903 karma · joined November 25, 2010
[1] That's putting it a bit kindly. 'that we were told exists' might be more fair.
I'd say that the major of downside of LaTeX is that it's not very accessible. One of my goals at the moment is to improve that, and that's part of my motivation for working on ShareLaTeX [1], which is probably one of the easiest ways to get started with LaTeX (I am of course biased.) We've cut out all of the installation and configuration needed to set up LaTeX, so you can dive straight in.
For example, say we want to work with a 'user' model, and we need to do basic CRUD stuff. One argument would say that we should have a module for each action: creating users (registering, hashing password, sending out welcome email, etc.), deleting users (cleaning up their data, removing them from the db), and for authentication, profile updates, and so on. The downside to this is that we end up with a dependence on the underlying data structure across lots of modules. If we want to change the property 'username' to 'login', or something more complex, we have a lot of modules to change. We also need to understand how a user is created before we can understand how they are updated or deleted, which means we need to have the CreateUser module in our head while we're working on UpdateUser or DeleteUser.
Perhaps this problem is worse in our set up because we have only very thin 'models', which are basically just Mongoose wrappers around MongoDB, and so our UpdateUser models is still quite heavily coupled to our database.
All things considered, I've found the schema described in this article is better than any alternatives that we've tried. Perhaps we're just floating at the equilibrium point where either more or less abstraction would make the code more complicated. Certainly we refactor as soon as we can when a single module gets too complex. As always, pragmatism rules.
I can juggle with 3 balls, and I'm able to do a passable Mills-Mess, but I'm not sure I have the experience to judge the utility of your juggling notation. However, it certainly seems to be doing a similar thing. Your notation contains exactly the same information as the entire pattern but it can actually be kept in ones head and worked with. Even being able to juggle Mills-mess, I'm still not really sure what's going on, and certainly struggle to imagine the whole pattern. I'm not surprised it took you 2 and half pages to describe!
Perhaps the oldest and most obvious example of the power of notation is the invention of algebra itself. Before that, people used to write maths in words. Fermat's Last Theorem for example was stated as:
It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or
a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any
power higher than the second, into two like powers.
There are no integers, a, b and c such
that a^n + b^n = c^n when n is an integer n > 2.
Perhaps that's the criteria for good notation - it makes additional manipulations and insights easy to the point of trivial.
I've only recently grokked this aspect of unit testing and I feel like it's made my code an order of magnitude better and more maintainable. Thinking first about how to write code in a decoupled manner also makes unit testing really easy. After having tried unsuccessfully for years to test my code it was a revelation when I that it was because my code was bad that it was hard to test, not that testing is itself hard.
Edit: I've tried to illustrate my thoughts more clearly with a copy-cat post to show the parallels between the two: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4427842
Oh fiddlesticks, the post was deleted before I'd even finished my reply! :(
No it isn't. It's fairly clear from the article that in this context a number is something which you can have that many of. You can have 3 dollars. It even makes sense to have -2.5 dollars. Ok, an irrational number of dollars is pushing it a bit, but you don't need to go that far to see that infinity doesn't work when trying to count things consistently.
A lot of the comments here are getting hung up on trying to pin down the mathematics of what you can and can't do with infinity. That's fine, it's been keeping mathematicians busy for centuries, but this article is for the layman who doesn't know about rings, groups, algebras or any other mathematical structure which you might call 'numbers'. It's for someone who thinks the obvious when someone says 'number'.
Why not replace "all guys, and especially single women" with something more neutral like "people who don't like pink". I'm a guy and I don't hate valentines day.
We're currently adding in templates and formats, as well as looking at how we can better integrate with other referencing tools.
Collaborative editing is not real time but warns and merges if you are editing a document at the same. I think the ease of use for collaborating is our main selling point at the moment, but I agree our pricing needs refinement. First we need to fix our focus and main features.
Thank for your time in replying.
Basically we're new to this game and are struggling to get started. I don't know if you or anyone can help, but it's worth a shot. Thank you very much for lending your time like this, I hope the karma comes back to you!
All of my research to date and the work in that paper has been funded by the UK taxpayer. There is something very wrong with that.
This is the only problem standing in the way of open access publishing. While the arXiv doesn't offer peer review and so doesn't negate the need for journals, the ecosystem would quickly adapt to open peer review. Unfortunately the implied reputation of being published in certain journals is still something that's too ingrained in academia. It's getting better slowly but it's going to take at least a generation to go away at the current rate.