miguelmurca

This is an at-a-loss, public service created by volunteers who are not necessarily professional software developers. The first version of the website parsed PDFs. It's not obvious at all what exactly they are doing behind the scenes.

I don't see how this is the correct reaction to have, nor whether most of us can claim to have made such a positive social impact with a website.

I would think a much more interesting question is who is targeting a public service informing about wildfires when these get particularly bad.

Ginga is a Brasilian Portuguese word. I spent all of the day of the blackout listening to the radio (as you might guess) and not once heard the terms "ging" or "ging-induced". Also, ginga would not be swing as in cable swing, it would be swing as in swing dance (rhythmic movement specifically to music). When possible explanations were put forward in the media, they were attributed, usually either to the portuguese representative of REN (the Chinese company supplying power structure to the country) or to an analogous representative of Spain (where the fault originated). It was always pretty clear that the fault was unknown, since this was stated plainly by the aforementioned representatives and the prime minister. I respect the language barrier, but it would be good to take it into account.

"Typst Overleaf" sounds like a fine business idea to me, if you give the user the option to export TeX (so that they can then submit it to a journal).

(If you support both LaTeX and Typst, and improve the Overleaf experience somewhat -- which is definitely possible -- I can't imagine you wouldn't steal some market share from Overleaf.)

Hey, hope you enjoyed the article itself.

I'm sorry if you felt that addendum was aggressive. However, I still feel like I'm justified in making it absolutely clear how (and if) I want to be contacted. I am in a complicated position where I'm speaking to a niche -- not an imaginary niche, by any means -- but actually addressing every reader. In the face of this, my option was to clearly state my boundaries, regardless.

I list an email address at the end of every article, for the purposes of discussing the content of the article. I add a "+ext" to every email I list (including the one on my personal home page). I had people ignore the email I stated in the article, find a different email, strip it of the + tags, and email me there in a foreign language and opening with "I assume you speak X" (presumably because of my name?).

I disagree with you that it's fair game to do the above. OSINT is, well, legal, and I'm not trying to hide my identity, clearly. But I would still be upset if, for example, someone wrote to my university email (which is not hard to find out, by your own procedure) regarding this post.

Nonetheless, again, it is not my goal to sound rude, but simply to set boundaries and expectations. I will remove the second sentence towards this goal, but stand by its objective meaning, and will keep the rest as is.

Cheers

While I agree that it's very questionable that Nature would invite someone to write an obituary (or what have you) and then reject it, I fail to see what's so controversial about the text being overly technical. I work in Physics, and "[...] locus of solutions of sets of polynomial equations by combining the algebraic properties of the rings of polynomials with the geometric properties of this locus, known as a variety" is still an incredibly tough sentence to parse on the first pass. I cannot imagine how it would read for someone who is either unfamiliar (or only passingly familiar) with, for example, the concept of a ring; "algebraic properties of a ring of polynomials"? This just seems like a case of https://xkcd.com/2501/ , with a hint of arrogance in thinking everyone working in STEM must be as comfortable with abstract concepts of mathematics as mathematicians are.

This should be the link. As is, currently, you get a PDF viewer that does not allow zoom (without zooming surrounding UI), and with a weird comments integration.

This is bound to get some criticism (or some tangent-at-best discussion), but it seems like a pretty fair discussion to me.

What I'm missing at the end of the article is the author's point: I believe they're advocating for the use of raw threads and manual management of concurrency, and doing away with the async paraphernalia. But, at the same time, earlier in the article they give the example of networking-related tasks as something that isn't so easy to deal with using only raw threads.

So, taking into account that await&co. are basically syntactic sugar + an API standard (iirc, I haven't used Rust so much lately), I wonder about what the alternative is. In particular, it seems to me like the alternative you could have would be everyone rolling their own "concurrency API", where each crate (inconsistently) exposes some sort of `await()` function, and you have to manually roll your async runtime every time. This would obviously also not be ideal.

Maybe not your point, but a lot of programmers like to take this as "I should invent the Python of quantum computing", which is just about as silly as trying to approach anyone in 1960 and telling them they shouldn't be thinking about electronics at all.

Every time this is reposted I giggle at this comment:

> @chx: I already have a master's thesis. This was harder. – ais523 - high effort answers Oct 29, 2021 at 1:17

Haha, Malware Bytes hates that link

Knuth's "Concrete Mathematics" is fantastic, precisely because it's very applicable.

Re. 403353: That's a lovely stackexchange post, and inspiring; I've run into it more than once when googling for answers. Great running into you here, and thanks for caring enough to rephrase the post.

It's true, I do enjoy being perverse. However, I think it's a bit unfair to say I have "picked up a few pieces of knowledge, become excited, and tried to hack their way through by themselves, without understanding the broader ecosystem of other packages and conventions". I'm aware of xparse, and other tools in the ecosystem (etoolbox, ifthenelse). This doesn't mean that I shouldn't try to get a given result with the provided primitives, rather than use an existing codebase. Very analogous to writing your own X programming lib rather than using an existing one: good for experimenting and learning, but maybe not something you should go for in production. (Of course, I'm certainly not at the level of a LaTeX team member.)

Thanks, and ouch. I have some follow-up questions/comments, if you have the time:

> these are predefined as `\@firstoftwo` and `\@secondoftwo`

I do wish LaTeX kernel commands (which I'm assuming these are) were more widely documented. As it stands, it's pretty hard to keep track of what already exists. Is there a nice reference for those?

> Also the Unicode bytes are already active so setting their catcode is useless.

This is true for LaTeX and not TeX, correct? Originally, I'd `\expandafter\let\expandafter\@firstoct\@firstoftwoλ`, but I decided not to assume that that character was already active.

> Also redefining the first octet breaks LaTeX's UTF-8 handling...

How so? (If the else case wasn't broken)

>...and the else case forms an infinite loop.

If `\Firstλ` was not an active character, would this still be true? Since I store `\Firstλ` in `\lambda@first@oct` before it's declared an active character.

> and it breaks other uses of `(` and `)` in the argument.

This is not a concern for the DSL, but...

> Changing the catcodes of `(` and `)` means that this command doesn't work in the arguments of other commands

...this is. Thanks.

> Instead you could do this as

Damn :)

Thanks for the nice feedback. I suppose I should read up on xparse. In any case I feel like it's not moot to try to achieve the same results with primitives, to have some idea of what's breaking when a given program doesn't compile (usually at that point the primitives surface).

Sorry you feel like that. I tried to counteract for this by including the TL;DR at the top. OTOH this did come from an effort to implement the lambda calculus I discuss at the beginning, but I thought it was reasonable enough to make a small post.

LuaTeX and XeTeX usually aren't an option where LaTeX comes up, i.e., in academic submissions. This is a common discussion, see [the comments under my previous post].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31490136

Ah, my bad. Can't delete the original reply anymore, sorry.

What? The article is apologizing for a mistake (with questionable implications, as pointed out by other comments).

My god, the last thing I'd want is for someone to auto-DM me after I follow them with "Thanks for following, how can I help you?"

In fact, I'm almost sure that would make me unfollow immediately.

That said, is this meant for people or for brands?

Hello, I thought about it a little and indeed you are both right! For the sake of completeness I've updated beamleeto to use this mechanism instead :) thank you for your help!

Yes :) https://github.com/mikeevmm/nobeamer

I can only hope to curse you with a TeX nerd-snipe :) I can recommend reading the first few chapters of The TeX Book (it's a genuinely fun read) followed by the links in the article's footnotes for more operational information.

This anonymous, undated article was written by me, yesterday. The strong backwards compatibility of LaTeX(2e) [0] make it so that the date is not especially relevant (since I'm using primitives); in any case my point was pedagogical, in the sense of diving into the operational mechanisms of (La)TeX to develop a better mental model of what's going on. And while Pandoc is very nice, if you're in academia none of your alternatives are viable, since LaTeX is a de facto standard for most journals.

Fun fact: the article was written in Markdown, with some front matter for metadata!

[0] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/247524/do-i-risk-bre...

Hi! Author here. This is a cool idea for a vector implementation, but you still need to work around the fact that the command definition can come after the \get

Poe's Law preemptive answer: no, I am not being serious (though yes I dislike Beamer) :)

This was more of a cool project to write advanced (La)TeX, which manages to fascinate and horrify me in equal parts. (Advanced LaTeX includes, for example, file IO which, yes, LaTeX can do.)

The converse fallacy is also, I believe, true. "This person knows how to do XYZ, therefore they're smart" (in a more general sense; good at "other games", as it were), is something that took me time to understand to be false.

And I think your last paragraph reflects this fallacy:

> Real intelligence is the capacity for complexity, pattern recognition, and speed of cognition; none of these guarantee either of the two above conditions.

These are criteria I would give to be good at mathematics, not necessarily a kind person, or cultured person, or good team member.

Of course, I may be hair-splitting at what you mean by "smart" (and I'm sorry for that), but I think this is the angle the article is also taking.

A large part of the world certainly feels like not having guns widely and easily available can help.

Keeping in line with your analogy, I mean.

Also sup-mail, which I found much more usable than mutt, neomutt, or alpine.

Surprised scli isn't in there. It's one of the few pieces of software that I'll actually advocate for: super stable, great bindings if you're coming from vim, and surprisingly complete. Also since the desktop app for Signal is hot garbage, it's really a must for me.

[1] https://github.com/isamert/scli/

Between the EULA for, erm, looking at the website, or the intro page, or the bird that flies away on the home page, I don't know whether I'm curious or concerned

Fairly bold of you to assume I didn't read the article, but anyway:

I've given five minutes to the thought that being an anti-vaxxer in the middle of a pandemic when vaccines are provided to you for free and at the point that only very long term effects can be a concern is comparable to being a jew in nazi Germany, and I still think it is atrocious, sorry.

But I mean, there's only so much you can talk about when "faith-based scientism" is used for vaccines.