternatives in Emacs:

I swear I had to read that twice to stop seeing "alternatives to Emacs". I'll see myself out now.

(Doom Emacs is really nice though, and modal editing does help with key bindings, just as a sibling comment points out.)

Yeah, well. The Dvořáček affair is certainly a serious allegation. Yet not something the general public can be a judge for. Given that the Czech authorities and courts did not pursue it, the rest of us can't either, if only for the lack of information.

As to the rest of it — authors routinely revise their works. The very notion that readers (or critics) get any say in this strikes me as bizarre. They get to observe the process and decide which version they like better, but nothing more. Ne supra crepidam.

Early Christianity and the phenomenon of martyrdom is discussed in a very nice episode of In Our Time:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0016ptt

If I recall correctly, the panelists express the idea that it might have been the feature that impressed the Romans most and served as a powerful ad for this new religion.

I like what Bertrand Russell had to say to that very question, in one of Unpopular essays (quoting approximately from memory):

Philosophy is science in the circumstances of insufficient knowledge. That is, given insufficient data it may still be beneficial to ponder possible future directions of research, contemplate lines of attack on long-standing questions, or even determine beforehand how these big questions should be posed. All of these circumscientific activities and thinking together constitute philosophy.

Firefox supports ublock on mobile.

A great thing about Lem is that he has written in (the style of) so many genres. The third column in this table on Polish wiki illustrates this rather well: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_pierwszych_wyda%C5%84_dz...

There's sci-fi of course, but also crime fiction, "realistic" fiction, philosophy essays. Further, something not easily gleaned from the table is that his sci-fi can be humorous, horror-y, thriller-y, book-for-kids-y, etc.