gunnihinn

The bravery of the people signing this anonymously is inspiring.

Terrence Tao was a good example of what happens when an exceptionally smart person stops getting funded by an American University: not moving to another country, but got VC money and created a new company.

What company did Tao fund with VC money?

Thanks, I hate it.

Their boss does nazi salutes at political events. They’re nazis.

I think the Icelandic data is a bit skewed upwards. It’s showing senior and principal level salaries in large companies, most “normal” devs earn maybe 70% of that.

That's pretty cool. Unfortunately school holidays mean I can't take time off whenever, but I can definitely use the idea to plan time off around those.

A distribution is not a function. It is a continuous linear functional on a space of functions.

Functions define distributions, but not all distributions are defined that way, like the Dirac delta or integration over a subset.

For any smooth function (like the conjugate) it makes sense to ask whether there exist holomorphic functions that approximate it arbitrarily well.

However: Suppose that for every n > 0 there exists a holomorphic function f_n such that |f_n(z) - z| < 1/n for all z. Then |f_n(z)| <= |f_n(z) - z| + |z*| = |z| + 1/n by the triangle inequality. A consequence of Liouville's theorem is that any entire holomorphic function with polynomial growth is a polynomial; here in particular we would need to have f_n(z) = a_n z + b_n for some complex numbers a_n and b_n. For real x we would have |(a_n - 1)x + b_n| < 1/n for all x, so a_n = 1. For imaginary iy we would have |(a_n + 1)iy + b_n| < 1/n for all y, so a_n = -1, which is a contradiction.

In fact, if a sequence of holomorphic functions converges uniformely on compact sets, the limit is itself holomorphic because of Cauchy's theorem.

Good for you to stick up for the _checks notes_ nazis.

I read Playboy for the stories and take Viagra for the memories.

I may be biased as I am a trained Mathematician, but I always feel when someone says "Math is Hard", that is because they had bad teachers.

I dunno, man. I have a PhD in complex differential geometry and think math is pretty hard.

Thank RÚV, the Icelandic national broadcaster, which setup cameras weeks ago and has been live streaming the area since then for capturing the eruption.

they are objects (I call them oracles) that answer Yes or No when asked if the number ought to be between two given rational numbers.

So a real number is a function from pairs of rationals to a two-element set (plus some sanity conditions)? Why is that better than the other constructions?

This notation maybe makes some things in trigonometry or Fourier analysis easier to do. Then a wild polynomial appears and all of the sudden we have to write

(d bar) x = 1 / 2 pi.

Honestly every single one of those execs is very replaceable too.

Bret Victor is very much Alan Kay's protege and has unfortunately inherited the curse of people cherry-picking particular ideas and missing the bigger picture.

Maybe it's time we lay some of the blame for us idiots just not getting Alan Kay's ideas on Alan Kay. At this point he only has himself to blame if he's spent 50 years trying and failing to communicate his wonderful ideas.

As the post points out this involves some claims about infinite sets that are maybe not super obvious to laypeople (every infinite set of natural numbers has a least element). But we can rephrase this to avoid mentioning sets:

For any rational number p/q (with q > 0) there exists a smallest positive natural number k such that k * p/q is natural: Clearly q works, so we check the finitely many numbers 1, ..., q and pick the smallest.

Suppose the square root of 2 is rational. Let k be this smallest number for \sqrt 2, and proceed with the rest of the proof to find 0 < k' < k that also works.

Iceland does the same: https://github.com/island-is/island.is

I grew up with the Icelandic layout. When I started programming professionally I taught myself the en-us layout and stared using that instead. It is much easier on my hands and fingers; it really does show that the people who came up with the syntax for most of the programming languages in use picked things that were easy to type on a US layout and didn't give any thought to the rest of us.

There you go, arguing a trivial point at length instead of doing interesting math. This is why tau is not worth anyone’s time. There’s no one weird trick to understanding math.

I’m a mathematician. Tau is bikeshedding. It’s far removed from being either interesting or useful. But it is a useful litmus test for whether a person’s options on math are worth listening to or not.

SQLite does not compete with client/server databases. SQLite competes with fopen().

https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html

103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known

Not one of them being "edit your writing".

I work at Booking. We do not do this and never have. Other OTAs do, like Expedia. It’s the merchant vs. agent model.

This is America. Schwarz was not prosecuted for his crimes but for his failure to monetize them.

There are very old reports saying the Rome build times are quite long, longer than a day even. Has this changed?

Calm down, Bret Stephens.

Maybe the travel, restaurant etc industries have stopped paying for clicks so Google gets less cash? My work cut down on PPC by a lot and we spent a lot of money on it.

F

Turns out the Vietnam war was a savvy retirement plan setup: clear out some space, return to the US to bask in the most generous ROI in history for 30+ years, return to that patch of land that’s conveniently clear now.

At least the conquistadors had to live there in the interim years.