meuk

That was an oversight from my side ;)

Suggestion:

    leave (verb)
    1. To go away
    2. To keep in place

Vim is quite nice, but also quite... old-fashioned?

I use vanilla vim as my main editor. Today I had to search for some text verbatim, and I don't think there's a way to do this in vim: It treats everything as a regex. I'll also happily use mouse support, and really hate the bad support for the clipboard in vim. I have spend multiple afternoons on getting this to work properly and it still doesn't. So sometimes you just have to take your loss and use another editor for something.

When I say that it was a bedroom, I don’t just mean that it would be identified as a bedroom on the condo’s floor plan, I mean that this room had a fully made up bed crammed into it next to the conference table and video conferencing unit.

That's hilarious.

It didn't strike me as one, and I'm not sure what it would be a metaphor for.

I've had the same experience. After two on-site interviews, an assessment, and a series of tests. I got offered 2k/month for a full-time job (despite my current job making about 25% more at the time). I declined on the spot, then got a mail with the same offer (including the standard "we are confident we're giving you a good offer". I mailed them that I declined, got no reply, and got called the next day (during work) if I could please respond to the mail.

Weirdest interview experience ever.

Not a place I'd want to work, I think. Two red flags are:

1. They signal from the first point that all your time belongs to the company. Taking a test of 6 hours is not something I'd have time for.

2. Their company value "Give 110%, 33% of the Time" creeps me out. If someone is not satisfied when you give 100%, run away.

While we're talking about thing we don't understand: I never understand the need to scoff at people who make such a small mistake. If you have a need to call people unbelievably stupid, there are lots of better alternatives.

Looking at the pictures, there is no name or picture on the fake card. The card looks exactly the same as a normal one. The only difference is the word 'specimen', which doesn't even cover the whole card and to me does not convey the meaning 'fake, don't use'.

Is the point of free software to create as much variations of a program as possible?

I'd rather see that useful changes are merged upstream, or projects are forked. If this had happened, you wouldn't even need to patch, and this would save an enormous amount of manpower that is wasted on trivialities.

I'm always a proponent of simplicity.

Some criticism about the site: What a horrible layout. I zoomed out to 25% (the furthest you can go) and the text is still to big.

I think that distributions patching software is especially problematic -- whether you consider it a symptom or a cause of fragmentation.

I have no doubt writing fiction isn't easy. I'm just saying that in general, a math book like I mentioned takes more time and expertise to write than fiction. Not in the first place because it requires that you have at least the level of expertise of a graduate student (which is 5 years of study). I'm not sure what Ulyssess being intensively studied has to with it. The only thing which makes a math book easier to write is that it's more accepted to distribute the work between different writers.

Some caveats apply: Many professors have teached a course repeatedly, at which they have such a level of mastery of the subject that they can just bang out the theorems and proofs (I've had one professor who wrote the 300 pages of lecture notes during the course). When the book actually contains new information, it takes much longer.

Yup, 32 hours/week (on paper) and slightly less than 2k/month before taxes.

This seems to be very relevant. I have double BSc and MSc degrees in STEM fields and am still struggling to find a proper job. On my first job I made less than 2k (for 4 days a week, but still). I've had offers which were even lower as well.

I've seen people in other fields with a lot less education do a lot better. It really makes me sceptic about the shortage of developers in Europe. If there really would be a shortage, surely developers would get paid more.

My bank allows arbitrary length, but enforces certain special characters while disallowing others. Which means I can't use the (long and secure) password and have to write it down.

Not sure what they hope to accomplish.

You make a good point: There surely is a difference between someone like Donald Knuth writing a book that is relatively niche, and a best-seller. For one, I can imagine that a page of mathematics requires more expertise and time to write than a page of fiction.

However, there are dozens of free e-books on the web, written by respectable and knowledgeable professors, and this tells me that the only real cost involved is the effort of writing itself. The distribution and marketing cost for an e-book like 'Concrete mathematics' should be nearly zero. Unless my €80 goes directly to the authors, I'm wasting money. This is defendable for a physical book, but not for an e-book.

very little of the cost of making a book is tied up in the physical format

Either that's bullshit, or the costs are entirely artificial. I really, really want "Concrete mathematics" by Donald Knuth. I really, really don't want to pay €80 for it. A good alternative for me would be the e-book, but it isn't any cheaper. I doubt if anyone will buy the ebook for that price while there are free copies available online.

You should approximate it with an exponential function. Actually, the nth Fibonacci can be obtained exactly by rounding an exponential function:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number#Computation_b...

Ah, it makes total sense now! Thanks for taking the time to explain your thought process to a random stranger on the internet ;)

I'd say that the exposition in your post is very fitting for the purpose of proving it. The most elegant proofs are usually not the most enlightening.

Thanks. I just don't understand how you arrived at

  k <= ceil cr (c(m-1) + r(n-1))

I like to think that I'm good at these combinatorics-kind of questions, but I can't wrap my head around this one. I can follow the construction of the matrix, but I don't understand how you came up with the formula.

To put this in perspective: The cost of calculating a 10k character hash is negligible compared to serving a modestly sized image.

Still, you have a point that allowing arbitrary sized passwords to denial-of-service attacks. Still, a more reasonable limit would be 100 or 256, for example.

How's it coming along? Will there be an English translation available? Actually, I just tried to translate part of the book (the whole book is 'too big to translate') with Google translate, and the translation looks of remarkably high quality compared to what I'm used to from Google translate.

I would love to see a similar book/project for a linker and assembler.

I understand that you follow some misguided security guidelines that state that a password must contain special characters and have a length of at least X.

What I don't understand is why sites use a maximum password length. They shouldn't save your password anyway, and only compare the hash, right?

This is cool. I wanted to comment on the necessity of knowing the approximate size of N a priori, but this is very clearly stated on the github page.

Interesting alternatives that also support insertion, deletion, and lookup (is there a name for this interface?) are AVL trees and hash tables.

As described in https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.00275.pdf, tiered vectors can be improved further:

"We present a highly optimized implementation of tiered vectors, a data structure for maintaining a sequence of n elements supporting access in time O(1) and insertion and deletion in time O(n^ε) for ε > 0 while using o(n) extra space."

Thanks for the comment! I am probably in a different position; I work in Europe and am not as wealthy as most of the US-based developers, so if I take time off it probably won't be in the near future anyway.

I'll send you a mail!

Thanks for your reply, I really appreciate it! I'll send you a mail.

I found that companies always pretend to be all about learning, but in practice I haven't learned a damn thing after leaving uni, except the idiosyncrasies of their code. Maybe it gets better in senior positions (I spent 7 years in uni and have only 2 years of working experience), but I don't expect so.

I feel like since I am working, I am just getting dumber. I miss the time in uni where I was learning new things every week. I'm thinking of taking a year off just to learn new things.

I think 8 subjects is too much too make any meaningful progress. I have 2x 30 minutes when I'm on the train, and that's just too little to study anything worthwhile. I mean, I can read a novel in three days, but anything involving math costs me about 1 hour to get into before I can really learn something.

you can get the work done very quickly and then have large periods of unproductive time.

Totally agree, but I've also worked in codebases where I spend a huge effort and don't get anywhere (these are usually codebases with dark corners which no one knows anything about).