HN user
Agreed! I'm realizing that my comment came across as negative, but I did appreciate seeing a second path to the same place. I also agree that the expression x^(1/x) feels like a more natural place to start.
You often see this I think, in "pretty" proofs compared with the more direct approach. A clever early step or some bit of startling insight.
Logs will appear no matter what, at some point in the line of reasoning. They are only held back until differentiating in this approach. I think the expression for the derivative of logn/n was much nicer to grapple with.
"Catitude" is a good one. One might also say "felinity". Or "kittyhood". Or "purrsonality"!
I've only watched the movie version, but all these feel like they were words spoken by a character in CATS the musical.
Hey now, I turned out all right.
For the past decade there has here in Norway been a recurring news sensation surrounding the mountain Mannen[1] (literally "the man") located in Romsdal in the northernmost part of Western Norway. Geologists have found Mannen to be at high risk of a sudden and large-scale landslide, placing the local population at the base of the mountain at great peril. There have been several abrupt evacuations of the place over the years, whenever measurements indicate a sudden increase in risk, with great media exposure and public interest. However, The Man has still yet to fall as predicted.
A website was soon set up: "HarMannenFalt.no"[2] (Has the Man fallen?), displaying no more than the word "NEI" (No). The sentiment of the joke was felt by all, as many had grown tired of all this attention being directed at what was essentially, on its surface, just a mountain, standing there, doing nothing.
I was a student at the time, and remember many idle screens around campus set to this page, reeking of that sarcastic mock-worry only a student body could put on. But I suspect a lot of us were secretly waiting for the moment when the text would change into "JA".
And soon enough, something did in fact happen. A neighbouring mountain, Veslemannen (The Little Man), saw a considerable increase in daily movement in 2018, before finally there was a minor landslide in 2019. But this was not the landslide we had been promised and waited for, as The Man himself was still standing tall as ever. A "JA" was not really in order, but then perhaps neither was really a "NEI".
Instead, the website was updated to show "TJA", a Norwegian word somewhere between yes and no, with meaning closer to "Well, perhaps".
As an aside: A second website with identical design was also created: "HarDovreFalt.no"[3]. A play on the concept with allusion to the vow of our founding fathers: "Enige og tro inntil Dovre faller" (Agreeing and true until Dovre falls)[4]. The "NO" on this second site, I think, is far less likely to change any time soon.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannen
[4] https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enige_og_tro_inntil_Dovre_fall...
Right on point, "a blessing and a curse".
The tailoring was just for taper and length. The waist I didn't do much with so it's pretty loose. Besides, the pants are simply supposed to be worn with suspenders. I'm not sure as I haven't tried fitted high-rise trousers, but I think it would be hard to keep them in place otherwise.
As for my BMI, I'm 183cm at 85kg, which I understand nudges me just inside of "overweight".
I absolutely have! Didn't think it was worth the tangent so I'm glad you're bringing it up. Women's fashion is so much more varied in shape, size, style, and fit, and some of it even looks comfortable. As a matter of fact, if you search for high-rise trousers online, most of the results are precisely in the women's section. I think that will have to be my next stop, though it's a line to cross and somewhat of pill to swallow.
As an aside, I have said for a long time that I wish it was socially uncontroversial for a guy to wear a loose skirt or dress in public, and that if I found one I liked I would wear it all the time.
This is a premise I can get behind.
One of the silliest battles I have found myself fighting against society has been my search for comfortable yet attractive men's pants. I deeply dislike the restricting fit of modern pants, especially tighter fitting jeans, but also the semi-current fashion in suits and pants in general.
It may be that a catalyst for this conflict has been my anatomy. My thighs and butt are huge, compared to other guys of similar proportions, and so apparently they cannot be contained by modern fashions. Every time I try to put on a pair, they're either too loose in the waist, or too tight in the thighs, and always sit too low for my liking, digging into my groin if I force the belt to sit at my waist. And should i find a pair that feels acceptable at first, my optimism only lasts until I have to sit down and feel the edge of these clothes digging uncomfortably into my flesh, rekindling my hatred for these trends and their designers.
The current resolution to my woes has been Darcy Clothing's line of suspender pants[1], which I have had tailored after purchase to taper and fit my height. However, this look is quite jarring in a modern environment, so I tend to wear a sweater over the suspenders. Still, I sometimes need to take it off, and wearing something like this day in and out puts quite a label on you.
Still to this day I keep my eyes open, hoping that the pants of my desires will appear in a shop somewhere, or that trends will change, and we get style in service of comfort, instead of discomfort in service of style.
Me too, and I was disappointed to see this comment section mostly full of people either blaming the author or explaining why their experience actually makes sense.
It's like a positive feedback-loop (though I guess morally negative) between manufacturers, developers, and users, all three dragging/pushing on the other to roll down the hill of faster hardware and heavier apps, none of them really in control or able to stop, and therefore also not directly to blame. The upgrade-train to Waste City has no breaks. Still, it seems to me at least that the manufacturers are the only ones strictly happy about the situation.
"Permitted" is a strong word for activity enabled by a protocol. It implies some moral acceptance from the ones who designed the tool. I think a better word would be "possible". Similar to how e-mail makes it possible to send all kinds of content.
You are right to point that out, but I don't think the article is making a claim that its findings compose a recipe for exceptionalism. It actually seems very careful not to make any claims at all, except that it presents "a few of the patterns that have struck [the author] after having skimmed 42 biographies".
I've been surprised to find myself making multiple similar pivots over the years. A lot of what I dismissed in my younger years as lacking of intellectual merit, I have come around to value much more highly than I ever would have guessed.
It's funny, but dancing in particular has been my greatest fear for as long as I can remember, so I've always done my best to avoid situations where I'd be forced to do it. Not only did I not see the point or appeal, but I deeply dreaded the prospect of going on the dance floor.
As fears go, however, this one is quite innocent, and also fairly simple to face. And how empowering wouldn't it be, to overcome ones biggest obstacle? So not too long ago, when I was invited to a dance class by a group of friends, I decided I'd go, just the one time, as some sort of exposure therapy.
The dance was tango. As I had expected, I was anxious, stressed, and scared through the entire class (although it was very helpful having the excuse that it was my first day). What I did not expect was how fascinating the dance would turn out to be. How beautiful and elegant, yet also technical and structured. I saw our instructors dancing some dead simple improvised steps, and somehow, despite not being planned out at all, they were totally synchronized. There had to be some brain-to-brain communication going on, a sort of body language that I could not yet perceive or understand, but that I knew I wanted to learn.
That was six months ago, and since then I've gone to some sort of tango thing multiple times a week, every week I've been able to. I'm still nervous on my way to a class, and it takes a few dances to warm up and get loose each session, but I'm starting to enjoy it and feel like I'm actually dancing. In the process, I've come to understand more deeply what people mean when they say "there's more to life than X".
That's a pretty flimsy argument. Yes, you can map mathematical ideas onto concepts within different fields of study, but that's kind of the point. Mathematics aims to abstract away any such notions of where you might encounter the natural numbers or the reals, "in reality" or elsewhere. All you've persuaded me of here is that philosophy has a use for math.
"Don't eat much" is quite different from "don't eat at all for a period of time", both conceptually and in how they impact the body.
My friend shared some screenshots of ChatGPT giving a convincing response to the prompt
> Outline a proof of the snake lemma
Because of these examples, even though they are examples of mathematics rather than computation, I don't think it's fair to be so dismissive. It's a bit of a well known fun fact that a lot of professional mathematicians are terrible at mental arithmetic.
I don't think that's accurate. One of the things that make incubation and choosing which startups to fund so difficult is precisely the lack of track record. According to Graham himself, when everyone involved with a startup are new to the scenes they're invading, you instead end up relying on such nebulous concepts as "imagination", "naughtyness"[1], or "earnestness"[2].
It' uplifting to hear that these things can be managed and unlearned. I hate knowing that I am my own biggest obstacle in certain respects.
Goodhart's law strikes again.
I think this is a big one as well, and would go one step further and say that anyone no matter their place on the spectrum may fail at communication in this way. I bet most junior developers know what I mean, if they've sat in meetings with senior guys talking about something esoteric.
One simple trick, I think, is to avoid extensive use of pronouns. A sentence like "Because of that, it doesn't find it there" might be clear enough when you know the context, but is meaningless if you don't. Filling in "that", "it", "it", and "there" would help tremendously. It will make sentences awkward if you avoid them completely, of course, but I think sentences that contain nothing but pronouns are a red flag.
Here's some advice from a Norwegian who programmed in Vim for years on the nordic layout: do yourself a favor and get an American keyboard ASAP. The brackets alone are worth it.
One of the most delightful yet surprising things about learning another language is to see a whole new part of the internet (not to mention "the world") become accessible and unveil itself to you. After my time with Spanish, as an example, I can say that I've become reasonably certain that the Spanish speaking world produces the most hilarious white-hot memes on the planet.
With all the devotion on display from so many very clever people, it's hard not to be at least a little curious about Emacs. But I still have something holding me back. On the one hand, the entire environment that I've heard described might be very powerful. But at the same time, it is a whole new system to learn and get into, very specific to itself, on top of the operating system I'm already using. People say you will want to do everything in Emacs, and hold that idea up as a good thing, but I tend to be scared away instead. I don't like the idea of digging myself into a groove, even if it should be a comfy one. Powerful ecosystems can be hard to break out of, something I've found with Google and specific social media.
La ligilo tute ne malpravas. Vi vere faris _tujan_ vortaron!
I got sucked into Esperanto after a year in Spain trying to learn Spanish. I was intrigued by the premise of an easy to learn, exception free language, with vocabulary that would already be somewhat familiar, and logical ways of building new words from components.
After having spent a lot of time on learning it (before moving on to Latin for a couple of years, and later French), I've become more skeptical of some of the elements that drew me in to begin with. According to the comprehensible input hypothesis of language acquisition, studying grammar is not as important as the number of hours spent taking in messages that you understand in the language. So, a simple grammar is actually not so important. Of course, it will let you start immersing more quickly after less grammar study. But you might also have spent that time instead immersing with a "real" language in content that is more enjoyable and interesting (good entertainment in/translated to Esperanto is scarce) and come out of it with a useful skill with roots in the real world. (Sorry fellow Esperantists if that comes across as harsh...)
Esperanto also does away with a lot of redundancies, like grammatical gender, or arbitrary groups of verbs with distinct conjugation schemes. On its surface that's a good thing. It makes it easier to memorise the rules. However, it also makes the language more fragile as a medium of communication, or less noise resistant. Grammatical gender and redundancy in syntax is very useful to a fluent speaker whose brain is familiar with all the arbitrary rules, because these things provide our brains with different checksums to rely on when parsing spoken sentences. That utility is largely why such grammatically redundant features have persisted.
I wonder if the explanation for Carlsen's move could be far simpler than people are making it out to be. This is the guy who decided not to compete for the world title, simply because he didn't feel like it. He loves chess, and wants to keep playing it for the joy that it gives him, and nothing else.
He could have resigned early simply because going through with the game would have left a bad taste in his mouth. I'll bet it's annoying to play someone with a history of cheating, regardless of whether they are still currently known to be breaking the rules or not. Imagine having to sit through a game that you love to play, only with a nagging thought in the back of your mind that sucks the joy out of the experience and turns it into a chore.
This is wonderful! Just what I need. I keep returning to this one YT series by Frederic Schuller, "Lectures on Geometrical Anatomy of Theoretical Physics"[1], where he goes through the mathematical foundations of theoretical physics from the very bottom. He starts with propositional and predicate logic, presents the ZF axioms of set theory, and then boom, you're off to the races!
Recently, I posted a comment in a questions thread on /r/math asking where I could get a more thorough treatment of the philosophy of mathematics, as these lectures can get a bit arm-wavey, but the responses I got were disappointingly dismissive. One guy said all this philosophy was "not interesting" and considered the foundational stuff to be "just a construction". I get that it may not be directly useful for current research to a mathematician trying to get published, but common!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V49i_LM8B0E&list=PLPH7f_7Zlz...
The same can be said about the entertainment business since pretty much forever. Writers can be quite eccentric people, yet manage to tell compelling stories about characters we relate to. Movie makers, actors, and script writers, all might lead extraordinary lives, yet try to tell stories about ordinary people. Stand-up comedians are another example, where you might have some low-life, whore-mongering, low-functioning alcoholic doing bits of observational comedy about office life and his awful wife.
One development that is new is the one where reviews and encyclopedia entries are written by people seemingly detached from reality. That's a sobering thought for anyone looking for factual answers.
I love cursive, even as a programmer who touch types on a keyboard most of the day. Cursive is just so comfy and looks so nice. But I'm also incredibly thankful that I'm as proficient with a keyboard as I am.
I'm never more than an Alt-Tab away from a terminal, and have some nice and simple aliases for creating new plaintext notes, or accessing old ones. Yet I also need to keep a notebook or piece of paper closeby for handwritten sketches, notes, diagrams, etc. I studied maths and physics, where solving problems with pen and paper is simply how you do things. Come to think of it, I'm quite thankful for that part, because it is a powerful skill to have developed for managing ideas.
I have friends who are bad at handwriting, and who hate it and avoid it for that reason. Some of them claim that handwriting is a useless skill. I also have parents who are bad at typing, and who prefer handwriting for that reason. They do see the utility of touch typing, however.
I know both well, and value both very highly. I maybe won't be so strict on my kids as to force them to learn a writing style designed for pens we no longer use, but will encourage them to try it, and to at least get comfortable with writing by hand.
What better place than Hackernews for sharing the newest video of the biggest selfproclaimed hack-frauds on the web?